White House Enacts Climate Corps, But Is It Enough?
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President Biden signed an executive order that will create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps. This will serve as a major green jobs training program.
Democrats and environmental advocacy groups have pushed the White House for weeks to enact this executive order. The White House on Wednesday announced this executive order.
What does this do?
The White House states that this will employ more than 20,000 young adults to build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and help prevent wildfires.
Will this help?
In order to properly combat the climate crisis, we need to get to “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner. We need to work towards a better transportation system, stopping deforestation, and creating a climate-friendly agricultural system.
We also need to remove Carbon Dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere. To do this, we would need to plant new forests and better technology to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping into the atmosphere.
While it is no surprise how effective planting trees are in combating climate change in a number of ways, there is more needed to make effective change. There needs to be fundamental changes in infrastructure throughout the world.
What the scientists say
Scientists are concerned with long-term efforts when it comes to planting trees. There is a lot of push to plant trees but there is not a lot of push to spend the time to care for these trees afterwards. There also needs to be the understanding that different trees have different amounts of sequestered carbon.
The World Resources Institute in 2020 recommended $4 billion a year through 2030 to be invested by the United States to support tree restoration in order to make effective change.
There would need to be more than 200 billion trees in the United States to counter the amount of carbon dioxide that the United States puts out into the air. Is there even the land available to plant this many trees?
It is important to note that new trees do not absorb as much carbon dioxide as already standing trees. Trees also release all the carbon dioxide that they have absorbed when they die (naturally or otherwise).
Helping Prevent Wildfires
Smokey Bear may be right when he says that “only you can prevent wildfires.”
Since 1983, there have been approximately 70,000 wildfires per year but the area that the wildfire covers has increased each year since the 1980s.
The air quality goes down when wildfires occur, as most known in the past year as the air quality of New York going down significantly due to the Canadian wildfires.
The smoke from wildfires are a mixture of pollutants that are harmful to humans: PM2.5, NO2, ozone, aromatic hydrocarbons, and lead. They also release carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that causes negative impacts on the climate.
Each year wildfires are getting more extreme with duration, intensity, and they affect the daily lives of people in terms of transportation, communications, water, power, gas, and air quality.
There are ways to prevent these wildfires, not just the ten steps that are taught to campers for their trips. These ways include reducing the amount of byproduct in the forests that cause greater risks to starting the fires, add on to environmental laws, research more about the ecosystems in the United States to properly understand how to prevent them.
What is the consensus?
While this won’t be a cure to climate change, this is a great start. It is becoming a critical time and the climate crisis is not going away without human intervention. More and more scientists are handcuffing themselves to Chase Banks or pipelines so that people start taking the climate crisis seriously.
This executive order will be good for the economy, create jobs, and hopefully start a discussion into more ways to properly combat the climate crisis on a larger scale. We have till 2050 to get to “net zero” carbon emissions, this is a start to getting there, just a smaller one than currently needed.