Climate workers wanted
Three years ago, Alexsandra Sesepasara moved home to American Samoa, a remote chain of Pacific islands, with her family after more than a decade of military service. She took a job as a water resources engineer for the utility that provides power, cleans up trash and manages drinking water for the more than 49,000 residents of the territory.
But soon after she arrived, she realized that rising seas and worsening storms, fueled by climate change, had brought new problems to her homeland, while exacerbating old ones. Saltwater was seeping into the islands’ fresh water supply, shutting down schools and leading to boil water notices. In December, the issue caused a nearby hospital to close all nonessential services for nearly a week.
There was another problem, Sesepasara said: American Samoa didn’t have enough workers to fix its water issues.
But this summer, the American Samoa Power Authority, her employer, became one of nine entities across the country to receive funding under a $60 million federal program intended to help train workers to combat the growing challenges of climate change.
The climate jobs of the future, experts told me, may mean adjusting how we think of the jobs of the past: Electricians may need to learn to install solar panels, construction workers may need to deal with new engineering requirements and bankers may need to manage climate risk.
“This is a model of us adapting our jobs in real time to the reality and need of the moment,” said Ned Gardiner, a program manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Program Office, which is coordinating technical assistance for the grantees.
The funding comes as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions in tax incentives for clean energy and climate programs across the country.
While most of the applications NOAA received for the grant program focused on coastal resilience and protecting marine economies, the agency was open to proposals from sectors like shipping, engineering and finance, Gardiner said.
“Every job will be affected by climate change,” said Lara Skinner, founding executive director of the Climate Jobs Institute at Cornell University. “We look at every sector of the economy, and every sector will have to change. This isn’t some little transition.”
American Samoa will receive almost $1.8 million over the next four years to hire an on-island trainer to provide technical certifications for 150 current and future utility employees out of its 439-person work force. Sesepasara hoped the money could help the company better support its customers.
“If you don’t have water, you don’t have a future,” said Kelley Tagarino, an American Samoa resident and a community adviser at the Hawaii Sea Grant program, which is run through the University of Hawaii. Tagarino works to help her community understand the impact of sea level rise and collaborated with Sesepasara to apply for the grant.
Funding climate jobs
 |
| Damage to a neighborhood in Lake Charles, La., left by Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020. William Widmer for The New York Times |
The tax incentives in the I.R.A. could ultimately help fund more than 6,200 projects in utility-scale clean energy and storage and almost four million jobs, according to the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, a labor organization educating workers on climate action.
NOAA’s work force program isn’t the only funding for jobs included in the I.R.A. Hundreds of millions of dollars are also available to hire employees in the National Park Service and workers to expedite clean energy projects in rural America, as well as to train a new generation of Indigenous workers through the Indian Youth Service Corps.
Last year, the Biden administration also launched the American Climate Corps to put 20,000 young Americans into jobs addressing global warming.
In the short term, there’s a lot of physical work that can be done to mitigate the climate crisis, like building more flood-resilient communities.
The Flood Mitigation Industry Association, a national industry group, received $6.9 million from the NOAA grant program to run a six-week pilot program to train at least 600 apprentices to elevate structures and flood-proof buildings in Lake Charles, La.
There are more than a dozen large projects being funded and studied by the Army Corps of Engineers to elevate and flood-proof thousands of structures across the country, said Rod Scott, the flood mitigation group’s board chairman.
“It’s like the space program,” Scott said. “We’re going to build the work force to match up to very large projects in different regions of the country. This is about adapting and surviving.”
All nine NOAA recipients are still waiting on the arrival of grant funding. Scott hopes it will arrive by the end of September.
In the meantime, Sesepasara has already had to adapt to climate change at work. She had to learn how to install and operate new equipment to desalinate the area’s water. But she hopes the work will help sustain the place where she was born and raised, especially for her children. “Family is always the reason we relocate home,” Sesepasara said.
|
 |
| The vice president at a rally in Milwaukee on Wednesday. Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
Harris goes light on climate policy. Green leaders are OK with that.
In the 2020 presidential election, climate activists demanded that Democratic candidates explain, in detail, how they planned to tackle the planet’s greatest environmental threat.
But in the weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris ascended the Democratic ticket, she has mentioned climate change only in passing, and offered no specifics on how she would curb dangerous levels of warming. Climate leaders say they are fine with that.
“I am not concerned,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a Democrat who made climate change the centerpiece of his own 2019 bid for the presidency. Mr. Inslee said he believed it was more important for Ms. Harris to draw a distinction between her and her Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, than to drill down on policy nitty-gritty.
“I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will,” Governor Inslee said. — Lisa Friedman
Many climate policies struggle to cut emissions, study finds
First, the good news: 1,500 climate policies aimed at reducing emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases have been implemented across dozens of countries over the past two decades.
The more troubling news: Only around 4 percent may have substantially reduced emissions, according to a new study.
“We’re finding good and bad news together,” said Nicolas Koch, a climate economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of the study published Thursday in Science. “It’s highlighting opportunities, like that larger reductions are possible, but also challenging the political will for policy design.” — Austyn Gaffney
