Infrastructure Summer: Why Prioritize the Civilian Climate Corps?

In this first installment of the Prospect’s new series, we talk with the Sunrise Movement’s Evan Weber.

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When the bipartisan infrastructure framework released, it was easy to see why climate activists would be alarmed. The bipartisan plan was to deal with the so-called “hard” infrastructure elements, and climate-related initiatives were severely minimized within it. The second bill was supposed to bring in the social spending on things like education and the care economy, similar to what’s laid out in the American Families Plan. Especially because every Democrat will be needed for the reconciliation package, including climate-unfriendly types like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), you could envision how climate might get squeezed out of the final outcome, at great cost to the future of the planet. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) started raising the alarm on this a few weeks ago.

So climate hawks went to work. The noise level has risen inside and outside Congress, demanding that the reconciliation package include strong climate measures. #NoClimateNoDeal trended. Gangs of both progressives and even climate hawk moderates have been formed, each with particular sets of priorities for that second bill.

This has been somewhat successful. Last week at a speech in Illinois, President Biden said, “We can’t wait any longer to deal with climate crisis,” in response to the series of deadly extreme weather events sweeping the country. More concretely, in a White House memorandum dated June 29, climate adviser Gina McCarthy and top Biden aide Anita Dunn highlighted three key priorities for the next round of legislation: tax credits for clean-energy investment, a clean electricity standard of 80 percent renewable power by 2035, and a $10 billion investment in a Civilian Climate Corps, an echo of a New Deal–era public jobs program oriented toward land and water conservation, climate resilience, and environmental justice.

The first has the potential to spur hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy investment, and the second would decarbonize the power grid and force those investments online. So why do some climate groups seem to be prioritizing the third?

The big ask at the Sunrise Movement’s action in front of the White House late last month was a Civilian Climate Corps. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) highlighted it in her remarks: “They want you to think, ‘Oh, this is a new idea, this is too ambitious, this is too crazy.’ How about this? The last time we introduced the Civilian Climate Corps in this country, we hired and mobilized a quarter-million people in three months.”

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with the CCC, which the Prospect has profiled. A jobs program that chips away at the climate-related work that must be done to preserve the planet and its ecology makes sense. The echo to FDR is certainly a nice touch. But it seems to put the cart before the horse.

Any major climate investment is going to create a certain number of jobs; it’s not like the government has windmill manufacturers and technicians sitting around waiting for a task. So if a clean electricity standard or a climate investment program is enacted, you would need a “corps” of “civilians” to work on the “climate” projects. And of course, those measures would produce millions of jobs, far more than the CCC’s modest $10 billion would produce. Spread over ten years, you’d be lucky to get more than 20,000 jobs out of that.

I didn’t understand the strategy, so I talked with Evan Weber, the Sunrise Movement’s political director. One reason why Sunrise is committed to a strong CCC is that their executive director Varshini Prakash extracted that promise from Biden as part of the unity task force meetings last summer. You can see this as ensuring a follow-through, and giving members something to rally around. But there’s a deeper set of thinking at play too.

The first thing to know is that Sunrise isn’t fighting for a $10 billion CCC. “Compared to FDR’s original CCC, that’s peanuts,” Weber told me, noting that the Civilian Conservation Corps employed three million people over its lifespan and 300,000 simultaneously at its peak, in a country with only 40 percent of the current population. Sunrise’s explainer on the CCC favors a much bigger program, along the lines of Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-MA) proposal that would employ 1.5 million people over five years. That proposal would cost approximately $132 billion, and behind the scenes, Congress is coalescing around something in the middle, at $60 billion, with moderates like Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) on board.

It’s notable that the White House posted an infographic on Instagram about its Build Back Better agenda that touted a $40 billion CCC, without informing stakeholders about the increase from its initial $10 billion idea. “Looking at the politics of the package, the overall size is more or less set,” Weber said. “We could push in a significant way that would make an order of magnitude difference in policy without much political cost, a place where we could get a meaningful policy win.”

In Sunrise’s vision, CCC looks different than AmeriCorps or other programs that have become reserved for a certain type of upper-middle-class college graduate.

Still, even a bulked-up CCC wouldn’t achieve the same impact as clean-energy investment or mandates might. Why this particular concept, from the organization best positioned to go out on a limb and agitate for the most aggressive policy?

Weber made the case for CCC on its own terms. “For us, the idea of a public jobs program that connects a new generation of Americans with their communities, with the government in a different way, and with the environment is in and of itself a non-reformist reform that can have societal ripple effects,” he said. Weber argued that investments and tax credits weren’t a full break with what he called a “neoliberal” model, and CCC represents a different form of government action that would set the country up for more public works in the future, and present an important model of government working within communities.

In Sunrise’s vision, CCC looks different than AmeriCorps or other programs that have become reserved for a certain type of upper-middle-class college graduate. They want priority placed on keeping workers in their own communities, evolving into career-track, union-level jobs and providing whatever education and training is needed to get there, almost the way an apprenticeship program would, only done through the public sector. Projects would include energy efficiency and conservation, cleanup of environmental hazards, and fortifying communities for extreme weather.

You could get the same result by putting investment first, of course, and potentially get more investment. “The whole point of the Green New Deal was to get the conversation rolling on mobilizing like we did in World War II,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to Ocasio-Cortez now with New Consensus, a climate-heavy think tank, “which meant building all the stuff we needed to build.” New Consensus has been foregrounding public financing options for green projects.

Weber didn’t deny that any green infrastructure bill would create a lot of jobs. And CCC wasn’t a red line for him. Sunrise isn’t solely prioritizing the CCC; it was very involved in working with progressives in the House on their climate demands.

This aligns with other groups. Evergreen Action, the coalition of former Jay Inslee staffers, has put out a six-part program that builds on the three planks McCarthy and Dunn promoted, while adding in environmental justice investments for fenceline communities, more clean-infrastructure investment, including the $213 billion proposed for sustainable home building, and an end to fossil fuel subsidies. “We don’t really have the luxury of choosing one plan or another,” said Evergreen executive director Jamal Raad, while adding that CCC could be useful in creating a pipeline of workers for a burgeoning clean-energy industry.

But there is a split within the climate left on this, and real questions as to whether prioritizing a modest program (even if it’s increased) that is unlikely to really move the needle on emission reductions is worth it. The bottom line is that the overall package, even at its best, before all the horse trading, was underweight on climate solutions.

The fact that Sunrise proposed and won the CCC promise prior to Biden’s presidency may have it too wedded to the outcome. Getting wins to motivate activists is important. But the planet needs more than that.

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