Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Nobody in the Gen Z climate cadre the Guardian interviewed wants to get their hands dirty – the careers listed are mostly about convincing other people do the work.
‘No point in anything else’: Gen Z members flock to climate careers
Colleges offer support as young people aim to devote their lives to battling the crisis
Angela Lashbrook
Mon 6 Sep 2021 20.00 AEST
California is facing a drought so devastating, some publications call it “biblical”. Colorado now has “fire years” instead of “fire seasons”. Miami, which sees more dramatic hurricanes each year, is contemplating building a huge seawall in one of the city’s most scenic tourist districts to protect it from storm surges.“Once you learn how damaged the world’s ecosystems are, it’s not really something you can unsee,” says Rachel Larrivee, 23, a sustainability consultant based in Boston. “To me, there’s no point in pursuing a career – or life for that matter – in any other area.”
Larrivee is one of countless members of Gen Z, a generation that roughly encompasses young people under 25, who are responding to the planet’s rapidly changing climate by committing their lives to finding a solution. Survey after survey shows young people are not just incorporating new climate-conscious behaviors into their day-to-day lives – they’re in it for the long haul. College administrators say surging numbers of students are pursuing environmental-related degrees and careers that were once considered irresponsible, romantic flights of fancy compared to more “stable” paths like business, medicine, or law.Why won’t US TV news say ‘climate change’?Mark HertsgaardRead more
“I cannot imagine a career that isn’t connected to even just being a small part of a solution,” says Mimi Ausland, 25, the founder of Free the Ocean, a company that aims to leverage small actions to remove plastic from the ocean.
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“My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments,” they say.
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A 2020 USC survey found that 64% of undergraduate students are “very interested” in on-campus sustainability, while 27% are “interested”. They’re also practicing what they preach: 33% of survey respondents say they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report weekly sustainability practices.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/06/gen-z-climate-change-careers-jobs
I’m pretty sure “the lens of literature and philosophy” won’t help solve the currently insurmountable engineering impediments to creating a 100% renewable energy powered future. But it sure sounds like a path to a life of well funded government or lobbyist expenses paid conferences, international travel, a comfortable office, a sexy sounding job title, and no heavy lifting.
First task of these climate youth brigades – get the John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s and other rich folk off their private planes. Then they would be doing something useful.
Would be fun to watch those rich dudes argue back at the youth brigades.
Shades of the Red Guards.
Just be pleased that these know-nothings are going into climate change research. It won’t effect the climate and they’ll never be heard from again. People just aren’t being fooled by the climate hustlers any more, except for the hustlers themselves.
Can we ensure that their fieldwork include unsupervised trips into the Arctic to check (closely) on the Polar Bear population? At feeding time?
My understanding is that in the wild, feeding time for a polar bear, is anytime something yummy looking approaches.
Young people who are interested in Earth Changes of climate and weather conditions should study geology and earth sciences.
Climate hoax and warming creative accounting is nonsense no science at all.
School counselor, advising a lackluster student that prefers partying.
Of course the school counselor will steer the lazy nitwit towards the easy degree!
Never bothering to tell the students that the field is already glutted with lying fatherless children.
Then when the world graduates millions of political action and climate change degreed students in Associate, Bachelor of, Master of, and tens of thousands PHD degrees…
The world will have beaucoup burger flippers, taco chefs, grocery store sample pushers, gas pump monitors, sign whirling nimrods and numbskull trolls and trollops.
Sounds like a win-win to me.
“Why should I keep a dog and then bark myself?”
There’s something wrong in the (western) world when political activism is seen as a (paid) career choice.
Really? ‘scientists’ like Willie Soon have made a career out of political activism for fossil fuel companies and think tanks, haven’t they?
Griff, that’s below even your standards, Just take a look at Dr. Soon’s papers.
No, it’s not below Griff’s standards to use character assassination against skeptics. It’s standard operating procedure for him.
Griff and standards.Never the twain shall meet!
No it isn’t below Griffy’s standards – he doesn’t have any. There is nothing he wouldn’t stoop to in the name of his religion.
Disputin,
The griffter DID look at Dr. Soon’s papers several years ago. He’s mind is still confused from the horrifying experience!
griff, like the rest of our trolls, wouldn’t be caught dead reading something that doesn’t support the agenda.
Griff read it on HuffPo and had it confirmed when CNN reported that HuffPo had reported that David Attenborough had broadcast that the world wildlife or was it the world wildlife fund was endangered because Global Warming and that the mad scientist Willie Soon was responsible because he earned a living and it must have been tied to the fossil fuel industry, at least according to Don Lemo or was it Chris Cuomon. Nonetheless very reliable sources all.
