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Power Earth United States

Can the US Create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs With a Civilian Climate Corps? (go.com) 129

ABC News reports: Inspired by the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are pushing for a modern counterpart: a Civilian Climate Corps that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs building trails, restoring streams and helping prevent catastrophic wildfires. Building on Biden's oft-repeated comment that when he thinks of climate change, he thinks of jobs, the White House says the multibillion-dollar program would address both priorities as young adults find work installing solar panels, planting trees, digging irrigation ditches and boosting outdoor recreation...
Colorado Public Radio reports that there's already a new Colorado Climate Corps, funded by a $1.7 million federal grant, that will place 240 members of America's federally-funded national service program "AmeriCorps" into 55 counties across Colorado "to protect public lands and help low-income communities brace for the climate crisis."

And now supporters of the larger federal program "envision climate corps workers installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings and providing water and other supplies during heat waves and storms," reports the New York Times: A new climate corps would help address the growing threat of wildfires in Idaho, according to Jay Satz, senior director for partnerships and innovation at the Northwest Youth Corps and Idaho Conservation Corps. Mr. Satz said his group doesn't have the funding or the staff to meet that need, which includes thinning out dead trees, replanting new trees and rehabilitating land hit by fires.
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Can the US Create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs With a Civilian Climate Corps?

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  • Yes (Score:4, Informative)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @10:46AM (#61788111) Homepage Journal

    For one Betterage doesn't hold up.

    The real question is if the US will actually do it. I imagine to many it sounds a bit too socialist.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      It would help socially disadvantaged, create jobs in areas where jobs are rare and most of all do something lasting for the environment.

      That's so anti-capitalist!

      • Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:29AM (#61788199)

        It depends. If these are government make-work jobs, I'm not sure how much good they'll do in the long run. We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around. The federal government keeps going further and further into debt, with no end in sight. No one wants to think about what might eventually happen if that continues indefinitely, aside from those who actually believe that state of affairs can go on without serious financial repercussions. That's another "inconvenient truth" many people don't want to face.

        If they can be a bit more self-sustaining, paid for by legitimate needs (like companies who need solar panels installed), then it could be beneficial. I have no objection to that.

        You'll forgive my suspicion, however, that this will end up just being more pork barrel kickbacks that go to friends of the administration or high ranking Congress members, with only a few actual jobs created. I'd love to be proven wrong. We all know how "shovel-ready jobs" went. Fool me once, etc.

        • Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)

          by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @12:13PM (#61788335)

          It depends. If these are government make-work jobs, I'm not sure how much good they'll do in the long run. We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around.

          There is zero "extra money" to throw around. We're already 23 Trillion in debt, growing at a rate of half a trillion every year.

          • Not anymore. It is growing faster now. And these make work jobs cost us more than they give us. These workers will not increase the amount of goods and services we can use. They will be taken out of the labor force and be paid to provide nothing of value.
            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by ChatHuant ( 801522 )

              These workers will not increase the amount of goods and services we can use.

              I think this is a bit simplistic. We shouldn't think about those workers as being taken out of the goods and production workforce - because that's not the point. Instead, climate change prevention should be considered a form of infrastructure and civil work - similar for example to the flood protection/ecosystem restoration work done by the Army Corps of Engineers. Even if those workers won't create goods themselves, their work will enable communities and businesses to flourish and produce those goods and s

              • I think this is a bit simplistic. We shouldn't think about those workers as being taken out of the goods and production workforce - because that's not the point. Instead, climate change prevention should be considered a form of infrastructure and civil work - similar for example to the flood protection/ecosystem restoration work done by the Army Corps of Engineers. Even if those workers won't create goods themselves, their work will enable communities and businesses to flourish and produce those goods and services you're concerned about.

                Interesting.

                I like the idea, but... it really seems to me that "hundreds of thousands" of minimum-wage workers really is not the way to combat climate change. You need energy storage systems and solar array fields and wind power and high-voltage transmission lines to moderate variable power and more-efficient transportation and methods to produce fertilizer that are not energy intensive, and, yes, even next-generation nuclear plants.

                None of this is to be done with a corps of a hundred thousand minimum wag

              • Also, if they have jobs they will have money and they can spend it on stuff, keeping businesses alive.

          • Get a damn clue!
            We're already 23 Trillion in debt, growing at a rate of half a trillion every year.
            You are in dept amoung yourself. The "state" is in dept by the rich part of the citizens.

            Who the funk cares about that? Unless you want to become communist and tell the rich to fuck off?

            • Do remember that every dollar created for this program will increase the money supply without bothering with all that "making something to sell" part.

              Which translates, more or less, to higher prices for everyone for everything.

