On September 20th, 2023, President Biden announced that he was launching the American Climate Corps (or as Sunrise has called it in the past, the Civilian Climate Corps). This is a program that Sunrise has been fighting for at a national level for years, but what exactly is it?

The Origin Story

It’s probably easiest to show what the ACC is by showing where the idea originally came from. The Civilian Conservation Corps was an incredibly popular New Deal-era program that put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work as the nation recovered from the Great Depression. It’s important to emphasize that the original CCC mainly employed white men, only employing women after Eleanor Roosevelt directly intervened. Racial segregation was common in the program, and in fact, many benefits of the wider New Deal outright excluded people of color. In many cases, the New Deal even made things worse - the Federal Housing Administration, started by the New Deal, was directly responsible for the creation of redlining.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, the original CCC had a broadly positive impact on the natural environment. The program worked to reverse erosion from aggressive farming that created the Dust Bowl, planted more than 3.5 billion trees, and, most famously, created the infrastructure for our state and national parks. While the program was ended in the early 40’s due to the war effort, the labor of over a million Americans bolstered our natural environment, combatted dangerous erosion, and created numerous national parks to explore.

So why do we need an American Climate Corps in the 2020s?

America finds itself in a similar position today. The care of our natural environment is more important than ever due to climate change. We need to make important infrastructural investments (for the energy transition) that will require a lot of labor, and we’re facing a housing crisis while wages have not risen with productivity for half a century.

Source: Economic Policy Institute

For the past few years, a successor to the original CCC seemed like a no-brainer to the Sunrise Movement. Put real effort into the energy transition while providing jobs for our generation that have lived through multiple “once in a lifetime” economic crises. Our hub participated in this campaign, hosting a rally of our own at the Kansas Capitol and writing an op-ed for the Lawrence Times back in 2021. Sunrise’s huge national-level campaigns for a Civilian Climate Corps, which included a 400-mile march that ended at Ted Cruz’s house, made headlines all over the country. We have been loud about this for a while!

What’s the catch?

Photo by Jim Watson

While it’s really encouraging to see a sitting president at least vocally support action like this, the current American Climate Corps proposition will only create around 20,000 jobs in its first year as opposed to the hundreds of thousands the original CCC provided in its first few months alone. As an anecdote, a majority of the people my age who I’ve talked to about the ACC are actively interested in working in an ACC job. We’re the most climate-conscious generation the world has seen and we want to use our skills to help the United States protect the environment and transition away from fossil fuels as fast as possible! But those 20,000 spots will fill up incredibly quickly and still leave many of us unemployed or forced to take on jobs that may exacerbate the climate crisis simply to survive in the short term. This is besides the fact that there haven’t been many specifics released on the ACC - we don’t even know when or where these jobs will be offered, much less to who.

While it’s certainly a mixed bag, the ACC is a step forward towards actually solving the climate crisis while giving young people much-needed employment opportunities. I’m excited to see how the agency evolves and what sort of jobs we are able to apply for, and am hopeful that more will be offered as time goes on. Sign up for updates at this link if you’re interested in staying in the loop too!