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Gen Z members flock to climate careers
- 63 5y agoAnecdotally, when talking with my advisor toward the end of college, I was essentially given the choice between choosing a career that's really meaningful (working on data mining for climate projects was the example) and pays less, or a career that pays more but doesn't mean as much. I chose the latter for now, but I still think about it often. Maybe I'll regret it in time.
- Voloskaya 5y agoYour choice doesn’t have to be permanent. It’s perfectly fine working for a few years in high paying jobs to build a cushion and then work on something that you find meaningful. Now the hard part is deciding when your cushion is big enough as it is very easy to always want more.
- m12k 5y agoSaving the world and making a living are not guaranteed to align well. So I'd argue that it makes sense to first work to become financially independent, then spending that freedom in pursuit of making a difference, without being influenced by which path has paying jobs at any given time.
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y agoYes lets all do that. Graduate with a degree in finance. Work for a big investment firm, make a few million. Then go help poor people with 'saving' more money 'to make a difference'
- teekert 5y agoWhat is meaningful? You can live life the way you find meaningful, you can even spend the extra money you now make on something meaningful. I think it is a false dichotomy to begin with. Btw way, aren't you in a better position to change the climate for the better when you are in, say, a car company? From the inside? I wouldn't listen to this BS. It's a road to a skewed market full of unhappy people, imho.
- fasteddie31003 5y agoA career is "data mining" you can apply it to anything. It doesn't have to be exclusively about climate projects.
- buryat 5y agothey didn’t pick data mining
- neuronic 5y agoIf it's any consolation, I did the same. Skipped on the academic career partly because I hate the pretentiousness of academia with a passion (while loving science), partly for a desire to get hands-on with industry and "the real world" quicker. I think either path is fine and we can still develop to do meaningful things. Working for a paycheck to increase some random companies profit feels less and less enticing though. In general, people in my bubble seem to gravitate towards more free time than increased salary. 32h weeks are not that rare anymore and for many jobs 37hrs is the normal full time nowadays. Working 5 days a week will die out, as most office jobs will have people wasting time anyways just to match the clock.
- travisporter 5y agoFWIW there's a lot of variability in academic pretentiousness based on the lab and university.
- ashtonkem 5y agoThe grass is always greener on the other side. Who knows how you’d feel about your choice if you were struggling financially in a more meaningful career?
- sebular 5y agoI can relate to this. Keep your eye open for new opportunities and eventually you may find something that both pays well and contributes to solving the climate problem. The good news is that more people are finding ways of doing meaningful work while also turning a profit. An obvious example is working at a place like Tesla, but there are an increasing number of lower-profile for-profit companies that need tech + data talent to execute.
- bb123 5y agoThis feels like an ideologically motivated article. Something along the lines of "boomers bad". They don't actually provide any evidence to support the assertion in the headline that "Gen Z members flock to climate careers". Edit: “My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments” Seriously?
- zelos 5y agoIt's the Guardian, kind of the left wing version of the Daily Mail (yes, I am mostly a Guardian reader).
- headmelted 5y agoYou'll get flack on here for saying this (speaking from experience), but this is accurate. Bad faith (and naive) opinion pieces abound. I say this as a Guardian reader, it's really made a very conscious effort to become the liberal Daily Mail in an effort to stave off bankruptcy.
- Freskis 5y agoThe Guardian is way more extreme than the Daily Mail. A better analog would be Breitbart.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jimmaswell 5y agoHow pretentious.
- jimmaswell 5y agoTitle when I commented was something about nothing else being important except climate change
- asah 5y agoHunh, given those numbers against costs-nothing feel-good questions, I actually came to the opposite conclusion, i.e. GenZ cares about other stuff way more like ya know jobs, housing, cost of living, etc. Instead of 25% giving lackluster priority to these broad climate goals I expected 75+%. Am I "not getting it" ? Sorry...
- antisthenes 5y agoIt's typical selection bias. News outlet needed a story about climate, so they decided to interview students until they got the sound bites they needed. Obviously that doesn't accurately represent the wider sentiment. From my experience/view, Gen Z is extremely materialistic, so climate work (real work, not virtue signaling) is pretty far down their list of priorities.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoLet’s hope you’re wrong and that this article isn’t trying to put the cart before the horse. We need the next generation who are climate-aware-from-birth to go hard into it with both feet and don’t look back. Better for everyone if they do.
- captainbland 5y agoGood for them, although like most passion careers market forces are guaranteed to turn it into something quite undesirable for anyone wishing to make a steady living. Why treat your staff well when more are always knocking at the door? The fact is the willingness to do the work isn't the problem, the issue is always whether there is sufficient capital on the table.