              Which translates , more or less, as "everyone will be a bit poorer.

              Do try to keep in mind that switching from coal, oil, and gas to solar, wind, and nuclear doesn't mean "let's recruit a bunch of guys from the ghettos of NYC to do this". Rather, it means "let's give a metric fuckt

          • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
            It's complicated. (Economics turns out to be complicated.)

            Jobs for minimum-wage workers puts more money in the hands of the low-income people, which turns out to be very effective in improving the economy. Improving the economy ends up increasing the amount of tax money coming in, even without raising tax rates.

            Yes, it sounds like a shell game, but economics is sometimes counterintuitive. The trick is having the civilian corps do things that are actually useful. The WPA, long ago, actually did; in fact

        • We don't have a lot of extra money to throw around.
          You have.

          The bombs you dropped the last 20 years on various places on the planet - including wedding parties - show that.

          that this will end up just being more pork barrel kickbacks that go to friends of the administration or high ranking Congress members
          Does not really matter if it leads to solar power and trees instead of bombs on brown children and wedding party guests.

          • The cool thing about saying "At least X is better than bombing children" is that it can be used to justify absolutely anything.

            Should we build more brown coal power plants and dump the toxic ash into the Mississippi River?

            Sure, because that is better than bombing kids.

          • You're so busy with your "schnaa schnaa" nose in the air routine, you forgot that moralizing works better if you yourself do something to achieve the moral high ground.

            Here, you're just saying, "Well, golly, war is messy, war is hell, therefore just let ISIS take over my neighborhood and behead half the people."

        • by whitroth ( 9367 )

          Dear too-lazy-to-actually-look,

                Try looking at wikipedia about the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's under FDR. "Useless"? I've been, and slept in, cabins built by the CCC in state and federal parks. And it gave a job history for young people who had *nothing* before. And a lot of their pay was sent to their parents.

                Gee, that would be terrible, giving money to folks who might be living in their cars otherwise.

    • Anything left of Genghis Khan sounds socialist to some people. To be honest, some of the most conservative people I know are also proud of the projects built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the depression. They don't mind federal stuff, as long as it's not by a guy who's opposed to their guy.

      • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:26AM (#61788183)
        The right wing. It's a common mistake because the right wing doesn't want people to think of them as right-wing because well, their policies are radical and not very popular.

        Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal but I'm actually a conservative. I'm not looking to reform our entire civilization I'm looking to stabilize it. But by casting me as the radical and folks who want to make us all work in the gig economy ala neo feudalism you can attract support from people who are just afraid of change because they're living paycheck to paycheck
        • "Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal but I'm actually a conservative."

          Because you're old, like your uid suggests.

          • Nah I was always kind of conservative. I don't like change. I like stability. Getting older and reading up about revolutions and how they usually ended poorly for everyone involved didn't help either. The only reason the American revolution didn't go the same way is that we still had slavery so we had a ready under class we could have used and we had a ton of land so that one things got bad for people who weren't slaves they could just go west. Things were starting to get really bad but world war II kind of
        • Based on my posting history most people would call me a flaming liberal

          What? When someone says "flaming liberals of /.", you seem to be maybe in the first quartile of the scale or something like that.

          • Has been spent taking someone like me it was largely trying to preserve the social order (an inherently conservative thing to do) and declare us the libbyist libs whoever libed. This lets the right wing constantly shifts the Overton window further to the right so they can grab more power. If you want to see actual liberals go look up the YouTubers Noncompete and Thought Slime. Beau of the fifth column is to but he openly admits that he appreciates conservatives like me reigning in his excesses, where is the
      • Re:Yes (Score:4, Informative)

        by Samantha Wright ( 1324923 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:27AM (#61788187) Homepage Journal
        Alas, Genghis Khan worked to protect the religious freedom of his highly diverse subjects [wikipedia.org], a quality he was admired for at the time and during the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon, of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire fame, thought Genghis Khan's religious philosophy was on par with John Locke, and moreover that it put the Inquisition [wikipedia.org] to shame. For this, the great Khan would probably be considered too left-wing by most if not all of the people you're thinking of.
      • by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
        Are you sure that you're not referencing the efforts of the WPA.
        The WPA was a depression era USA, Federal Government program that actually built "things" -- roads, bridges, building, etc. Many of which are still in use today.
        What did the CCC built? (I don't remember what my middle-school teacher, who worked for the CCC, told us was the difference with the WPA.)
        • Both actually, WPA and CCC both build stuff during the depression. CCC did more stuff in national parks and forests, including some roads.

    • Boosting outdoor recreation...

