Here is where climate change alarmism goes. Radical representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, wants to have a Climate Corps, a domestic Green army. Joe Biden has now taken up this idea, even though the US real army is engaged in war on a number of fronts, and faces a funding crisis. Biden is set though to throw $ 8 billion into this wacko scheme, which will have tens of thousands doing all sorts of touch-me-feel-me projects such as planting trees, and picking up litter. I suppose it does not hurt to have the vast amount of litter picked up, but be sure that most of the money is going to be wasted on woke aspects of environmentalism, as it already is. According to the Biden administration it: "will offer a range of compensation and benefits such as housing, transportation, health care, child care, educational credit, scholarships and student loan forgiveness, stipends, non-financial services and benefits that address barriers to employment and job retention, and other benefits as determined by specific program and participant needs."
Even The Wall Street Journal could see through this one: "Not a bad gig if you don't want to contribute to the real economy. This is an income redistribution program to finance left-wing nonprofits and bureaucracies to employ and train a cadre of political activists."
Yet schemes like this can be expected across the West, including Australia, as the climate change alarmist ideology becomes ingrained into daily political practice. If it has anything to vaguely do with climate change, it gets funded, regardless of whatever other pressing social problems exist.
"Who says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has no influence? Her vision to mobilize a government Climate Corps to promote green politics is becoming a reality. President Biden wants to shrink the real Army, but his budget includes more than $8 billion for a domestic green political army.
The political model is FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, which paid Americans to work when nearly one in four were jobless. The U.S. now has a labor shortage, but the Biden Administration wants to mobilize more than 20,000 initially for the Climate Corps—and some 50,000 by 2031. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey want the Climate Corps to employ 1.5 million over five years.
"This is not summer camp for climate activists. It's a job-training program," says Trevor Dolan of Evergreen Action, a green nonprofit that has lobbied for the Climate Corps. He says participants will learn to install electric heat pumps, solar panels, EV charger and pollution-monitoring equipment, fight forest fires, do wellness checks on the elderly during heat waves and help communities develop disaster plans, among other tasks.
The Sunrise Movement, another far-left outfit, says the Climate Corps can "raise the bar for all employment" and "allow us to use the government as a way of designing our own society and setting new norms for the workplace." Ah, yes, a children's crusade to remake America—paid for by your tax dollars.
A Climate Corps memorandum of understanding signed in December by six federal agencies and AmeriCorps says that, "to the extent permitted by law," the program "will offer a range of compensation and benefits such as housing, transportation, health care, child care, educational credit, scholarships and student loan forgiveness, stipends, non-financial services and benefits that address barriers to employment and job retention, and other benefits as determined by specific program and participant needs."
Not a bad gig if you don't want to contribute to the real economy. This is an income redistribution program to finance left-wing nonprofits and bureaucracies to employ and train a cadre of political activists.
The MOU says the Climate Corps will promote the Administration's goal that 40% of overall federal climate-change investments should "flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, overburdened by pollution, and experiencing disproportionate impacts of climate change."
The perverse priority of this program is hard to believe when the President is racking up record budget deficits and shrinking the U.S. military despite rising global threats. The Climate Corps plan shows how much Mr. Biden remains in thrall to the Democratic left and its climate-change obsessions."