- curiousllama 5y agoMost investors would cite a lack of opportunities, though. More young people doing more things means more investment opportunities.
- mgbmtl 5y agoConsidering billionaires are going to space for fun, I think there's enough capital.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoIn the past they build a continental railroad, cities, industry and inventions for fun, those were at least useful. I’m not sure what we get out of billionaire space flights really, maybe some safety and viability data. I’m not sure I’ve seen Zuckerberg, Bezos, Branson, et al expressing interest into the next transistor. Maybe our generation’s robber barons aren’t as interesting as ones of the past?
- Aachen 5y agoOr maybe it's just a lot easier to tell what "the next transistor" is with half a century of hindsight. You're basically saying "kids these days" except about billionaires.
- captainbland 5y agoWell yeah of course, the issue I'd take is it's on the "cock rocket" table rather than the "fix climate change" table.
- kalium-xyz 5y agoThey are flocking even harder to blockchain. Almost as if people are rational actors motivated by the forcing factor of “pay your bills or die”, there is funding for climate jobs now more than ever before.
- Freskis 5y agoThe people in this article appear more like a cult than a science-based environment. -Rachel Larrivee, 23, a sustainability consultant based in Boston -Mimi Ausland, 25, the founder of Free the Ocean -Matt Ellis-Ramirez, 22, a Chicago-based volunteer for the youth-led environmental activist organization the Sunrise Movement -Brooke Hoese, a 24-year-old undergraduate in Texas pursuing a career in restoration ecology
- skyfaller 5y agoWhat is a cult? In what way are these cult-like?
- soco 5y agoMaybe that they work together towards a goal of common good. I suppose some people cannot understand why somebody would care for others, or care about the future.
- thebean11 5y agoNot sure what point you're trying to make, am I supposed to be familiar with these organizations? Also, what's culty about "restoration ecology"?
- dieortin 5y agoI’m curious to know why. Out of those people you listed, I don’t see a single thing pointing to a cult, or not consistent with science.
- jdavis703 5y agoI re-read the article critically, and I don’t see any signs of a cult here. Maybe these people are putting their beliefs ahead of empirical research (hard to tell from just this article †), but from what I can tell it’s just people who feel passionately about the environment. † The Sunrise movement generally opposes nuclear energy, carbon capture and geo-engineering. But I think there are scientific and policy arguments for and against these strategies that can be rooted in public policy, engineering and even scientific constrains.
- version_five 5y agoCynically, I expect a continued growth in climate bureaucracy, where various office jobs get set up in the name of tackling climate change, but for the most part are just doing the usual stuff you'd do in a bureaucracy. It would be nice (despite the irony of suggesting a bureaucratic task) to see some analysis or thoughts about what jobs have the biggest real impact. For example, I wonder how many people are looking at becoming farmers or builders or other sustainable trades, vs who wants to do software development or data science.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoHot take: The most important jobs are building and installing renewables (drives out coal, natural gas, and diesel/oil fuels), electrifying transportation (drives out petroleum), lab grown proteins and protein replacements (drives out emissions from factory farming emissions), and air source carbon extraction (paying back the credit card of CO2 we spent industrializing as a species).
- nicoburns 5y agoYou can add battery research to your list.
- Aachen 5y agoI always wonder if it's worth it for me (30yo) to learn a new trade, like the physics to advance battery research, when I now know a ton about computers and could rather be a dev or sysadmin for a company doing battery research. Probably I need to make that decision soon if I want to make it ever.
- nicoburns 5y agoI think battery research is more chemistry than physics, but of course there's overlap.
- 5y ago
- poorjohnmacafee 5y agoI read because I was curious what "climate career" means. From the article they mention: Urban farmer Environmental consultant Environmental scientist Environmental lawyer Environmental activist Or joining the proposed "Climate Corps", a federal jobs program for young people to help fight the climate crisis [doing what though?]
- agomez314 5y agopretty soon we'll have Environmental software developer
- cblconfederate 5y agoi optimize my code cycles to environmental standards. Best CO2/LOC ratio in 5 years
- Aachen 5y agoYou joke, but code optimization is a career. If you can make something run much more efficiently, there's money to be made. I can't remember the name of the consultancy that did this though.
- cblconfederate 5y agoif it were so profitable maybe some things wouldnt be so bloated
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI honestly can't tell if the Guardian is trolling with lines like this: “My goal is to use the lens of literature and philosophy to study and hopefully help repair humans’ relationship to our environments,” they say. Like, why would you put that quote in an article otherwise? Possibly they're just idealistic dreamers, but since they regularly feature right-wing controversialists that rile up their usual fanbase, it feels likely that the algorithm tells them that this drives "engagement", possibly without them understanding why, but even before the algorithm was an possible excuse, they've been regularly printing inflammatory drivel to drive sales.
