As the Biden Administration starts to take action to address the climate change crisis, I get excited thinking about how “green building” will be a more prosperous industry because of its future workforce. Let me tell you why.

First, I am proud to call myself a graduate of applied knowledge and technical training. Early in my life as a young Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle mechanic, I learned to manage anything practical and see results to the end. I relish those early experiences. Those early life-skills helped me become skilled at implementing change and improving existing circumstances. 

The military training and values I learned helped me reach essential career milestones later on in my life, including eventually becoming Clark Construction's Director of Sustainability. My experience is just one example of how formal and professionalized workforce development training can result in some successful career arcs. But before I tell you about how proud I am of the work we do to advance workforce development at Clark, let’s take a look at the opportunities in this space that are likely coming from some of the campaign pledges in the Biden campaign website that were listed under the campaign's proposed Climate Action Plan:

• Buildings: Upgrade 4 million buildings and weatherize 2 million homes over 4 years, creating at least 1 million good-paying jobs with a choice to join a union; and also spur the building retrofit and efficient-appliance manufacturing supply chain by funding direct cash rebates and low-cost financing to upgrade and electrify home appliances and install more efficient windows, which will cut residential energy bills.

• Housing: Spur the construction of 1.5 million sustainable homes and housing units.

• Innovation: Drive dramatic cost reductions in critical clean energy technologies, including battery storage, negative emissions technologies, the next generation of building materials, renewable hydrogen, and advanced nuclear – and rapidly commercialize them, ensuring that those new technologies are made in America.

• Agriculture and Conservation: Create jobs in climate-smart agriculture, resilience, and conservation, including 250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines — providing good work with a choice to join or continue membership in a union in hard-hit communities, including rural communities, reducing leakage of toxics, and preventing local environmental damage.

These actions will take congressional approval and are likely to be packaged with the broader infrastructure investment bill due to be voted on in February. Meanwhile, President Biden is taking executive actions to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad, create jobs, and restore scientific integrity across the federal government. Here is a sample of actions in the orders that present vast opportunities for innovation in anticipation of public and private-sector action:

• The order affirms that, in implementing – and building on – the Paris Agreement’s objectives, the United States will exercise its leadership to promote a significant increase in global ambition. It makes clear that both significant short-term global emission reductions and net zero global emissions by mid-century – or before – are required to avoid setting the world on a dangerous, potentially catastrophic, climate trajectory. 

• The order formally establishes the White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy – led by the first-ever National Climate Advisor and Deputy National Climate Advisor – creating a central office in the White House that is charged with coordinating and implementing the President’s domestic climate agenda.

• The order establishes the National Climate Task Force, assembling leaders from across 21 federal agencies and departments to enable a whole-of-government approach to combatting the climate crisis.

• Consistent with the goals of the President’s Build Back Better jobs and economic recovery plan, of which his clean energy jobs plan is a central pillar, the order directs the federal agencies to procure carbon pollution-free electricity and clean, zero-emission vehicles to create good-paying, union jobs and stimulate clean energy industries.

• In addition, the order requires those purchases be Made in America, following President Biden’s Buy American executive order. The order also directs agencies to apply and strictly enforce the prevailing wage and benefit guidelines of the Davis Bacon and other acts and encourage Project Labor Agreements. These actions reaffirm that agencies should work to ensure that any jobs created with funds to address the climate crisis are good jobs with a choice to join a union.

• The order catalyzes the creation of jobs in construction, manufacturing, engineering and the skilled-trades by directing steps to ensure that every federal infrastructure investment reduces climate pollution and that steps are taken to accelerate clean energy and transmission projects under federal siting and permitting processes in an environmentally sustainable manner.

• The order creates a government-wide Justice40 Initiative with the goal of delivering 40 percent of the overall benefits of relevant federal investments to disadvantaged communities and tracks performance toward that goal through the establishment of an Environmental Justice Scorecard.

Earlier this year, President Biden also called for spending $400 billion in government procurements, which would boost demand for American products and services together with his clean-energy and infrastructure-investment projects. This momentum of investment in rebuilding the economy while rebuilding the nation’s GDP toward clean-energy and sustainable buildings is quite promising. So as the buildings industry continues to grow ever more innovative with its green buildings’ environmental, health, and financial performance, I’m committed to finding new and dependable ways to achieve those better future conditions.

And I believe it starts with workforce sustainability — preparing people to adapt to work with the coming inventions and discoveries, particularly in communications, computers, and electronics, where we expect these technologies to embed themselves more fully in construction in the coming decade. Leadership in workforce development must include economic empowerment with triple-bottom-line results.

At Clark, we have been addressing economic empowerment and ladders of opportunity for decades. Eventually, those early programs grew into what it is today the Clark Strategic Partnership Program, which is an intensive executive MBA-style course targeted to local small business enterprises, including minority-, women-, and veteran-owned firms. Clark developed the program in partnership with Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business with the primary goal of growing the capacity of small contractors to enable them to contribute to large-scale construction projects. Since the program’s inception in the past 13 years, Clark has awarded more than $1 billion of contracts to over 800 graduates of the program nationwide, resulting in a total economic impact of more than $2.3 billion.

I’ve had the privilege of working with colleagues in the program’s leadership to integrate sustainability training for these local small businesses for the past four years. The goal is to build their capacity to deliver any technically complex material requirements on future projects and get them familiar with what is to be expected on construction projects that are also pursuing any sustainability green building certifications, primarily the LEED rating system. And it’s not just me praising this program, but also industry peers in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, who recently recognized Clark as a Finalist for Best Economic Empowerment Program in the U.S. I can envision the program going even further through partnerships with trade associations and government agencies to determine the right standards and curriculum and align the work skills retraining in areas of maximum opportunity with the forthcoming wave of economic recovery stimulus via the Biden Administration. 

No matter our feelings about it, the future always arrives. To me, it’s critical to work toward catalyzing our economic success by shaping it, giving it order and organization in areas where new development is forming and in need of framing, especially as I look ahead at a profoundly challenging sustainable future ahead of us.