      Just what we need, more people starting fires, more trails and structures to defend and interfere with fire lines. Maybe a better idea would be to invest in fixing power distribution lines, tear down housing that was built in fire prone areas, invest in desalination plants, and relocate people away from deserts and drought prone regions.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I imagine to many it sounds a bit too socialist.

      That's the problem, about 30% of the population will see it as plot to end or start something, and throw political fits.

    • First off, all jobs are make-work jobs whether created by a corporation or a government. Second, as Noam Chomsky and others point out, jobs are pretty much wage slavery because you have no freedoms, no autonomy, have to follow every corporate rule. You sign away all your freedoms to get a paycheck, often a meager pay check. A civilian climate corps would not only be useful in converting the US to a green-smart grid, where power distribution and storage would be non-localized, but they would also be extremel

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I'm Europe we have rights at work, so it's not really like slavery.

        • Yes, I was talking about neoliberal (which means paleoconservative actually) America, where corporations have more rights than people. Sorry about that, I should have been more specific.

  • But using the Colorado example, $1.7 million spread across 240 employees is $7k/year. If the feds try such a program on their own, $1.7 million won't even cover a regional program manager plus her staff and travel exprnses.
    • by I75BJC ( 4590021 )
      Whoa!
      You just outlined a major problem with Leftist governments!
    • The Colorado Climate Corps uses AmeriCorps [wikipedia.org] members, who are volunteers. Biden is looking for $10 billion to create a jobs program. You can RTFS like everyone else; I believe in you.
      • by PPH ( 736903 )

        AmeriCorps [wikipedia.org] members, who are volunteers

        I'll bet that Chester Spellman [federalpay.org] doesn't work for free.

        • I would not doubt that the $1.7 million were spent in the most frivolous and non-halal [wikipedia.org] means possible. Probably something like six-figure salaries for half a dozen managers, five figures for a re-certified and repainted jalopy that's barely EPA-compliant, four for matching baseball hats, and—most importantly—the rest for airline tickets to fly in the actual volunteers from the other side of the country to comply with some arcane century-old fairness doctrine about job creation that shouldn't eve
      • You can RTFS like everyone else; I believe in you.

        At least somebody believes in him. I suspect he has a write-only interface.

        • We must weep for the confounded, lest there be none to weep for us in our times of great befuddlement.
          • Nobody weeps for me in my times of great befuddlement. Thank goodness.

            Though if I sit re-watch the same physics lecture every day for 3 weeks, my wife tells me I'm really smart. I'm not sure I follow that logic, but it's still nice of her.

  • A large portion of the economic problem is that people are finding it much easier to accept unemployment payments than to work. The only incentive for such people to move to a government work program would be if unemployment payments go back to where they were pre-COVID.

    However, the same people proposing this government work program are the ones pushing the "enhanced" unemployment, so it won't go away. Assuming it passes, in a year the complaint will be that they need to increase it, because there aren't en

    • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:34AM (#61788213)

      A large portion of the economic problem is that people are finding it much easier to accept unemployment payments than to work.

      False [cnbc.com] and more false [nytimes.com]. Removing unemployment payments did not force people to find jobs. As been mentioned here and commented even more so, people are not rushing out to fill all those open jobs employers say they have,

      • A survey released in July says that cutting off federal enhancements less than a month earlier didn't get people to go back to looking for jobs. Even when the benefits were cut off, it would have taken a month for recipients to notice, because of delays in the money pipeline.

        Not sure what the NYT link says, due to the paywall.

        Anecdotally, one of my nephews decided that he made more money sitting on his ass during COVID than he did working for $20+ per hour as a mechanic. Working, he was earning $40K/year be

        • Not sure what the NYT link says, due to the paywall.

          There is no paywall. You're just lazy.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Places like Denmark where the unemployment benefits were quite generous even before COVID also have a high level of employment.

      Turns out very few people are content to live that way, when they can gain by being employed.

      So if that is really what is happening in the US then the problem is probably that wages are too low. Sure enough employers are finding that offering decent money gets applicants.

    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      A large portion of the economic problem is that people are finding it much easier to accept unemployment payments than to work.

      Who would have thought that paying people not to work would result in people not working?

      What we need are payments that are not conditional on being unemployed. Call it an "unconditional basic income" or "UBI". You'll have just enough to survive, but if you want any more than that, you'll have to work for it.

      And with that in place, there would no longer be a need for a minimum wa

    • Several States had already pulled back the extended federal unemployment benefits months ago and these were states where it's extremely difficult to get unemployment in the first place. None of these states saw any increase in hiring as a result.

