Biden Further Channels His Inner FDR With the American Climate Corps
With this executive order, President Biden sets a precedent for his successors. This is what good government looks like.
Taking further inspiration from President Franklin Roosevelt, President Joe Biden last week signed an executive order creating the American Climate Corps.
Modeled after the 1930s-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the new program serves to train and employ around 20,000 young adults to build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels, and prevent wildfires.
The new Civilian Climate Corps explains:
The American Climate Corps will put a new generation of Americans to work conserving our lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, advancing environmental justice, deploying clean energy, implementing energy efficient technologies, and tackling climate change.
American Climate Corps members will gain the skills necessary to access good-paying jobs that are aligned with high-quality employment opportunities after they complete their paid training or service program.
While he has not yet formally declared a climate emergency, nor shut down the Willow oil project, President Biden is heeding the groups, lawmakers, and scientists in their insistence that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale”.
More than 50 Democratic lawmakers behind that insistence stated the new federal climate corps would “prepare a whole generation of workers for good-paying union jobs in the clean economy” while helping to “fight climate change, build community resilience and support environmental justice”.
https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1704648715045142730
Justice Democrats Executive Director, Alexandra Rojas, stated in response:
For years, alongside allies like the Sunrise Movement, we have called on the Democratic Party to provide more than just lip service to the existential climate crisis facing our planet. Now, because of our movement and leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, a Civilian Climate Corps will recruit and train thousands of young people to defend our communities from climate disaster and revitalize our economy. Today, we have demonstrated what the power of our collective action can accomplish at the highest seats of power.
She added:
Though this investment is not nearly at the scale that we called for or needs to be — a $132 billion Civilian Climate Corps that would train and recruit 1.5 million Americans in public service jobs — this is an important step towards employing a new generation of workers dedicated to combating the climate crisis, defending our communities from disaster, and rebuilding our economy. Now, President Biden must make this work matter by divesting our reliance on fossil fuels, ending federal subsidies to Big Oil and Gas, reversing the approval of the Willow oil project, and investing in the communities that have been most harmed by environmental racism. Otherwise, we are just continuing to kick the can down the road.
This comes at a time when scientists warn Earth is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity” since human activity has caused us to cross six out of the nine environmental barriers securing a habitable planet.
This comes at a time when this past July was the hottest ever in recorded human history, producing 21 of 30 days with the highest recorded temperatures, breaking more than 3,200 global daily temperature records. At least 26 cities broke or tied previous daily records three or more times.
This comes at a time when last month was the ninth warmest August on record.
This comes at a time when this year’s weather disasters shattered records and cost us nearly $58 billion at least 253 deaths. The United Nations estimates climate-related deaths will surpass cancer deaths in our children’s lifetimes.
This comes at a time when the worst heat wave on the planet ever recorded happened last year — in Antarctica.
Hawaii is crawling out from the deadliest wildfires in United States history in more than a century.
California confronted the first tropical storm in 84 years.
Phoenix, Arizona is looking at a future where it could become America’s first unlivable city.
Heat domes are causing pavement to become so scorching that when people pass out (which they are doing more frequently), they are being hospitalized with second- and third-degree burns.
Months ago the entire east coast of the United States was blanketed in a thick hazy smoke from wildfires raging across Canada that are anticipated to continue into the present fall.
According to a paper published last month in Lancet Planetary Health, there are “significant correlations” between tiny solid dust, dirt, and soot or liquid particles in the air and antibiotic resistance.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are at 421.61 parts per million (ppm). The last time there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere, human beings didn’t exist yet and palm trees grew in the South Pole.
As each year gets hotter and weather crises become more destructive, the urgency for an official climate emergency declaration becomes more dire.
With El Niño pressing a summer heatwave all across the northern hemisphere, this year is predicted to be the worst so far.
Joe Biden is the most pro-climate president the United States has ever had. With this executive order, he sets a precedent for his successors.
This is what good government looks like.