Change Your Job, Change Your Life, Solve Climate Change
There are at least 100,000 vacant climate change jobs
Dear Reader: This article, above all others on Intertwine, needs to be shared. Please share it. We need everyone on board with solving climate change, and we need them in high-impact, high-leverage activities. I even started the job search for some people here. Please share this on your social media, with your friends, or with your adult kids. We are all in this together, and we need all the jobs filled to solve the climate crisis. Thanks.
I want to introduce a new idea about our individual, personal opportunities to make a difference in the climate change and environmental debates.
Ever since I was a kid in the 1970s, I can remember hearing lectures, radio interviews, television discussions, and later Youtube interviews and podcasts in which someone asks a speaker: What can we do? What can we as average consumers do to help? Most of the time, the answer was “write your congressional representatives.” But in the environmental movement, there was more — conserve energy by turning down your thermostat, recycle, and live with minimum impact. Those were lifestyle changes you could make. In the climate debate, of course, it has become a list of actions you can take to reduce your carbon footprint.
Let me be clear: I have nothing against reducing your carbon footprint. We should all do that. But there is so much more most people can do, and we need everyone to do as much as they can.
Our challenge is huge and it is urgent. You would have to be living in a hole to have missed the evidence — storms, fires, incredible heat waves, rising sea levels, droughts, and so much more. The flooding of Pakistan, but also of Houston and Kentucky. The list goes on and on, and every year, it seems to get a bit worse. Urgent action is needed.
Think High-Impact and High-Leverage
We all know we need to wake up and do the right thing. But the right thing has less to do with one’s personal carbon footprint and a ton more to do with participating in high-impact, high-leverage solutions. What would this mean? Greta Thunberg is an example of someone who has had an outsized impact on raising awareness. There are others. Love him or hate him, Elon Musk has driven auto companies to go electric through innovative competition. Because Tesla proved the viability of electric vehicles, virtually all car companies are on track to transform their manufacturing to building only electric vehicles by 2035 or sooner. Some people are inventing and bringing to market perovskite solar cells, which improve efficiency from 18–20% to as much as 29% in solar panels, thereby producing 50% more electricity in the same amount of roof or ground space. Or, to put it another way, reducing by 33% the total amount of ground space that needs to be covered to generate the electricity we need to come from solar. Folks doing battery research and bringing real solutions to market are another example.
It’s not that we can all be Greta Thunberg or Elon Musk, nor can we all be Bill Gates or Bill McKibben. Some of these people are far more conscious and aware of their carbon footprint than others. But whether they are tending to their carbon footprint or not, all of them are engaged in high-impact, high-leverage activities. In addition to what Thunberg and Musk have accomplished, Gates is investing in and making possible a multitude of climate-related projects. McKibben is effectively getting people focused on systemic economic and political change throughout the world.
We cannot expect to all become big, household names in the climate change movement, but all of us can and should go beyond a focus on our personal carbon footprint and look for how we can get to high-impact, high-leverage action. For some, it is a career change that re-applies the energy of work to new climate outcomes. For others, it is an activity in retirement that goes beyond what we enjoy. For others, it is volunteer work for organizations where you can have a bigger impact.
Workers
What does this mean for workers? Engineers can get into solar and wind development, battery research, EV and other electric appliance development, grid engineering, and so on. Marketers can help people understand the opportunity, and sales reps can go sell the stuff. Finance and administration types can commit their efforts to companies and organizations creating solutions. Writers and speakers can keep calling people to a higher vision of what they can contribute. Entrepreneurs can go looking for great ideas and pull together people like Gates to help fund them. In my mind, we spend much of our best energy at work, so the best way to have the biggest impact is to change the focus of your career. That single change will unleash more creative energy toward a solution than any single thing a person can do.
In case you need some help getting started, here are links to search results for a sampling of climate-related jobs in the US on Indeed.com:
Vacancies in these jobs are slowing our transition to a new carbon-free economy, which is essential to any realistic climate solution. Want to have an impact? Fill one of them! Plus, there are loads of unfilled positions in electrical engineering, materials science engineering, project management, and other disciplines that have jobs applied to solar, wind, geothermal, and electrical appliance development. We can’t get to the emissions target without going to renewable, non-burning electric generation and converting to electrical appliances in homes and buildings. These and other jobs will help create that new future.
Volunteers
On the other hand, not everyone can change their jobs. Some will keep the same job and volunteer at night. Volunteers can organize local events that bring people together to hear a speaker like McKibben or organize groups to spearhead political action. Volunteer organizations have the same range of needs as businesses to be effective, so you can contribute skill and expertise to a group that is focused on whichever piece of the solution energizes you. Just as companies are short-skilled, so are NGOs and similar organizations. The key is to look for an organization that has leverage and that promotes high-impact activity.
Leadership
If I could do one thing to help solve the climate crisis, I would ask all of our political and business leaders to call people to action in their jobs and careers that focused on the solutions. Unfortunately, we are not getting enough of that. So the next best thing is for the climate community to talk it up, to push people into their best contribution with the skillsets they have while budling a new future for themselves. Make your move and encourage your friends.
The solution to climate change requires our very best energy, creativity, and commitment as a society. There are tons of opportunities to have a big impact. Every one of us should undertake that opportunity.
Thanks for reading. Again, please share this article. We need everyone to think bigger and think better about what they can do.
I hope you all will subscribe. Please do. Climate change and living better within it is just too important.