- Freskis 5y agoThe article is describing a cult, so the language is going to be quite abstract and obtuse.
- beaconstudios 5y agoliterature, maybe not - but philosophy does provide options that aren't just navel-gazing. The philosophical attitude that modernist society takes towards nature is that of material resources to be extracted for economic benefit; obviously this mindset is a big part of how we got to this point. Instead there are philosophical ideas like deep ecology or complex systems theory that point to a different approach.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoSo I'm probably a good example of the Guardian's target demographic, and I highly value the study of philosophy and literature and other humanities. I fully believe that going to zero carbon is the next big global challenge. I still would pause if I was writing an article about students trying to save the world from climate change and used that line, unless I was trying to undermine them. Maybe I'm just out of touch, or maybe too in touch with the older generation who have been turned into deniers. But having e.g. read academic papers that argue that Africa shouldn't introduce carbon fees, because it would be bad for Africa, from someone employed by a fossil fuel company, my suspicions are raised that this is intentionally inflammatory.
- 5y ago
- husgfdsr34u 5y agoWhy not nuclear engineering jobs too?
- SV_BubbleTime 5y agoFrom the effort we put in now, almost seems like a dead end career unless you are in the military. It’s been regulated into impracticality.
- tbihl 5y agoThere's Terrapower, which seems like a pretty interesting place to work and a lot of worthwhile technologies. I'd probably go work there myself if I were open to the location.
- johan_felisaz 5y agoTalking from my experience, despite its undeniable advantages to fight climate change, the general hostility of the public opinion towards fission (or nuclear in general) refrained me from pursuing this path...
- epistasis 5y agoConstruction is the challenge with nuclear. It's likely that due to the extreme challenge of construction, we will see a huge contraction in the amount of nuclear. We literally can't build it fast enough anymore to replace reactors that are reaching their end of life. Choosing a nuclear engineer career path today is likely to be extremely challenging, and will have little impact. Better to try something that scales, like wind/solar/storage, or do something high-risk that is completely out of the known path, in order to try to blaze something novel. (We still need cement and steel decarbonization tech, for example.)
- quotemstr 5y agoBecause it's not about actually fixing the climate. It's about signaling superior holiness. See Turchin's work on elite overproduction.
- jgreen10 5y ago
- twelfthnight 5y agoI know about companies like electric car manufactures, do folks know of other (non-activist) companies that are helping to solve climate change?
- Voloskaya 5y agoProviding an example of just one or two companies for each categories but there are obviously much more. * Carbon Capture technologies [1] * Any of the companies working on any of the renewable source of energy: solar, wind, geothermal etc. [2] * Energy providers (and other smaller companies) working on smart and/or micro grids: being able to forecast renewable production and intelligently balance it across the grid to avoid starting up backup coal/gas plants. [3] * Plant-based meat substitute companies [4] * Monitoring through satellite imagery [5] * Low CO2 cement production (don't know this industry enough to link) * Smart thermostat, insulation and other means to reduce energy consumption for heating [6] * etc. etc. A very good place to start to get exposure to many different solutions is Drawdown: https://drawdown.org/solutions https://drawdown.org/solutions ---------- [1] https://carbonengineering.com/ https://carbonengineering.com/ [2] https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels https://www.edf-renouvelables.com/en/ https://www.edf-renouvelables.com/en/ [3] https://openclimatefix.org/projects https://openclimatefix.org/projects https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/fairs-events/fairs/the-smarter-e.html https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/fairs-events/fairs... [4] https://www.beyondmeat.com/ https://www.beyondmeat.com/ https://impossiblefoods.com/ https://impossiblefoods.com/ [5] https://ecometrica.com/ https://ecometrica.com/ [6] https://www.ecobee.com https://www.ecobee.com
- twelfthnight 5y agoVery helpful list. Thank you!
- FigurativeVoid 5y agoMy college had a pretty large environmental engineering and sustainability programs. It may have even been one of the first to have sustainability as a major. Many of the people found out that if you go the "save the planet route", you usually end up doing some boring regulatory job. Lots of energy auditors and EHS managers. These are important jobs, but I don't think they are very fulfilling, and they certainly aren't doing anything great for the climate.
- dgb23 5y agoYour last sentence seems contradictory, can you elaborate?
