A New CCC: Combating the Climate Crisis
President Biden, among many others, has proposed a Civilian Climate Corps. This is a necessary step if we are to live up to our commitments. Earth is not running out of time, our civilization is. Never before has the human species faced such a massive and complex problem as climate change. We are the cause and we are possibly the solution. Or as President Kennedy said more than half a century ago “Our problems are man made and therefore they can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.” A large and effective Civilian Climate Corps is essential to turning the tide of our greatest crisis.
We can’t underestimate what is at stake here. If we stay on our current course we court disasters that will make Covid-19, the Great Recession, and the opioid epidemic look like quaint memories of a nostalgic past. The Secretary General of the United Nations has called the latest UN Climate report “a red alert for humanity.” The International Energy Agency warns that we must drastically increase investment and deployment of clean energy this decade or lose our last opportunity. That UN report is some 4,000 pages with 234 authors and 14,000 citations of peer-reviewed studies. Jor-El is telling us Krypton is about to explode. Except that if we fail to act we don’t even get Superman. We all lose and realize too late that there is no hero to save us from ourselves.
History offers us some guidance to our current plight. In the desperate days of the Great Depression FDR launched the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to put young Americans back to work, teach them vocational skills, and build infrastructure to protect and enhance our natural world. The CCC, or Roosevelt’s Tree Army, was one of the most successful and popular programs of the New Deal in the 1930s.
For a decade it put unemployed young men into nature to do the nation’s work. Enrollees were paid $30 a month with most of this automatically sent home to their struggling families. The program was closed down not because it was no longer needed but because the storm of war summoned our energies and efforts abroad.
During its short duration over 3 million Americans served in its ranks. These young men planted 2–3 billion trees, built 125,000 miles of roads, and improved or constructed 800 state parks. CCC members were deployed to fight raging wildfires and help prevent floods as well as to help rebuild from the ashes and receding waters. They stocked 972 million fish, restored thousands of historic structures, and all the while tens of thousands of enrollees were taught how to read. The benefits of this program were multiple and profound for those who participated and for our country as a whole.
Just as before, our needs are dire and our challenges staggering. A Civilian Climate Corps is needed to provide economic opportunity and environmental regeneration. At a time when our country has never been more divided, except the Civil War, CCC units could bring Americans together from every community and background to serve side by side in common cause. To strengthen the bonds of a fraying Union is no less important than the other purposes of this program. And just as before we can deploy hundreds of thousands of our people to prevent floods, fight wildfires, and build infrastructure.
Beyond the old horizons this new CCC must be committed to additional national missions. Building a tremendous network of carbon sinks from a trillion trees in ten years to aggressively restoring and expanding resilient coral reefs is only the beginning. Of course biodiversity and whole ecosystems would be taken into account for each project. Enrollees would be trained in the skills and technologies necessary and provide them with career paths after their tours of duty. In our towns and cities our homes, businesses, and schools need to be weatherized. Clean energy projects and broadband needed to be deployed yesterday. Americans who answer this call must be paid livable wages, health benefits, housing, and the equivalent of a G.I. Bill. Those that do the hard things today will earn better tomorrows.
A Civilian Climate Corps is a difficult project to undertake and organize but we have done it before and we can do it again. To be sure, it must be far larger than what is currently before Congress to achieve what is desperately needed. The power and promise of this program will not only buy us time in the climate crisis, it will help us build a future worth living in.
