Not Just For Hippies
Sustainability and fighting climate change have a stereotype. Popular culture has caused many to think that sustainability is only for liberals, hippies, and academics. But this cannot be further from the truth! Ask yourself — what is more conservative than wanting to keep the ocean where it is? The reality is that combatting climate change represents an opportunity for an unprecedented boom in domestic manufacturing, good-paying unionized jobs, and more blue-collar work than we know what to do with. From construction and carpentry to electrical and farming, on the assembly line and on-site, sustainability can create jobs, rebuild our infrastructure, and truly Make America Great Again. This becomes an even better opportunity considering how badly we need a jobs program after the impacts of COVID-19 on the economy.
Energy & Transportation
Overhauling our energy infrastructure will require putting solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal, and battery storage installations everywhere from individual rooftops to massive solar and wind farms. In addition, the distribution of this power will call for the grid to be completely revamped into a distributed network of decentralized smart grids. Furthermore, we will need to retrofit millions of buildings to become more efficient yet still maintain their historical culture.
This will require an army of carpenters, welders, electricians, masons, construction workers, and plumbers, as well as an equally large army of managers, accountants, architects, dispatchers, and foremen. These jobs will be located across the country, in every state, county, and town.
Not only does this provide a post-COVID jobs program and address climate change, but it makes our energy infrastructure far more resilient. With miles of exposed powerlines, centralized coal and gas power plants are outdated, inefficient, and vulnerable. If the power plant goes down, thousands, even millions of people will lose power. However, if some solar panels are damaged, the rest of the smart grid remains intact, filling in for the damaged panels and keep the power. Power is democratized when methods like the Brooklyn Microgrid give people power over their power.
When it comes to transportation, it’s more than just electric cars. Reaching carbon neutrality will require robust, electric public transportation. This means hundreds of thousands of new miles of railways. Millions of new busses, monorails, train cars, and subway trains. The infrastructure surrounding rail and bus travel will have to be retrofitted as well. This, too, will require millions of unionized construction jobs.
Agriculture
When it comes to agriculture and climate change, two things must happen. The industry must become carbon negative, and its supply chains must shrink immensely. Agriculture has the potential to become a massive carbon sink, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere on an industrial scale and, as a result, yielding healthier, stronger, and larger crops. The innovative potentials for agriculture using technology like robotics and the Internet of Things are limitless, all offering job opportunities and new business niches. Secondly, the need to shrink supply chains and decentralize agriculture, accompanied by the myriad of new efficiency technologies, opens the door for a new generation of small-scale high-tech farmers. Thousands, or even millions of new farmers, selling locally to their community increases food access, food security, and consumer health and substantially reduces the carbon footprint of agro-industrial supply chains.
Manufacturing
Someone will have to make all these new rail cars, solar panels, wind turbines, farming equipment, and electric vehicles! This will cause a manufacturing boom, and with the right regulations and incentives in place, these booms can happen domestically. By happening at home, unionized manufacturing jobs can return to the factories they once resided in, reinvigorating local economies and clawing our way out of this economic depression. This army of blue-collar manufacturers would rival the size of those working to install the products they’re building.
It is essential to look at every issue from multiple angles, and with climate change, it is easy to get swept up in a purely ecological viewpoint. But the truth is, in the solutions reside endless opportunities to improve people’s material lives and create a booming economy that works for everyone and addresses climate change, not causes it.