It’s very unusual for you to reply to a comment, Griff mate, which shows you do read them, but you do realise if you make an allegation like that you have to back up your claim with hard facts, don’t you?
Hard facts are not really your forte though, are they?
Griff is all about making false accusations against skeptics. Facts, and backing up claims, are for other people.
I strongly suggest that you go to your nearest library & take out a book on geology, then you’ll begin to learn about climate change, also take out a book on astrophysics & learn about stella dynamics & variable stars!!! The UN set out from the get-go to create fear about globul warming & climate change. They had to call it climate change because somebody pointed out to them that the Earth’s temperature could start to cool, as was the scare story from the late 1960s & 1970s!!! It was virtually carved in stone that our Sun was a stable star, until not so long ago it was declared to be a variable star, remember Griffy-baby, science has a tendency to change every now & then, think of the grief Alfred Wegener got given when postulated Plate Tectonics Theory!!!
There are days when it seems that griff actually believes the lies he preaches.
The one problem with lies like griff uses, is they take just a sentence to spew, but several paragraphs to refute. Like the rest of our trolls, they hope that people grow tired of refuting their lies, and just let them lie there.
Heartland Institute had a small (something like $10K) grant for a program that had nothing to do with climate change, several years prior to Soon joining Heartland.
This is the source of the oft repeated lie that Soon is paid by big oil.
nyolci still claims that this site is funded by big oil. When asked for proof he just proclaims that it is something that all of his friends know.
These guys may be from the Hard Left, but they are not actually hard.
They avoid face to face confrontation and debate.
Many Government Organisations have Climate Changes Officers that have the mandate of the CEO or Board, but these officers are actually scared of confrontation within their own organisations.
They haven’t got the guts to confronts sceptics such as engineers.
They are not leftists, or of the ‘hard left’.
‘Left wing’ may where you are be a convenient term for ‘people I don’t agree with’ but accepting climate science and fighting climate change is not polarised to one end of the political spectrum.
Griff
You make a very obvious error, in thinking that CAGW is somehow related to science or the environment. A corporate climate change officer may have a science or environmental background, but their duties don’t include any actual science. Their duties are political and clearly left leaning.
I have yet to encounter one scientist who could explain why we need to “fight” climate change, when they haven’t demonstrated with any degree of confidence that we need to “fight” it!!! All the scientists have is puter models, which will produce any outcome the programmer wants them to produce!!! Humans always adapted in the past, & we’ll have to adapt to it in the future, or we die!!! Simples!!!
Actually most of the United Nations created IPCC is made up of bureaucrats as is most of the Climate Crisis Community.
Griff and his ilk barking about 97% consensus is not even an argument, because you would be hard pressed to find a real scientist who would disagree that the Climate is in a constant state of change, sometimes cooling (a really bad thing) and as for now warming (which by all indications has been a very good thing).
But few scientist would stake their reputation on a claim that it is catastrophic and even fewer would argue that the bureaucrats can do anything about it. The climate changing that is.
As we have no control it is an exercise in futility to wring our hands over it. But the Central Authoritarians have created this hobgoblin and intend to ride it until they have managed to frighten enough generations of children into bowing in obeisance to the Bureaucratic Climate Gods. This is all about centralizing control under a global governance for population control and resource rationing,
Are you a leftists, Griff? How do you define yourself?
When confronted, almost all the leftists that I know define themselves as centrists. They have spent their entire academic career surrounded by people either like themselves or further left. After graduation they have actively sought out groups that agree with them, refusing to have anything to do with low lifes who fail to appreciate the wonders that socialism brings.
As a result, they live in an echo chamber in which nobody disagrees with them. So obviously the whole world agrees with them as well.
So we shouldn’t take them at their word when they tell us they are using global warming as a vehicle to destroy capitalism and impose socialism?
“They avoid face to face confrontation and debate.” That is why the “debate” was over before it was never held!!!
When they use phrases like ‘the lens of literature….’ you know you are dealing with airheads doing a pseudo course.
A very few of these hopefuls will get berths on the Green Luxury Express. The vast majority will end up in dead end employment. A young man of my acquaintance desired a career in the Security business. Four years after graduating with average grades, he is working on the bottom rung of the career ladder at Go Ape.
I agree that most of them will end up in dead end employment, and they will be 100% convinced that this lack of opportunity for them is the result of capitalisms failure. And they will support ever more government to fix this travesty of justice and lift them up to the positions they believe themselves entitled to.
“My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments”
roflmao. Not going into engineering then. The problem is the eco-jobs probably pay more than what you average engineer gets as they are mostly government funded.
Most of the people who talk like that, have never once set foot outside a major city.
The should forget “international” travel by air for at least as long as it takes for them to retire.
