(Bloomberg) -- Standing on ladders and wielding flashlights, four people are bringing a dark, dank restroom at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds into the energy-efficient future.
Their mission is to remove old fluorescent lighting throughout a sprawling fairgrounds building in Stockton, California, and rewire the fixtures for LEDs. They’re members of a state service organization, but the project is also now part of the work of the American Climate Corps (ACC), a nationwide program geared at placing young people in temporary jobs while giving them a pathway to federal service and climate-related careers.
A long-held ambition of the Biden administration, the Climate Corps launched earlier this year and now boasts some 15,000 members. They’ve been deployed doing everything from cleaning up after wildfires to helping people make their homes more energy efficient. It’s all part of a plan to pick up the torch from the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program whose members transformed farmland and natural spaces across the country.
But with a US election looming, the fate of the Climate Corps is an open question. Republican members of Congress are openly critical of it, and Donald Trump would have the authority to end the program if he returns to the White House.
Workers would still likely keep their jobs, since they serve across a range of state and national partner organizations — some newly created but many, like the agency AmeriCorps, that predate the initiative. (Those partners post job openings on the ACC’s website.) Still, a Trump return would threaten national cooperation that the White House says has boosted recruitment and worked to create funding opportunities for those partners.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The Climate Corps was designed to be resilient to political shifts in Washington, the Biden administration says.
“We have built the American Climate Corps to be a durable program that will continue to serve communities around the country, no matter who is president,” said Maggie Thomas, special assistant to the president for climate. Thomas, who led its creation from the White House, said the decisions to lean on existing partners, use funding that Congress has already authorized and hire staff at AmeriCorps are helping to “institutionalize” it.
Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said most of the ACC’s work “is not a threat to fossil fuels, which is the sort of thing most likely to attract Trump’s attention.”
But as a brand new and relatively obscure program, it also lacks broad popular support. “Even during the depths of the Great Depression, Republicans for the most part refrained from criticizing the [Civilian Conservation Corps], because it was so popular with the American people,” said Neil Maher, a historian who wrote a book about the New Deal program. “The problem for the ACC might be that it is not yet well known.”
Among the foursome rewiring light fixtures at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds is Noah Van Ekelenburg, 25, who studied environmental science in college before joining the California Conservation Corps. The program — among the state initiatives to partner with the wider American Climate Corps — is aimed at young adults, who spend a year doing everything from installing solar panels to responding to natural disasters.
“It might not seem like a lot,” Van Ekelenburg said of installing LED bulbs at the fairground. “But when you multiply that across hundreds of lights in this one building and then hundreds of buildings in the whole state, it adds up pretty quick.”
In the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, which stretches across parts of Utah and Wyoming, Kayleigh Martinez spent about two months from July to September doing work that would have been familiar to her predecessors in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The 20-year-old cleared trails, removed unwanted trees and surveyed fish populations alongside other members of the Forest Corps, a partnership between AmeriCorps and the US Forest Service. She also helped survey burned areas after two forest fires, checking for spots that were still dangerously hot.
“The best part is just getting to work and live somewhere that’s so beautiful,” Martinez said in September, near the end of her time in Uinta-Wasatch-Cache. Her team’s housing lacked internet access, so she’d posted up in a nearby library to speak over a video call. “Our worksite views are insane,” she said. “Our lunch views are incredible.”
Back in the 1930s and early 1940s, 3 million total members of the Civilian Conservation Corps developed 800 new state parks and combated soil erosion on 40 million acres of farmland. A modern climate corps on that scale would be “transformative for the country,” said Maher, the historian. Progressives in Congress like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thought so too, and their original vision for the corps was grand: A legislative proposal called for a jobs program that would employ 1.5 million people.
Representative Cliff Bentz of Oregon, a Republican, called the idea of a federal climate corps “delusional” in 2021. Funding for it was dropped from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, leaving President Joe Biden to create the ACC by executive order. That prompted GOP pushback, with some members of Congress introducing legislation to block the program. And after Biden’s request earlier this year for funds to expand it, the conservative-leaning Senate Western Caucus said it would probably be better to set $8 billion on fire.
The program in its current form is a much smaller version of the initial idea, and lower profile, since it’s essentially grafted onto hundreds of existing agencies and nonprofits around the country.
Work at those partner programs will go on no matter who wins on Nov. 5. Michigan plans to continue its organization, the MI Healthy Climate Corps, regardless of what happens at the federal level, said Cory Connolly, the state’s chief climate officer. Maine’s Climate Corps was authorized by the state legislature, Kirsten Brewer, until recently the program’s coordinator, noted when asked about its future.
Maher could see the Climate Corps grow if it captures the public imagination. A larger version could then help make climate change a dinner-table issue, he said, just as its New Deal predecessor “democratized conservation” by bringing that topic into people’s everyday lives.
Morgan Glynn, 23, is used to starting those discussions. She traveled the coast of Maine to help communities prepare for floods as part of her role within the network of Maine Climate Corps programs. She joined in January after studying environmental science and film in college. Glynn spoke to people who were seeing flooding threatening places where they had “deep roots,” and who were thinking about what life would be like for their children and grandchildren. She says the job gave her a greater appreciation for people’s connection to where they live.
“Community voice is so important, and that’s something that’s going to be irreplaceable as we think about building our climate-resilient future,” Glynn said.
Chad Oberdoerster, 51, also spends a lot of time listening. As a member of the MI Healthy Climate Corps, he plans events where people share their thoughts on the state’s energy transition. The goal is to help communities prepare, and to identify people who can help with planning on the state level.
A former teacher, Oberdoerster sees the Climate Corps as a step into a new career after he went back to school to get a master’s degree in natural resources. “I’m going to continue to work for these goals in Michigan,” Oberdoerster said. “I’m planted here. I’m set here.”
Glynn’s experience made her want to keep working on climate resilience in Maine, and changed her view of what service can look like.
“I’m realizing that change can happen on a really small level,” she said, “and it can have really big impacts.”
--With assistance from Zahra Hirji.
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