Not all climate jobs have climate in the title
Simple climate action // I S S U E # 4 1 // RECAREERING
Going pro in the age of climate change
The low-carbon economy is coming for every industry
By Michael J. Coren
Until recently, people who devoted their careers to the environment expected low pay and long hours. Sterling academic credentials were no guarantee against penury. Yet today, “green” jobs are not only coveted, they’re relatively well compensated. Biden has made them a centerpiece of his economic recovery plan. Wall Street is hiring climate risk analysts as fast as it can find them. And the definition of a green job — always a bit vague — has been stretched to include everything from a software designer to a driller (thanks, geothermal).
Take Victoria Wallace. In 2018, the new graduate with a biology degree was struggling to make ends meet working an entry-level job at a state natural resources department. Like others in the office, she was earning rock-bottom wages with no benefits. To get by, she was encouraged to hold down two part-time positions at the same desk while waiting for full-time positions to open up.
Three years later, things have changed. Wallace is in the graduating class at the University of California’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, one of nearly 100 graduate environmental science programs around the country. The schools are sending scores of people to prestigious jobs at renewable energy companies, corporate sustainability teams, and government agencies addressing climate change. And as the climate has heated up, so has the competition — and compensation — for these gigs.
“Everybody wants to do this now,” Wallace says. “This is where the money is, this is where the attention is. It’s becoming a hyper-competitive job market.”
Recareering for the climate
One of the most common questions science journalists get asked about climate change is, “What can I do?” Lately, the question has been: “Where can I work?”
Historically, that answer has been clean energy. Renewables (wind, solar, biofuels in particular) accounted for about 11.5 million jobs globally in 2019. In the US, two of the three fastest-growing professions are solar and wind technicians (alongside nursing). If US President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill passes, the solar industry, which has already doubled to 231,000 workers since 2010, will need about a million jobs to meet America’s clean energy targets by 2035.
But that’s no longer the only track.
A few years ago, Brendan Loudermilk had no experience working on climate change. The software developer from Los Angeles led technical teams, eventually securing enough flexibility to work remotely and travel from Europe — a long-held dream.
“I reached those goals and I wasn’t fulfilled at all,” he said. “That was a big mental wakeup for me.” Gradually, Loudermilk began looking afield for ways to use his skills for something meaningful. “I started reading more about climate change,” he said. “It hit me really hard and I decided, at that point, I better figure out how to help on that.” He now runs Climatescape, a group organizing the ecosystem of companies and non-profits fighting climate change to encourage more investment, hiring, and collaboration. The directory connects thousands of companies, investors, NGOs, and other organizations working on climate solutions.
Others like him are looking for their own ways to contribute, he says. In places like Silicon Valley, more people are rethinking the type of work they want to do. Climate change is driving it. “Ten years ago, it was everyone’s dream to work at Google,” says Loudermilk. “But most startups are not working on things that are going to be world-changing. What I see is people leaving and getting fed up with it.”
Evan Hynes asked himself similar questions in 2019 after years of working in the technology industry. Reflecting on his career, Hynes created a spreadsheet of 1,000 climate jobs that interested him— a list his friends kept asking to see. That led him to hold a climate career fair, and last June he launched Climatebase, one of the largest climate-related job boards on the internet. Hynes says thousands of organizations have posted more than 8,000 jobs on the site to date, attracting more than 200,000 visitors.
“People are realizing you don’t need to be a climate scientist or an expert to work in climate,” says Hynes. “Let’s have that conversation about what a climate career is, so we inspire the next generation of professionals.”
To go pro, or not go pro
That is a conversation happening at Yale University (full disclosure: I graduated from the university’s graduate program in 2009). When the Yale Forest School was founded in 1900 by Gifford Pinchot (the first head of the US Forest Service), the school was dedicated to training a generation of foresters who would manage the nation’s trees for conservation and timber. But today graduates are more likely to head to Google for jobs such as Global Infrastructure Sustainability Lead than the US Forest Service (although plenty still do that, too).
Now, the newly christened Yale School of the Environment’s mission is to find “workable solutions to today’s global environmental challenges,” climate chief among them. Yet many of these new jobs may never explicitly mention climate change at all. “Most of the work of climate mitigation or adaptation goes on in jobs that don’t have ‘climate’ in the title,” says Kevin Doyle, executive director of career development at Yale’s School of the Environment.
That’s exactly what we need, says Beth Gibbons, executive director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP). The professional association, founded in 2011, encourages as many workers as possible to find roles protecting people, places, and resources from global warming. ASAP now has 636 individual and organizational members across North America including urban planning, coastal issues, disaster research, and public policy. While organizations such as the Association of Climate Change Officers and the National Association of Environmental Professionals offer training and certifications, ASAP has resisted the hallmarks (some would say hurdles) to professionalization.
“We don’t believe that climate change allows for the kind of transactional, paywall gatekeeping that has been so much a part of professionalization,” says Gibbons who worries certifications will shut out marginalized communities from the global conversation.
However the field evolves, the shortage of experienced and qualified candidates is already acute. Even brand-name organizations are now begging for candidates, says Doyle. “There’s certainly not enough people with the right training and the right education to do these jobs,” he says.
The cost of perpetual growth
Whatever their qualifications, climate jobs clearly are not the sole domain of environmental school graduates, non-profits, and volunteers any longer. Artists, doctors, engineers, singers, and CEOS are all getting involved.
Perpetual growth that comes at the expense of social and ecological stability eventually undermines the economy itself.
Perhaps the most interesting jobs are the ones that don’t yet exist.
In 2012, Oxford University economist Kate Raworth proposed “The Doughnut Model” for the global economy. She argued (controversially among economists), that infinitely expanding GDP isn’t necessarily healthy. Instead, a truly healthy economy must strike a balance between two of humanity’s defining challenges: poverty and ecological degradation, especially climate change.
Perpetual growth at the expense of social and ecological stability will eventually undermine the economy itself. She reconceived economics as managing a prosperous society with an ecological ceiling and a social foundation (hence, the “doughnut”).
The idea caught on. Last year, the city of Amsterdam announced it was adopting the Doughnut Model. The Dutch city is the first major city in the world to adopt the paradigm as its official policy that will inform everything from urban planning to waste management to construction.
And this concept is already implicitly changing the workings of the global economy. In 2012, forty-three institutions, including the International Finance Corporation—the private arm of the World Bank—asked companies to account for natural capital (and its loss) in their annual statements. Governments from Maryland to China are adding natural capital to the national ledger. Last year, the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, said all its investment decisions will begin accounting for ESG (environment, social, and governance) criteria, climate paramount among them.
Finding a new way to safeguard the biosphere, while enabling humans to thrive, will be a job for the new generation just arriving in the workforce.
That’s what Doyle at the Yale School of the Environment sees as the defining challenge for new students. “There’s one area I’m not seeing as much hiring in, but lots and lots of thinking about,” says Doyle. “If our current economic structure got us into this crisis, can those economic structures get us out of it, or do we need to build something new?”
Hothouse is a weekly climate action newsletter written and edited by Mike Coren, Cadence Bambenek, Jemima Kiss and Jim Giles. Everything we publish is free to read — your donations fund our writers and artists.
