Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks at a press conference on President Joe Biden’s launch of the American Climate Corps, September 20, 2023.
The American Climate Corps is “an opportunity to turn anxiety into action.” That’s how Michael D. Smith, the CEO of AmeriCorps, describes the historic workforce development program that aims to bridge the skills gap that many workers face in a sector experiencing critical labor shortages. Established by a Biden administration executive order, the Climate Corps will train and deploy thousands of young Americans to work on clean-energy, conservation, and climate resiliency projects across the country. The ACC’s job board debuts today.
“We’ve heard a lot from young Americans about climate anxiety,” Smith told The American Prospect. “It’s been heartbreaking to hear young people say, ‘This is overwhelming. I don’t know what to do, I don’t know if I want to bring children into this world.’” Smith says the ACC “gives you a way to not wait for somebody else to do something, but for you to jump in the arena right now to make a difference on an issue that is bigger than all of us.”
The rising costs of college, as well as the pivot to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, have also led to more young Americans skipping college to consider alternative pathways after high school. “More and more, you’re seeing that young people are feeling disillusioned by the academic system and leaving with a degree and hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt,” says Michele Weindling, political director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group that supported the push for the ACC.
AmeriCorps, the independent federal agency that offers national service programs, will serve as the lead coordinator, joining forces with six departments—Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Labor, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency—to offer opportunities. Two ACC programs have already been announced: The Forest Corps, an AmeriCorps and Department of Agriculture initiative, offers opportunities to mitigate and prevent wildfires, while Agriculture’s own Working Land Climate Corps will implement conservation practices on farmlands and ranches.
ACC plans to go beyond one-and-done projects. The goal for these jobs, known as “term positions,” which can range from 300 hours to a full year, is to develop “real marketable skills that [lead] into a career path right away,” Smith says.
Mary Ellen Sprenkel, president and CEO of The Corps Network, an advocacy group representing AmeriCorps and other service and conservation groups nationwide, says the many jobs and skill sets are still being defined. ACC projects, however, could entail anything from installing solar panels and conducting energy-efficient retrofits for homes to removing invasive plants. Creating specific pathways to full-time clean-energy and climate resilience jobs is also being ironed out, but Sprenkel says there are ongoing conversations with the Labor Department to ensure that corps members receive credentials or certifications.
Climate and clean-energy advocates have long called for a “civilian climate corps,” a 21st-century answer to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the massive, decade-long service program authorized by Congress in March 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. By July of that year, the CCC had put nearly 300,000 men to work. At its peak, between 1935 and 1936, the CCC deployed 500,000 workers.
The American Climate Corps will recruit low-income Black and brown youth whose communities have been marginalized by underinvestment and pollution.
The CCC officially prohibited discrimination based on “race, color, and creed,” a clause inserted into the legislation by the only Black man serving in Congress at the time, Rep. Oscar Stanton De Priest (R-IL). But segregation and racial attitudes of the time dictated where Black corps members worked. Women could not serve in the CCC. However, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt eventually set up “SheSheShe” residential camps to assist women with employment.
The ACC intends to address those historic injustices, in part, by recruiting low-income Black and brown youth whose communities have been marginalized by underinvestment and pollution. The program also boosts the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative, ensuring that 40 percent of federal investments for clean energy and climate change mitigation go toward disadvantaged places—to be linked to projects designed to tackle specific regional issues. “The way the climate looks in the Gulf looks very different from the Pacific Northwest, [and] looks very different from tribal country in the Southwest,” Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell, the senior adviser for strategic partnerships for AmeriCorps, told the Prospect. “Making sure that we are providing people with the skills and opportunities that are related to the environments and local economies they are in is a critical component of this.”
Climate change poses an existential threat to human life, but the ACC’s initial deployment of 20,000 corps members is only a fraction of the workforce that the CCC deployed during the country’s most serious economic crisis. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of people will be needed to fill clean-energy sector jobs in the short-term—and perhaps millions by 2040—according to Kenneth Gillingham, a clean-energy economist at Yale University. “20,000 is kind of a drop in the bucket when you think about the scale at which we need to transform our economy,” he explains.
The Biden administration originally intended to fund the ACC through the Inflation Reduction Act, but Congress eliminated funding for the program before the passage of the landmark climate law. The seven participating federal agencies now fund the ACC. The president’s fiscal 2025 budget plan asks for $8 billion to hire 50,000 people annually through 2031. Republican members of Congress predictably have blasted the program.
An IRA tracker created by Jack Conness, a policy analyst at the San Francisco–based Energy Innovation, a climate and energy think tank, found the law to date has created 154 clean-energy manufacturing projects, a $106 billion investment that’s expected to create approximately 88,000 jobs. A 2023 Department of Energy report found that overall in 2022, the U.S. created 114,000 clean-energy jobs, raising the total number of jobs in the sector to 3.1 million.
Yet many of these jobs are going unfilled. Clean-energy workers need to develop certain mechanical and technical skills, while there’s a shortage of construction workers, electricians, and HVAC technicians (who can install heat pumps, for example). A Wall Street Journal analysis of LinkedIn data showed that the number of U.S. LinkedIn profiles listing at least one green job skill grew only 8.4 percent in 2022, while green-job postings overall saw a 20 percent increase. A 2023 International Energy Agency report found that high-skilled and medium-skilled U.S. energy-sector positions are expected to grow by 8.3 percent and 8.5 percent respectively from 2022 through 2030, but the number of related degrees and certifications isn’t expected to keep pace.
Weindling of the Sunrise Movement is optimistic that the ACC can begin to bridge the skills gap. But more importantly, she says, the corps “guarantees young people a sustainable, good-paying job that helps their community and fights the climate crisis and they don’t have to go into debt to do it.”
