America's Climate Future Is on the Ballot. So Is Mine.

By Jade Yang

When I was accepted into SIPA to study climate, energy, and the environment, Columbia was under fire from the Trump administration, climate policies were being rolled back, and the aftershocks of USAID’s fall were still reverberating. I had a stable nine-to-five job investigating high-profile cases at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and had just become my bureau’s senior-most analyst. It would be baptism by fire, people said.

I sent in my deposit anyway.

I was determined to be part of the solution to the climate crisis. Like so many in my generation, I was set to inherit a world shaped by decisions I had no say in. I needed to play a role in shaping what came next.

Now, it’s a semester and a half before graduation. A year of combing through textbooks, enduring required economics classes, and too many overcaffeinated late nights in Lehman later, I am faced with a question I never anticipated: Will I have to leave the United States to pursue the very career I went back to school for?

The job market, for aspiring climate professionals like me, is bleak. My peers with years of experience in climate policy and sustainability are struggling to find work and now resort to applying for entry-level positions. Some who graduated in May are still on the hunt. Europe and Asia, on the other hand, seem to have a plethora of open climate roles, leaving me contemplating whether my professional future might be more promising abroad.

Of course, the job market is poor in general, and climate careers are certainly not immune to economic uncertainty. But with midterm elections, I wonder how much our elected officials’ priorities will shape my future, and my peers’—how much my unanticipated question will evolve into a genuine reality.

Governments determine which environmental programs receive funding, which research initiatives survive, and which institutions have the resources to hire. These priorities can change in a matter of months. The environmental challenges we’re up against, however, are bound to last generations.

E2 recently reported that nearly 40,000 clean energy jobs were cut in 2025, eliminating 40 percent of all new jobs created the year before. It was also the first time that clean energy jobs were cut since the pandemic. This comes after the Environmental Defense Fund found that regulatory uncertainty and federal policy rollbacks led to 1.4 billion in cancelled investments.

The rest of the world, however, is not waiting on the U.S. to fight climate change.

Global demand for people who understand climate is booming. Global green hiring rates are double that of green skills supply growth. This is because other advanced economies have enacted regulations and mandates that require companies and institutions to develop these skillsets.

The EU's Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, for example, forces large companies to adopt and execute Paris Agreement-aligned climate transition plans by auditing global supply chains for environmental harm. As a result, employment in the EU green economy expanded significantly, jumping from 3.6 to 5.8 million full-time jobs.

And yet, the U.S. seems willing to undermine an economically important workforce not only rapidly growing in the rest of the world, but that is crucial to human health and survival.

Somewhere along the way, climate change in our country became a political issue rather than an existential imperative. Sure, we can disagree about how quickly to transition away from fossil fuels, how much the government should spend, or which technologies deserve investment. Those are legitimate policy debates.

But hurricanes do not distinguish between Republicans and Democrats. Neither do floods, wildfires, or rising electricity bills. And when funding disappears, jobs are eliminated, and the climate crisis only flourishes, the consequences are felt by everyone. The economic effects of our government's inaction are fundamentally nonpartisan, including lost investments in talent and opportunities exported overseas.

Although other countries do have their own political and economic challenges, browsing job openings in Switzerland and France has become a natural instinct for me. The case to leave home feels strong when there are countries that actually want people doing this work, and when there are genuine opportunities to have a profound impact.

When I put down my deposit last year, I never imagined fighting the climate crisis could mean leaving the country I envisioned helping protect. Our generation is expected to ameliorate the dire trajectory past generations set us on, to build a resilient world for future generations to thrive in. But that brings me back to my initial question—and I’m not sure we’ll actually get the opportunity to do it here anytime soon.