How Climate Corps members are tackling the climate crisis in communities across the U.S.

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• John Yang:

  2024 is on track to be the hottest year ever on record. Another sign of the climate crisis. The Biden administration wanted to find a way to empower Americans to play their part in combating this crisis by helping to build a clean energy future.

  So last year they established a workforce initiative called the American Climate Corps. Its mission, training people for green jobs. Thousands of Climate Corps members have been dispatched across the country. We spoke with some of them.

• Josh San Diego, CiviSpark:

  My name is Josh San Diego. I am 23 years old and I am serving American Climate Corps based out of Riverside, California.

• Anna Marie Smith, Grid Alternatives:

  My name is Anna Marie Smith. I'm 49 years old. I'm in Los Angeles, California.

• Daniel Escobar, Mile High Youth Corps:

  My name is Daniel Escobar. I am currently a climate educator at Mile High Youth Corps through the Energy and Water Program based out of Denver, Colorado.

• Richard Hamilton, Lomakatsi Restoration Project:

  My name is Richard Hamilton and I am an enrolled tribal Klamath member. I'm Klamath and Modoc. I am a crew boss here at Lomakatsi, based out of Ashland, Oregon.

• Josh San Diego:

  My daily work deals with clean energy, utilities, sustainability and project management. And so I've worked on documents relating to public park lighting retrofits and clean energy vehicle charging.

• Daniel Escobar:

  I am doing energy assessments, which basically means that I'm changing out like sink aerators, shower heads, light bulbs to ensure energy and water efficiency. We do occasionally change toilets to higher efficiency models.

• Anna Marie Smith:

  I was learning how to design a solar installation on a residential home. I learned how to look at a home, look at the roof, assess all the characteristics of a property being ready for solar. How will they benefit from having solar? Will there be like a real benefit to their electric bill?

• Richard Hamilton:

  What we do is go out and ecologically thin and put fire on the ground. In these areas that have either had fire go through them before or are susceptible to getting fire in them now or in the near future.

  When we go out and we work in these areas, it's not just we're going out and cutting trees down and burning them. We're going out and taking care of this land, taking care of the trees and taking care of the communities.

• Anna Marie Smith:

  I grew up in an age where, you know, when you look at downtown LA and it was always overcast, it was just a layer of smog. Just as time went on, I became more interested in like, you know, I like planting native flowers, being more environmentally friendly, like just engaging on a different level.

• Richard Hamilton:

  I want my kids to see just how beautiful some of these mountains are out here when they get older because they love to be out in the woods. And if I don't do anything when I have the chance at my age, then I don't know who's going to step up and do this work.

• Josh San Diego:

  The public parks that were actually retrofitting, I used to walk in every day and I loved how beautiful it is and getting to meet all those different people. I never thought I'd actually start working behind the scenes on these kinds of projects. So that's something that I find pride in.

• Daniel Escobar:

  What we've noticed as we go out into these communities and as we talk to these people is that they might not necessarily know much about water and energy efficiency and how it can save them money and how it actually helps them save energy and water. We've had people that are spending like $300 on their water bills and like changing toilets for them really helps lower them.

• Anna Marie Smith:

  I would say the average solar system, solar installation for a home, I would say base costs probably about $40,000. In a low income community, how many homeowners have the resources to leverage to invest in a $40,000 solar installation system? And these communities that we serve, you know, they're often in areas that have not been serviced well by cities or governments, by their local governments.

  And this solar energy helps, you know, it's cleaner air helps improve their neighborhood.

• Richard Hamilton:

  There's a lot of tribal people out there that want to do this work. They want to see this work done. There's tribal elders that talk about the way that things used to be and our traditions.

• Josh San Diego:

  I'm helping not only my future, but the world's future as a whole. And that might seem funny to think about because I'm only based in a city. But in turn there are other fellows just like me who are doing the same for their cities. And we find ways to make our cities cleaner through these different projects that we are working on that we're helping develop. And little by little, we're making each spot of our planet cleaner.