      The main issue appears to be a lack of affordable child care. There were a lot of people in the job market or effectively working for free or for very very little after factoring in the cost of child care and the cost of going to work.

      The energy expenditure
      • From watching my kids trying to find work, it is also that the companies are being why too selective. It shouldn't be hard to get a job in fast food or sales, but it seems near impossible to even get a call back for an interview.

    • Well, at least 4 of the people with MOD points that try to zap my messages have used them to erase the "insightful" and "interesting" mod points my post had half a day ago. I wonder how many they have left?

      The subject of the story is whether or not the government can "create" a lot of jobs. Yes, they can issue paperwork describing work, define hiring rules and purposes, and allocate billions of dollars to making it happen. Like any government project, it will have "hiring incentives" to "fix discrimination"

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:23AM (#61788173)
    So the problem with stuff like this and the green New deal (besides the fact that the dumbass left wing couldn't resist putting some nonsense about racial Justice in the preamble bill) is that it would raise wages for everyone across the board by increasing demand for labor.

    You can bet every CEO in the country is thinking about the effect that having millions of good-paying jobs would have on the wages they have to pay. From the lowest Walmart or Amazon employee to your six-figure slashdot poster an increase in the supply of jobs would mean an increase in the wages employers would have to pay. That's just how supply and demand works. As a CEO a large part of your job is keeping costs down and labor is a large part of your costs.

    This is kind of the problem the job Creator narrative. More often their job destroyers because they don't want to have to compete for employees.
    • dont be ridiculous. i made 200k in my last job and currently loving the unemployment insurance ( I EARNED IT ).
      now that its over i got people hitting me up talking 165k for cool kubernetes but for a boring corporate sector and im thinking to myself id rather work for 15$ an hour doing hydroponics. the climate corps is perfect for me. get outside, get workout, get some lunch money and have lots of time outside of work to keep working on my inventions or just keep improving my hydroponics and robotics ski
    • The increased demand for labor driving up wages across the board is already happening. Take a look at the help wanted signs outside the nearest fast food place.

      And I don't know about anyone else here, but I sure as hell don't make six figures.

  • by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Sunday September 12, 2021 @11:26AM (#61788185)

    This is not the great depression, we have millions of job openings right now.
    There is no reason to be discussing a government program like this under these conditions.

    • This is not the great depression, we have millions of job openings right now. There is no reason to be discussing a government program like this under these conditions.

      And the reason is that we are paying people not to work.

    • Furthermore those millions of job openings often don't pay enough to cover the costs of going to work. Things like child care and transportation. One of the things that this pandemic brought to the forefront is that they were millions of people working for free after they factored in the costs involved in being able to work. These weren't the best educated people in the world so they weren't able to crunch the numbers themselves but after they were forced out of these so-called jobs it became pretty clear t
    • you werent listening to Andrew yang were you. the old school 9-5 5 days a week to run around and have meetings all day reporting "progress" needs to die.
      this religion you pray to is so myopic that they will pay you all the money in the world but can understand allowing your to work 3 days a week so you can have more free time to work on your inventions and your real plan.

      this is called the hamster wheel and you love it.

      but theres alot of people that think it sucks and have the guts to do something about.
    • But those jobs are not in the areas the government program is aiming for.
      And if there are indeed millions of job openings (which I doubt): why is no one taking those jobs?

  • Thereâ(TM)s already serious labor shortages so this is likely to just make that much worse. Biden doesnâ(TM)t seem to understand basic economics of supply and demand.
    • dont be ridiculous. i made 200k in my last job and currently loving the unemployment insurance ( I EARNED IT ).
      now that its over i got people hitting me up talking 165k for cool kubernetes but for a boring corporate sector and im thinking to myself id rather work for 15$ an hour doing hydroponics. the climate corps is perfect for me. get outside, get workout, get some lunch money and have lots of time outside of work to keep working on my inventions or just keep improving my hydroponics and robotics skills
  • Here in The Netherlands you're "employed" (as in, not unemployed) if you have a job for one hour a week. It's one way to gamble the statistics.
    • ... a job for one hour a week.

      It's an international standard. The problem, aside from the large number of jobs that require a person to work for only one or hours per day or per week, is the person who works such a job has to perform all the unemployment activities that a person working zero hours does, but isn't labelled a dole-bludger and belittled. It means the under-employed are never mentioned in government reporting or welfare-bashing while in fact, they number two or three times the no-job population. It is a sneaky way of giv

  • Our safety net systems and poor educational choices have created the present conundrum of both high unemployment and record numbers of open jobs.

    While some of those openings are relatively low skill and low wage offerings like food service and hospitality jobs, many more are middle skill and high skill jobs like machinists, wiring technicians, and the like.

