A New AMERICAN CLIMATE CORPS
Will it do the Job?
by Paul J. Baicich for World Ocean Forum
In mid-September, the Biden-Harris Administration unveiled a new climate and jobs program that it claimed could put 20,000 mostly young people to work in its first year of existence.
This innovation, an American Climate Corps, would emphasize ambitious projects like installing solar panels, building recreational and nature trails, planting trees, protecting forests from fires, fortifying communities from storm surges, and restoring coastal wetlands.
Of course, the idea didn’t appear out of nowhere.
The Past
The concept borrowed heavily from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the highly successful effort that between 1933 and 1942 had put some three million young men to work. The original CCC — intended as a jobs and conservation effort — was an employment and environmental wonder.
The “CCC Boys,” as they were called, created more than 800 new state parks, improved or created over 90,000 acres of campgrounds, constructed over 142,000 miles of foot and horse trails (including major segments of the Appalachian and Pacific Coast hiking trails), built more than 40,000 bridges, constructed 4,500 rustic cabins and hiking shelters, strung over 89,000 miles of telephone wiring, built 168 emergency landing fields, stocked almost 1 billion fish, and planted more than 2.3 billion trees.
Moreover, the Civilian Conservation Corps helped instill character and leadership skills among many otherwise idle and unemployed young men, boosted their long-term health, and repaired and fortified America’s natural resources, all the while remaining extraordinarily popular with the American people.
More than 80 years later, Americans, wherever we live, can probably point to some nearby park, forest, trail, or other outdoor amenity that owes its very existence to the historic work of the CCC.
This is not to say that the CCC wasn’t flawed. It surely was, and it had a litany of troubles, related to race, gender, geography, and eco-failings. But it was both a product of its time and an institution that was surely better than the society it served.
The Present
The conservation corps concept has since persisted, during both Republican and Democratic White House administrations and in Congress. The late Senator John McCain and onetime Representative Martha McSally, both Republicans of Arizona, sponsored bipartisan corps legislation in 2015 and 2017, “The 21st Century Conservation Corps Act,” (21CSC Act, H.R.2987) before Democrats seemingly picked up the legislative drive in subsequent congressional sessions.
The vision of a Civilian Climate Corps had a new life in the recent efforts of Democratic lawmakers Senator Ed Markey (MA) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) as well as with emphasis by Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) in his two Presidential campaigns. It was a core part of discussions in launching a “Green New Deal” for climate activists, especially those young people around the Sunrise Movement. And, as such, it has continued as proposed legislation in the current 118th Congress, sometimes as the “Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice.”
But beyond the current place-holding legislation, it has gained some meaningful traction in three nearly-sequential developments:
First, it was part of the healing Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations that immediately preceded the Democratic Convention in the Summer of 2020. Indeed, “Combating the Climate Crisis and Pursuing Environmental Justice” occupied the first pages of that seminal document.
Second, in his first week in office, President Joe Biden called for the government to find a way to establish a Civilian Climate Corps in an Executive order.
While he called for such exploration “within existing appropriations,” he envisioned a corps that would “mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs.”
Third, it was formally proposed as the Civilian Climate Corps in the Build Back Better Act, which passed in the House in November 2021, but was subsequently sliced out of the replacement Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) during intense legislative negotiations. Determined Democrats in the House at the time had sought almost $30 billion for such an expanded corps. And this was a price-tag that certainly scared off some Senators.
Each of these three developments added up to incremental steps preceding the White House announcement in September on the launch of the American Climate Corps. Immediately before the official announcement, over 50 Democratic lawmakers wrote to the President, stressing that a “Civilian Climate Corps must take a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis.” But the Biden announcement was, after all, an Executive order.
The Problems
Such Executive orders — described under Article Two of the U.S. Constitution — give the President some broad authority to enforce the law or manage resources and staff, but these are subject to judicial review and don’t carry all-powerful funding authority. It’s the Congress that has spending power, and while the executive can sometimes shift funds to achieve related goals, it can get very complicated.