- FigurativeVoid 5y agoThey are important in the they maintain safe workplaces and enforce say... wastewater treatment standards. So in that sense they are important. However, given the trends in climate change, these jobs don't do much to change the trajectory of climate change. I guess saying they aren't fulfilling is more a personal judgement, but I thought it was boring work.
- danans 5y ago> these jobs don't do much to change the trajectory of climate change. Yes, the trends are depressing, but jobs like energy auditing are very important going forward as housing is an even larger source of greenhouse gas emissions than cars [1]. There is no way we can make significant progress toward decarbonization without a workforce trained to understand and measure efficiency and GHG emissions - even if "progress" means just avoiding the worst possible climate change trajectory. 1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/5-charts-show-how-your-household-drives-up-global-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/5-charts-show-how-y...
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y agoWonder if the companies responsible for the exaggeration of impending doom will make some position for them. Also wonder if the companies will ever change because zoomers care so much. It's not about saving the planet, its a way for more control over us. Usher in the bait and switch of a new era. Millennial had the war on terror. Zoomers, the war on climate change.
- perfunctory 5y ago> They’re also practicing what they preach: 33% of survey respondents say they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report weekly sustainability practices. I wonder what those activities/practices might be.
- r00fus 5y agoNot having a car might be strong one. You can get away with it it many places. A close 2nd may be avoiding/foregoing meat. To be honest, for me, the meat they include at restaurants (esp. takeout given the pandemic) is sub-standard anyway.
- ericmay 5y agoWe live in a (maybe THE) golden age of cheap energy. We're pretty wasteful as a society (especially in America) and it's hard to see causality in your day to day life. People, including me, rely on things like cars for every day things. Grocery store 2 miles away? Well of course I'm taking my car. So that means the car has to be built (emissions), thankfully we are remote so we're sharing one standard range Model 3, we have to use electricity to power the car (fossil fuels), and I'm moving 2000 - 3000 pounds of material 4 miles round trip when if I had the ability to I could ride a bike or just walk those 2 miles and maybe save the car for the day that it rains. So let's say I want some broccoli. Broccoli is grown in California which is far away from Ohio Broccoli has to be shipped by some giant truck to a warehouse Warehouse ships the broccoli to my local grocery store I go and ask Tesla to build me an electric car (something something pretending I'm making a difference) I get the car, and now every time I want broccoli I start it up and drive 4 miles round trip to get broccoli Eventually I get tired of the car and I'll get a new one and that's more emissions, resources used, etc. This is an insane use of energy. And not to mention all of the times that people will go through this chain multiple times/day/week. "Oh forgot the butter, let me drive to the grocery store". And then we spend all of this money building and expanding highways and roads. It's like, what if we just built medium density mixed-use neighborhoods, and I could ride my bike (or walk) down the road to a farmer's market style store? How much money would we save by all American families only needing one car, and not having to build and expand highways until we paved the whole planet? Electric cars for example are just reaffirmations of the way we live right now. Bandaids. It's like you're doing the wrong thing and trying to find ways to improve doing the wrong thing instead of doing the right thing. It drives me crazy. But in your day to day life very few people chain these things together (or some variation of them, this isn't meant to be exact). It's just "gas prices are XYZ, I need my car to do things, why are gas prices high?". and this is just one (albeit, frankly I think the greatest) environmental challenge in America alone (I guess the anglosphere in general to some extent). Anyway, enough rambling from my soapbox.
- travisporter 5y agoYeah, totally feel your pain. I like my car but hate being dependent on it. Definitely looking into walkability/walk score next time I move. Incidentally I have been looking for a google maps style "walkability" color coded map.
- earlyriser 5y agoI'm Gen X and I looked for a job in sustainability/env for years (I got one). I'm really happy the newer generations have this offer available.
- Aachen 5y agoCan I ask what that job is you found? Mainly the general company goal and what your job/function in it is.
- grecht 5y agoMaybe this is a bit of a pessimistic view, but they are bound to become disillusioned. Nobody will move as fast as they want them to. Even if they are experts in energy policy, energy market design or engineering (i.e. not "using the lens of literature and philosophy [...]" to use a quote from the article), their contribution to limiting global warming will be insignificant. If they have deeply anti-capitalist stances, they might find a job in a degrowth think tank and make even less of a difference. And most importantly, climate change poses much less of a financial risk to the economy than they think, so companies won't become environmentally conscious unless politics introduces those environmental externalities into their balances. I'd consider myself a part of this group and I also want to find meaning in my work - but I try to manage my expectations.
