Last week, the United States government launched the American Climate Corps, and I think we need to immediately follow suit up here in Canada.
The idea is to train young peolpe in clean energy, conservation, climate resilience skills and create jobs that will help tackle the climate crisis. The U.S. Government is going to create more than 20,000 jobs for young people that will hopefully give them stable income and help ensure that the country will be just a bit better off when it comes to the climate.
Now we need to do the same thing.
Young people in this country are not doing well. I know, I’m one of them. I was lucky enough to find work in my chosen field, but I know of so many who are not nearly as lucky as I am. And even in my good fortune, I still am not going to be able to afford a house or have a child for the foreseeable future. However that can be different for others of my generation.
The Americans are doing this through a workforce training and service initiative. Basically they’re going to train young people in the skills they need to do this kind of work, then create a recruitment service linked to local groups that will employ these young people, with the help of the U.S. Government.
I wrote about this idea just under two years ago. I said that people my age have seen decades of crises, have been saddled with low wages and an impossible housing market. At the time, the Coquihalla Highway had just been washed away by floods. A few months earlier we’d seen the heat dome, which at that point had been unprecedented. Fast forward to today, and it was just announced that this year 3 million hectares of forest had been burned in this province over the past year, dwarfing any previous summers’ records. If there was any time that we needed people to step up and do something it would be now.
There are folks in B.C. who are looking into this kind of thing. Youth Climate Corps is an organization that is advocating for a just, livable future and putting the youth — who are willing and able to do it — to work. They’re actually holding a webinar at the end of October, more information is available on their Instagram account at @youthclimatecorps.
Their goal is to make progress towards the province’s committments to net-zero by 2050 by scaling up a motivated young workforce. According to Stats Canada, young people aged 15-30 are less likely to have a job than older Canadians. So what if we could harness that bit of labour power and get them to come together to fix one of the biggest problems the world is facing?
Especially when the traditional career fields that a lot of people in this part of the world can take are dwindling because of changing times?
It kinda makes sense, doesn’t it?