The upshot was a climate-corps policy pieced together from budgets in existing federal agencies and some flexible and cooperative states projects. With the announcement for the American Climate Corps, the Administration would not say how much would be spent on the program, only that it would be a cooperative effort among the Labor, Interior, Agriculture, and Energy Departments, AmeriCorps and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and that it would draw on existing funds at each agency.
Five states — California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington — already have individual climate corps programs. Five new states — Arizona, Utah, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Maryland — are moving forward with their own state-based models.
In the words of Jeff Ordower, North American Director of 350.org, “This is a major win for the climate movement. We hope that that is the beginning of real, sustained, substantive climate leadership.”
If anything, it’s very much an intentional and aspirational move, awaiting further action. According to Collin O’Mara, President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, “President Biden’s executive action is the first step toward creating a truly modern conservation corps that can address the challenges we face and inspire the next generation of conservation leaders.”
While the numbers and support do look attractive, today’s state-based climate-corps scattered across the country already employ about 25,000 young people a year in urban and rural settings.
You might compare that with the speed, delivery, and size of the original CCC.
Congress passed the CCC legislation on March 31, 1933, just 10 days after FDR made his request. Eight days after that, the first employee was hired. Nine days later, the very first CCC camp was established in Virginia, and 11 weeks after that, there were an astounding 1,463 working camps across the country with 250,000 junior enrollees, 28,000 veterans, 14,000 Native Americans, and 25,000 “experienced men,” skilled local hires who would play a training and administrative role. And that was when our U.S. population was 126 million, not the estimated 333 million it is today, or 38% of today’s population.
Geographic orientation
Of course, the original CCC of the 1930s and early 1940s was overwhelmingly rural in its structure and delivery, and that was for many good political and biological reasons back then.
To be meaningful today, the structure of an American Climate Corps would probably require a hefty rural sector, but also much needed urban/suburban branch as well as a third major department, for necessary coastal-and-ocean work. Just looking at the last category, the main interest of concerned people reading this on World Ocean Forum, the tasks are enormous.
Coastal protection is front-and-center when considering sea-level rise and hurricane threats. This goes well beyond obvious beach-and-coastal clean-up. Along the East and Gulf Coast alone, there are dire needs to protect barrier islands, stabilize and revegetate associated sand dunes, and restore coastal and bay grasses (submerged aquatic vegetation, SAV), oyster beds, salt marshes, and mangroves.
Sea-turtle protection, anyone? Restoring and protecting seabird nesting sites? And there’s “the plastic elephant” in the room: With increasing and threatening plastic production, inadequate levels of recycling, and insufficient waste management, between four and 12 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year, reportedly enough to cover every foot of coastline on the planet. The idea is to address this problem “upstream” while at the same time removing the plastic on our shorelines and coastal waters.
There’s plenty to do, and it’s not necessarily cheap!
Positive signs
But there is also a “flip-side” to these needs, and related needs, across our lands and waters. This illustrates how much better off we are today, compared to the 1930s.
Back then, there was a dearth of qualified and experienced practitioners, of environmental-needs inventory, and of a scientific base of knowledge. Moreover, there was little in the way of “mass-scale conservation work,” few examples of exactly what to do and how to do it.
At least in the last case, FDR had actually “tested” a CCC predecessor in 1931 with his own Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA) when he was New York’s Governor. The almost-accidental CCC prototype immediately created 10,000 conservation-related jobs in the state, mostly in forestry. By the end of 1932, before there ever was a CCC, TERA in New York had 25,000 enrollees. It worked as a “launching pad” and “model” for the much larger and ambitious CCC that followed.
Today we have the practitioners:
We at least have the models of five previously mentioned and existing state-based climate corps programs and the five new ones being launched. They are not all the same, with some funded through public-private partnerships, including AmeriCorps. They are a lot more than anything that existed in the 1930s.