- nharada 5y agoThere's an interesting viewpoint that comes through in these comments that seems to imply that the policy and regulatory side of climate isn't "doing", and that engineering or science roles would be more beneficial to make tangible progress. I'd like to challenge that view -- it's my belief that at this point climate is really no longer mainly an engineering or science problem. If we allocated our money and effort correctly, we could tackle a huge part of the problem NOW, with current technology. And this lack of will is ultimately a policy and regulatory problem at heart. This isn't to say there aren't many engineering challenges or potential engineering solutions. But for the most part I see those as only being necessary if the desire to fix things stays at its (very low) current level.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI'd agree, it's always been a "collective action" problem, we could all have adopted a carbon tax years ago and the problem would have solved itself. But, if one country or one political party defects, then they can profit themselves at the expense of everyone. I'm also a big fan of the effective "regulatory funny business" that have been regularly maligned, like seperating the carbon and electricity components of electricity production, and offsetting carbon for flights with easy wins of replacing kerosene with solar in developing countries. It's the simplest and easiest solution, and it's not primarily technical, just about creating a market. But it's been viciously attacked for so long it's all gets done quietly when reactionary voters aren't paying attention, even though it's worked really well wherever it's been used.
- Voloskaya 5y agoPolicy and regulation are indeed extremely important, at least as much as engineering. Implementing a carbon tax would probably be the single most effective thing we can do. However, I do not agree that climate change is no longer an engineering/science issue: Even if we were to magically stop emitting any GHG tomorrow, we would still be in for a pretty rough time (albeit much better than our current trajectory). And realistically, even with the best imaginable policies in place everywhere around the world we will still need to emit GHGs for decades no matter what. Developing carbon removal technologies is absolutely essential to solve this problem.
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- gizdan 5y agoHaving climate change experts is great but flocking to careers around climate change is not the solution. We need people in power who want to change. Fact of the matter is that there are still far too many climate denying anti-scientist career politicians, most of whom are boomers, in office. It's these people we need to drive out. We need the right people to kick out the career politicians that have done nothing to fight climate change. Both Democrats and Republicans. Both Labour and Conservatives. It is insane that the democrats, the so-called "centre-left", have yet to take any action around climate change. It's either "manchin this manchin that" or "republicans this republicans that". While here in the UK we have the likes of Boris who can increase taxes on the rich to pay for the pandemic, and instead puts it on the working class and the poor, while Labour can only stand by and complain that they're not in power (before any Labour supporter says, they'll probably make just as little progress if they were in power). We need the young to take these offices. We need climate change champions as our Prime Ministers and as our Presidents. Not as yet another scientist that will practically be ignored by politicians.
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- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoIs there any career overlap between software engineering and fighting climate change? New to the field and not sure where to start.
- sologoub 5y ago> California is facing a drought so devastating, some publications call it “biblical”. California is in a great place to address most (all?) of the ills plaguing it through sustainable infrastructure investments, such as mass solar (we are at what only 14% as a state?!), solar storage, desalination, etc. Fire situation can be helped with controlled burns and better overall management.
- lhorie 5y agoThe article has some data, but IMHO it's a bit too sparse to support the title's hypothesis. It says "33% of survey respondents say they participate in sustainability activities “daily” and 27% report weekly sustainability practices." referring to a survey[0], but this survey doesn't appear to specify what exactly these practices are. From looking at the questions, I'm lead to believe that even merely using a recycling bin qualifies. It then goes on to say that the director of the Environmental Studies program at USC has seen "an uptick in student enrollment within her department, particularly over the last five to 10 years". It'd be interesting to see what enrollment looks like in other departments for comparison since an uptick due to, say, population growth is a non-story (and it's also worth noting that USC is just one university, and in California - a very liberal-leaning state, to boot) The one piece of data that seems encouraging is the part about median salaries (they're reportedly above average), but at best that merely supports the idea that environment jobs are no longer gambles as they had a reputation of being in the past. This is good, but it's a pretty big stretch to go from that to "students are flocking to environment jobs". [0] https://green.usc.edu/files/2020/03/2028_Survey_Results_31920.pdf https://green.usc.edu/files/2020/03/2028_Survey_Results_3192...
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- HelixEndeavor 5y agoIf climate change really was brought about by the industrial revolution, then the only solution is to go pre-industrial, and of course you would have to do something about the excess population that you need industry in order to be able to take care of. And if climate change is as serious as we're told, why do the people who warn us the most always buy the hundred million dollars beach side properties? Don't they know that'll all be underwater in a couple years? I'm at a point where I've accepted if it's real, we're all screwed anyways. So I just kind of don't care anymore. I see no point stressing myself out about it every day. Either I'll get killed by the climate change, killed by the only possible method to stop it, or not get killed... 2:1? There are certainly worse odds in life.