These silly naive brainwashed kids…
When the PDO and AMO reenter their 30-year cool cycles in a few years, the CAGW hysteria will slowly die down as temp trends flatten/fall and it becomes obvious that CO2 is not the climate control knob…
Most of these kids pursing climatology studies will end up as baristas at Starbucks or waiters at restaurants while trying to pay off their $50,000 college debts on $35,000/yr…
Our Leftist public school indoctrination camps have really screwed these poor kids…
“When the PDO and AMO reenter their 30-year cool cycles in a few years, the CAGW hysteria will slowly die down as temp trends flatten/fall and it becomes obvious that CO2 is not the climate control knob…”
I think the fooled kids and adults will have a rude awakening one of these days.
I can hear Michael Mann now reassuring the alarmists: “Don’t worry folks, this last decade of cooling doesn’t negate the Human-caused Climate Change hypothesis.”
Mann’s audience may be smaller at that time. Fewer True Believers as they shiver from the cold.
They’ll play that old “The long-term trend (measured from the Little Ice Age, conveniently) is still up” game as long as they can – and as long as the gullible are stupid enough to buy it.
That’s right. The alarmists don’t have much else. They are hanging on by their fingernails.
climastrology
I guess that Mimi is too young (25, as the article states) to have but a very nebulous and very fractional knowledge, not to mention understanding, of what “the lens of literature and philosophy” can tell us… Youth arrogance? Ignorance? Mere stupidity?…
You know, Mimi, literature and philosophy need a lot of reading and thinking; and reading and thinking take a lot of time… unless you believe in reincarnation keeping the memories of previous lives, you did not yet got enough age to grasp that subject. Sorry to have to say that, but it is the unquestionable truth, known at leasts since Aristotle (he wrote something about minimum age to speak about certain matters).
“the lens of literature and philosophy” went through my universal translator (73 y/o model) and came out “the bias of fiction and mental masturbation.”
“Sustainability consultant”? At 23 !!!! ????
Where else would we get Five-Year-Plans? The Soviet requires all left shoes. [Pun intended.]
The future is shapeshifting-
Rising temperatures are causing some animals to change shape (msn.com)
A young grad could get fat on that and QED
They are changing shape alright. They are getting fat from all the food that warmer weather makes available.
oh great making more of the “saul” type useless idiots;-(
really needs to be a forced year of actual physical work on farms or heavy industry BEFORE theyre allowed to go to uni
We already have 100% renewable energy production, use all the coal in the stock pile you mine more, use all the gas in the storage tanks you pump more, fuel rods become expended you produce more. 100% renewable.
From the article: “California is facing a drought so devastating, some publications call it “biblical”. Colorado now has “fire years” instead of “fire seasons”. Miami, which sees more dramatic hurricanes each year, is contemplating building a huge seawall in one of the city’s most scenic tourist districts to protect it from storm surges.“Once you learn how damaged the world’s ecosystems are, it’s not really something you can unsee,” says Rachel Larrivee, 23, a sustainability consultant based in Boston.”
So much disinformation, and so little time.
California has experienced droughts in the past that have lasted for decades at a time. This was back when human-derived CO2 was not an issue. Drought is a natural state of affairs for California.
I don’t know of any Colorado wildfires that have been burning for years. I suspect there are none.
And Miami has not seen “more dramatic” hurricanes, it sees the same type of hurricanes it has experienced since before human-derived CO2 was an issue.
All of the above is pure hyperbole, and isn’t true, and yet this is the kind of thing the kids are exposed to every day.
The writer of the article is sadly misinformed and she is misinforming her readers as a result.
You can find scary, untruthful articles like this every day on a news feed. The kids are under mental assault. All of us are, actually.
Sorry, a couple of thousands isn’t flocking in a job market with Billions of jobs.
Find a better description of their interests.
By that standard, young people are flocking to crime and politics, but that’s redundant.
More parasites. Just what we need.
Don’t worry. Jobs, money and industry will soon move away from these places where these clowns are, and into more friendly jurisdictions.
Jobs have always moved to friendlier places and have been moving from the West for decades. Our “leaders” are now doubling down on stupidity. I hope it is not too late to reverse the trend.
Young men, join the trades. $100K is easy to get after you get licensed, and wages will only go up.
Let the idiots take the Enviro studies degrees with $200K in college debt. Then they have to go beg for government funding at foundations.
Engineering is also going to pay more and more.
They need to read “The Roads Must Roll”
“a life of well funded government or lobbyist expenses”
If there’s no productive economy, there’ll be no tax money to
subsidize their parasitic lifestylespay their salaries.I think the part you crossed out was more accurate.
Why not?
worthless education to do a worthless job