Today we have the inventory: For starters, there are the recorded federal backlogs of “operations and maintenance” needs — adding up to many billions of dollars — for the National Park Service, the National Wildlife Refuge System, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Those federal agencies just add up to one “tip pf the iceberg.” But it’s good to recall that some of these agencies didn’t even exist in the 1930s!
Today we have the science:
Another “iceberg” deals with wildlife science under the jurisdiction of the 50 States and five U.S. territories. This overlaps with the national “inventory” above. Existing State Wildlife Action Plans are intended to identify the wildlife and associated habitats in jeopardy before they become too rare or too costly to restore. These are science-based plans that our conservation predecessors never had when the original CCC was launched. They address problems related to areas as vast as mountains, sagebrush, wetland, and oceans.
Remember, in the 1930s the very science of wildlife management was in its infancy, and the very word environmentalism had yet to be crafted. The good news is that today we have probably learned from some of our previous mistakes, those made with the best of intentions in the original CCC. (I use the word probably because too many policy-makers and engaged environmentalists today are only vaguely aware of the historic CCC experience and lessons.)
One lesson embedded in our current culture has to do with the essential role of women. They were not included in the New Deal’s original CCC. Excluding them today is simply unthinkable. And the errors on race in the original CCC must be understood and corrected. At the start of the CCC, the “companies,” as they were called, were integrated, with black and white young men in the same units. But, this ended fairly quickly, as indignant Southern Democrats insisted on enforced segregation. Most of the CCC’s quarter million African-American enrollees served under these segregated circumstances. Moreover, this situation often prevented young Black men from attaining positions of real authority in their CCC units.
But even if they had authority and although they performed splendidly doing their work in trail-building, forest maintenance, bridge-building, landscaping, fish-stocking, forest-fire suppression, and coastal conservation projects, they found it hard to “translate” those skills outside the CCC, in a society and market where they were basically excluded.
Indeed, while many Black CCCers may have been trained for jobs they could not access, others were ready for professions that were barely in existence back then.
Times have changed. Land-based, conservation, environmental, educational, and government agencies and organizations at all levels are today seeking qualified and eager minority workers who would have been simply shut out or discouraged for work in those classifications in the past.
Moreover, the Biden-Harris Administration’s ACC intends to prioritize racial equality and frontline communities in hiring practices with a special emphasis in workforce training and pre-apprenticeship programs.
Conclusions
The whole concept of a climate corps is remarkably popular among Americans. Polling from Data for Progress in April 2021 showed that 77% of likely voters would support a Civilian Climate Corps, including 65% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats.
The intent of an American Climate Corps as described by the Biden-Harris Administration should:
• Train young people in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience related skills;
• Coordinate recruitment across multiple Federal programs;
• Expand AmeriCorps “Education Awards” to pay for post-secondary education and training or to reduce their student debt;
• Streamline pathways into the Civil Service;
• Leverage Tribal, State, and local governments when it comes to existing state-based corps;
• Invest in pre-apprenticeships and regular union apprenticeships through the Department of Labor and the Department of Energy;
• Expand National Service Opportunities to address our wildfire crisis; and
• Expand the Indian Youth Service Corps
The government intends to start a recruitment website for the ACC within months, the White House recently added. Varshini Prakash, Executive Director of the student-led Sunrise Movement said of the Executive order:
After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis… Today’s historic action to put an American Climate Corps into motion is a clear demonstration that the Biden Administration knows there are more ways they can leverage executive power to lead an all-out mobilization of our government and society to stop the climate crisis. Young people everywhere should feel empowered by this victory and continue demanding the change we need.
But will this plan, released via an Executive order, actually accomplish the job? It can, but only if there’s serious follow-up of funding, coordination, and, of course, vision.
Paul J. Baicich is a bird-conservationist and co-author of three books on North American birdlife. He is also a student of history and a promoter of a Green New Deal, emphasizing the intersection of environmentalism and labor. Read his DATE Forum piece entitled “The Civilian Coastal Conservation Corps: A Solution Within Reach”.
