Diana Furchtgott-Roth, who studies environmental and climate issues at The Heritage Foundation, says the order is another example of “executive branch overreach” by the Biden administration.
"Congress explicitly did not authorize the program when it put in place the Inflation Reduction Act,” she tells AFN. “So it's a little bit hard to see how he can get money to do this.”
Without any mention of funding and budgets, the Biden administration celebrated its “Climate Corps” with a 1,400-word “fact sheet” Wednesday that promises to “put more than 20,000 young people on career pathways in the growing fields of clean energy, conservation and climate resilience.”
In particular, the program plans to train those young people for “good-paying clean energy and climate resilience jobs” once they complete the paid training program.
The job training program is being compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s jobs program during the Great Depression, which was known as the “New Deal” and provided federal jobs for Americans desperate for work.
Almost a century later, climate activists have become convinced mankind is selfishly warming the planet, and dooming humanity, through fossil fuels.
"After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” cheered Varshini Prakash, who leads an environmental group called Sunrise Movement.
Sterling Burnett, a climate and environmental expert at The Heartland Institute, says Biden is "breaking the law” if he really goes through with the program.
"I guess he's going to take funds away from projects, from policies, from programs, that are actually funded under law and he's going to shift it to something that is not legal," Burnett predicts.
Furchtgott-Roth tells AFN the “Climate Corps” push is just “window-dressing” from the Biden administration to appeal to its leftist supporters.
"He is trying to send the message that he cares about the climate even though these people are not going to do anything particularly useful to the climate,” she says. “Because, after all, if all fossil fuels were eliminated from the United States, this would only make a difference of two-tenths of one degree centigrade by the year 2100."