    While back in the 30s it was plausible that a government program could tell millions of unemployed men to pick up a shovel and dig a ditch from here to w

    • Our safety net systems and poor educational choices have created the present conundrum of both high unemployment and record numbers of open jobs.

      There's numerous references in this discussion that prove that the safety net systems have nothing to do with it, the same situation persists in states which cut off unemployment benefits.

      While some of those openings are relatively low skill and low wage offerings like food service and hospitality jobs, many more are middle skill and high skill jobs like machinists, wiring technicians, and the like.

      Yep, those are kinds of employee who are legitimately in short supply. Most schools have failed badly to meet the needs of students who would become them.

      There is a platonic ideal of a CCC that ideally gets these things done on a grand scale, like an Army Corps of Engineers writ large. But passing a law today won't cause it to materialize. It'd probably take a decade or two before it could be made to happen.

      It might take that long to fully ramp up, but there's low-hanging fruit to pick in the meantime.

      • It might take that long to fully ramp up, but there's low-hanging fruit to pick in the meantime.

        Organizing and executing the effective and timely completion of anwide diversity of geographically distributed small tasks is precisely the sort of thing a centralized bureaucracy does poorly.

        • Organizing and executing the effective and timely completion of anwide diversity of geographically distributed small tasks is precisely the sort of thing a centralized bureaucracy does poorly.

          And yet leaving it up to the smaller, geographically distributed governmental organizations also tends to work poorly, because of the oversight needed.

          • Perhaps yes but it's hard to disentangle the latter failure from the effect of governmental strings.

            Back in the day roads and railroads and bridges were built by private actors with government involvement limited to rubberstamping the plans, if there was any involvement at all.

            And government projects like dams and highways got built by states and localities (using both federal money and locally issued bonds) out west without getting caught up in that red tape in the days before the hacker's veto became norm

  • Let's create thousands of jobs for people to tilt at windmills. There are going to be plenty of windmills, so lots of job opportunities.

  • We already have people doing this. They're volunteers and they already do this. What we do need are a lot of people to maintain the forests. Yes, dear snowflakes, that means cutting down some trees. That means cutting brush, dragging it into big piles and burning it. What it absolutely means is work. Hard work. Getting dirty every single day all day long. What we absolutely don't need are people going around talking about doing something and we sure as hell don't need an army of wannabe middle-manag

  • https://www.yahoo.com/entertai... [yahoo.com]

    Interesting how this one quotes $15. $25 is probably enough to move the needle, but backbreaking labor for $15 likely won't.

  • Wrong question. The question should be, "Can the US create hundreds of thousands of jobs?" full stop.

    Economic and social conditions today are not that far from those which led to FDR, the Labor Act, the WPA, and etc. Most likely the US would be a communist country right now if he hadn't done what he did, especially with regards to Labor. The Unions at the time were threatening to go full Bolshevik and violently if need be. Today, it seems the Upper classes simply haven't learned to quit pushing when they're

    • Anyone who thinks the wealthy as a group don't want others to prosper can't do math. And that's just where their intellectual shortcomings begin.
  • Large numbers of people being asked to swan about in the wilderness.
  • Thunderf00t already demonstrated how it doesn't scale.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Betteridge!

  • This smacks of socialism and it never works past five years or so.

    The first three years are a big boom in hiring with no results and then the organisation created goes into self sustaining mode, where it steps most of its resources to merely continue to exist.

  • I like trails, I try to be on them nearly every day (the dirt kind, please, not the asphalt ones). But I don't see what building them has to do with climate change. Or restoring streams or digging ditches or preventing forest fires or rehabilitating burned off land or thinning dead trees or almost anything else they mention (with the exception of installing solar panels). All (mostly) good things, but it makes as much sense to say that doing these things combats climate change as it does to blame the los

  • Good start. Good intention but to be not thrown under the next political bus it needs to be self sustaining economically and needs focus, reduce CO2.

    I'd like to see governments form NAPAs National Alternative Power Agencies, publicly funded, fast tracked through red tape, and prioritised through law in the supply chain for resources. The agencies exploit your most obvious alternative energy choices, in US, cover your deserts in solar panels and sell energy to consumers in competition with existing energy su

  • So, who pays for this program? Could it be taxpayers? Want minimum CO-2 produced, then build nuclear plants.
  • This is a youth targeted core with no actual objectively defined role but rather a subjective role including 'establish social justice.' Think SS, Red Guard, etc.
  • Do we have so many more people than we have unfilled jobs that we need the government to provide more? I saw three fast food joints and a pharmacy close unexpectedly last weekend because there weren't enough workers.

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