The NPR Politics Podcast - Biden Wants $10 Billion To Put Young People To Work On Environmental Projects

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

The president's Civilian Climate Corps proposal is a reboot of a New Deal era program that employed young men to build trails, parks, and other nature projects. While it is hard to say what will get through Congress, the initiative appears popular with a diverse set of voters.SEE PHOTOS OF NATE'S TRIPThis episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, White House correspondent Scott Detrow, and national correspondent Nate Rott.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Carol from Colorado Springs, Colorado. You don't hear any background noise behind me because this is my first day alone in my house in over a year. Due to the amazing vaccines, all my family and friends and an adorable dachshund puppy who have lived and worked here for the past year have moved on. This podcast was recorded at 2.05 p.m. on Tuesday, May 11th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll bet I'm still going to be getting used to this big silent house. Enjoy the show. Oh, that is a sweet, sweet sound. Silence. She seemed mostly happy with it, but a little wistful, which makes sense. It's been mostly nice with all sorts of mixed feelings to kind of like inch back into normalcy more and more lately. Yeah, it's just different.

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And Nate Rott is here. And by here, I mean on the line. There, you know. Yes, I'm in California right now and I cover the environment for NPR's National Desk. Awesome. So you and Scott, I'm a little jealous, have been out reporting. Well, I'll let you finish that thought, Tam. I was going to say that you guys have been, some more than others, out reporting on one of President Biden's big proposals.

It harkens back to the days of FDR and the 1930s. And at least one of you got to go spelunking. I am here for all of NPR's spelunking needs. Yes. For all of NPR's spelunking needs, yes. Yeah, Nate and I worked together on a big story looking at the Biden administration's effort to reboot the Civilian Conservation Corps. They'd call it the Civilian Climate Corps. This is a central part of Biden's approach to fighting climate change. It carries a lot of symbolic value on a lot of different fronts. So I sat at my desk making a lot of calls to congressmen and, you know,

White House officials, and Nate roamed through the woods in Montana spelunking in a cave, among other places. Not that I'm jealous. Yeah, you know, it's a tough assignment. Tough draw on my part. Yeah, we went to Lewis and Clark State Caverns in northwest, in west central Montana, and then we got to spend a day hiking around in the woods with a montana conservation corps crew uh up by glacier national park of everything they did here this tunnel is the most impressive piece of work tom forwood is the assistant manager of lewis and clark cavern state park in west central montana 538 feet long blasted from the outside in this cave forwood says was discovered by a member of the Conservation Corps, who decided to do a little non-sanctioned exploring.

Like I said, slid through all that and came out into just this. He hits the lights. Whoa. So it's by far the largest room we know of in the cave system. It has the biggest formations in the whole cave that we know of as well. Oh yeah, that is a really, really difficult assignment you got there. So let's explain why you got to go out hiking. President Biden has proposed as part of his American Jobs Plan, a bunch of things. It is a, you know, between that and the American Families Plan, we're talking about $4

trillion of proposed spending. But one element of that, and what you have focused on, is this concept of the civilian climate core. So what did you find out about what that would be? What the theory of the case is? I mean, so part of the idea here is I think, you know, like, obviously, we're kind of coming out of this pandemic, and it's a really tough time to be a young person, right? You know, COVID-19 has ruined all sorts of regular things that young people get to celebrate, you know, prom, graduations, you know, disruptions all over the place. Unemployment for youth remains pretty high. It's one of the few kind of unemployment figures that's kind of sticking. College enrollment is down.

And so part of the solution that President Biden is thinking here is to kind of reboot this very old school thing called the Civilian Conservation Corps, which in the 1930s. In magnificent natural beauty of the American national parks have gone many companies of the Civilian Conservation Corps to further projects which will guard this wealth of beauty against destruction by men and nature. In the wake of the Great Depression put millions of young men, and yes, it is just young men, back to work. Young white men with axes. Exactly. And shovels. So you had people moving from east to west, all over the country, to places that they'd never been before to build infrastructure. Roads, bridges, telephone lines, campgrounds, I think hundreds of thousands of dams, 800 state parks. And a lot of this infrastructure is still in use today, and it's maintained often by these smaller conservation corps,

like the one that we talked about that I visited in Montana for this story, that are basically built off of the original. The original federal CCC ended in 1942, kind of disrupted by World War II. But Tam, we've been talking so much about how Joe Biden is really unapologetically, unabashedly selling the idea of big government, big government programs in particular, as a way to help the country through a massive crisis. He talks so much about Franklin Roosevelt here and there. So you can see the appeal of this as a high profile element of Biden's climate plan. There are other aspects of the infrastructure plan that would do a lot more to lower carbon emissions. We can talk in a bit about the actual climate tie-in of these projects. But this is something, going back to the campaign,

that every time Biden talked about his climate proposals, he would specifically mention this because it makes an automatic association to this idea of people coming from all over, working together, and government doing large-scale projects that last generations. Okay, so let's just dig in on what a conservation corps is. And Nate, you spent time with conservation corps people doing what sounds like wilderness things. But in theory, this would be more than just wilderness things. Yeah, so I mean, the crew that we hung out with was part of the Montana Conservation Corps, and we hung out with them near Talley Lake, which is in northwest Montana. A crew there was basically doing trail work on a popular hiking and biking trail. They were removing down logs that had come down over the winter. They were widening the trail to make

