Add your name: We Need a Civilian Climate Corps for our Communities
Biden and Congress
The economic hardships of the past year and the climate crisis have made it clear: We need good jobs that will help restore our communities and create a livable future.
The Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) is a visionary proposal that would put a generation to work in good, union jobs tackling the climate crisis. CCC projects could include wetland restoration, installing solar panels and wind turbines, retrofitting homes and more.
Poverty, homelessness and economic distress are all preventable policy choices that result from a lack of investment in our communities. Through a CCC, the government will put people to work for living wages to support a clean energy future — and in doing so, help end long standing cycles of poverty, homelessness and incarceration. Our communities can’t wait. Add your name today if you agree that we need a fully-funded, robust Civilian Climate Corps!
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To:
Biden and Congress
From:
[Your Name]
I’m calling on Congress and President Biden to pass a bold Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) to put a generation to work in good, union jobs completing federally-funded projects to reduce carbon emissions, enable a transition to renewable energy, build healthier and more resilient communities, implement conservation projects with proven climate benefits, and help communities recover from climate disasters.
The CCC must maintain strong labor and training standards that would set corpsmembers up for success during and after their term. Corpsmembers should earn a living wage of at least $15/hour for all corpsmembers, plus healthcare, childcare, and educational benefits that would help corpsmembers and their families thrive. Corpsmembers should also receive technical and vocational training during their service term, including through pre-apprenticeships with local union chapters, to ensure pathways to good, union jobs in the clean economy following their service.
The Civilian Climate Corps must also correct the racially exclusionary practices of the original Civilian Conservation Corps and be built to advance environmental justice. Communities of color across the country are disproportionately burdened with the overlapping harms of toxic pollution, economic disinvestment, and other structural inequities. The CCC can be a force to directly combat those inequities and instead directly support these communities. To that end, any new CCC program should direct 50% of corps investments into overburdened communities, and recruit at least 50% of its corpsmembers from those same places.
The program should also ensure gender equity, provide opportunities for corpsmembers of a range of ages, give corps opportunities regardless of immigration status, protect tribal sovereignty, and more. And by prioritizing local hiring and engaging in local consultation on project design and implementation, the CCC can ensure that its climate action is sustainably driven from the bottom-up, rather than top-down.