View this email in your browser

This is a sample of the Prospect's latest pop-up newsletter
If you want to keep receiving it, please update your preferences by
logging in to "My Account "
on the Prospect website and clicking the "Manage Newsletters
" link.

 

 

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.

 

Youth activists participate in a "No Climate, No Deal" rally organized
by the Sunrise Movement, June 28, 2021, in Lafayette Square in
Washington. (Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

 

**** 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?

**Read all of our infrastructure coverage here**

Click to Support The American Prospect

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."

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.

[link removed]

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."

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.

[link removed]

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.

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (c) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States