sure that people could come. And it's a lot of maintenance work, stuff like that. But what Biden's envisioning here is having a little bit more of a climate focus. And there are current projects that conservation corps are doing that kind of address the climate issues. So you have fuel mitigation work, right? Which is removing some of the vegetation from parts of our national forests

that have been overgrown for years because we've been so successful at suppressing most fires, which is one of the things that's leading, you know, with climate change to these sort of bigger, kind of harder to manage wildfires across much of the western U.S. You know, I talked to Colorado Democrat Joe Neguse. You might remember him from the impeachment trial, impeachment trial number two, that is. And he had talked about the importance of having urban projects in this as well. You know, everything from building parks and recreation areas in and around cities to doing some of that climate mitigation work in cities. You know, I think cities near oceans have a lot of sea wall work to do, a lot of work to do to get ready for

rising sea levels that is just going to keep coming, whether or not we collectively fix the issue of carbon emissions. There's a lot of different work to do here to deal with the effects of climate change in addition to the traditional environmental work that these groups have done in the past. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, another big idea that is embedded in this proposal. Today, it seems like everybody's got a bone to pick with the news.

So it happens when somebody stops talking smack and just decides to wage all-out war. First thing you do in an evasion, you eliminate the communications of the enemy. And what happens if they win? Visit Stockton, California, for a story about a revolt against the mainstream media that's shaken up a city. From NPR's Invisibilia. And we're back. And Scott, I have sort of a technical question for you, which is that there's already an AmeriCorps.

There's a Peace Corps. I think there are other corps. So, like, how does this all fit together? Is this like something that people have actually been crying out for? That's a really good question. And the answer depends on which of these many different bills or executive orders moves forward. The general sense I've gotten talking to people both on the Hill and the White House is that

if this did not pass Congress, they still see a path forward to create some sort of civilian climate corps within the existing structures that have already been approved. And I think that would be something that you'd see within these already longstanding programs like the AmeriCorps. If it passed as part of the infrastructure proposal, or maybe just like the next budget, you could see a broader, bigger standalone project that would be more high profile. But yeah, I think part of it is symbolism, right? Part of it is the fact that there is a lot of overdue maintenance in national forests, national parks, things like that. A lot of people are saying this is a program that really, despite the glaring shortcomings of inclusion and segregation and not allowing women to take part, a lot of people in this space view is kind of like, you know, the best of what government can

be. So there was a push to try and bring it back for the symbolism and also for the actual, you know, project value. So this proposal is out there. It's been out there for a little bit. How is it being received by environmental groups or other organizations that have wanted something like this? Well, you know, from certainly progressive groups, this is something they've been pining for for a really long time. Democratic lawmakers have proposed various versions of a modern CCC numerous times over the last couple of years. You know, that said, there are some criticisms of the proposal that Biden's put forward, especially in terms of scale. You know, $10 billion is a lot of money. But when you think about the kind of deferred maintenance backlogs that exist kind of across government, you know, the National Park Service has a $12 billion

maintenance backlog. So that's, you know, aging bridges, aging roads, aging campgrounds, aging water systems. The U.S. Forest Service has a $5 billion backlog. And so, you know, the Sunrise Movement in particular has been kind of outspoken in saying that, you know, what Biden's proposing would probably only employ about 20,000 people a year annually. The original CCC put 300,000 people to work in the 1930s when the U.S. population was 40% of what it is right now. So when you compare it to what the New Deal kind of plan that Roosevelt put forward, this is not on the same scale. And I think there's some concerns from some progressive groups and especially especially climate folks, that this is not going to be a cure-all, and it will not address some of the climate issues that the nation really needs to address. And, Tam, you saw the original folks who brought you the Green New Deal, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey, come out after Biden's proposal was out there saying, we want to do this, but 10 times the cost. I will repeat the thing I say, like I feel like every third podcast here that

I do think there's some probably political usefulness for Biden to be criticized for not spending enough money, given the overall scope of his proposals out there. It's a little bit of, look, I'm the reasonable guy here, political cover. Any sense of whether this could become a reality? There is near universal interest in doing this from Democrats. The general idea, even though there are no Republican sponsors of this legislation, the general idea of service is something that I think there is semi-broad bipartisan support for. So I think I would be confident that some version of this does go forward, even if it's just a super scaled down executive order. But, you know, I think the price

tag, and Nate was saying, you know, the big difference of levels of spending here, I think the price tag is up for grabs and how prominent it is. But I would be confident that something like this does go into effect. And for whatever anecdotal evidence is worth, you know, we asked people all over Northwest Montana when we were there about what they thought of this idea of creating a modern CCC. And, you know, Northwest Montana is a pretty conservative place. We talked to some people that said, yes, they voted for Trump. But, you know, jobs are a really big issue around the country right now. And there's a sense that if, yeah, Biden can get people working again, folks are all for it. All right. We are going to leave it there for now. Nate, thank you for joining us. Yeah, happy to be here. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

And I'm Scott Detrow. I also cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.