AOC calls for 'wartime' effort to defeat climate change, pushes for taxpayer-funded 'climate corps'
is calling for a 'wartime scale' effort to fight in a press conference where progressive lawmakers pledged that money for a 1.5 million-strong 'climate corps' will be included in Democrats' budget reconciliation bill. 'The question is not just if we are going to do it, but how - how big, how ambitious?' the New York Democrat said Tuesday morning. 'Our climate crisis today requires a peaceful but wartime scale mobilization in order to combat the climate crisis.' Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who opened the press conference, said he would 'ensure' the climate corps is part of Democrats' sweeping $3.5trillion budget bill. 'I will fight to get the biggest, boldest CCC possible,' Schumer said. The idea behind the CCC is modeled after the first Civilian Climate Corps, created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 during the Great Depression. It has has similarities to the Peace Corps that were established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, where thousands of American volunteers worked in developing nations. President Biden included $10billion for a Civilian Climate Conservation Corps in his original $2trillion American Jobs Plan, which struggled to gain Republican support. Ocasio-Cortez outlined an ambitious scope for how far the money should go. She pledged that half of the CCC's funds - which could be up to $5billion - would go 'to making sure that this is not just going to our national parks and funding Climate Corps members to our national parks, but in urban communities as well to face environmental injustices.' She added that the millions of new positions would be 'good union jobs.' The initiative would recruit 1,500,000 members by 2015 to 'complete important projects across the entire country to help address the climate crisis,' according to Senate Democrats' Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act. Lawmakers aim for a minimum pay of $15 per hour plus benefits. Otherwise fulfilling service sector roles are notorious for their low compensation like AmeriCorps, where workers are seen more as volunteers who receive a stipend and are encouraged, since they are compensated so little, to sign up for food stamps. The program employed roughly 3 million young men to help build roads, dams, fight wildfires and aid in natural disaster relief across the country. Its nine-year run was interrupted by World War II. The CCC is a part of a sweeping $3.5trillion budget reconciliation bill full of progressive priorities. Under increasing pressure to pass infrastructure spending and with little Republican support, Senate Democrats are hoping to agree to a reconciliation budget which would allow them to bypass GOP lawmakers and accomplish Biden's wish list with a 51-50 majority vote. 'I think that the beauty of reconciliation is that it's not an "either/or" proposition, it's a "yes, and?" proposition,' Ocasio-Cortez said. 'This is not a pipe dream, and this is not some big, progressive vision that is "unrealistic" - this is what we have already done.' But Democrats hinted at bigger plans for the program's revival. 'Our mandate today is not just to revive some of the most ambitious programs and ideas, but so much of this is about how we go even bigger and better than we did originally,' Ocasio-Cortez said.