P1While fossil fuels—coal, oil, gas—still generate roughly 85 percent of the world’s energy supply, it’s clearer than ever that the future belongs to renewable sources such as wind and solar. The move to renewables is picking up momentum around the world: They now account for more than half of new power sources going on line.

P2Some growth stems from a commitment by governments and farsighted businesses to fund cleaner energy sources. But increasingly the story is about the plummeting prices of renewables, especially wind and solar. The cost of solar panels has dropped by 80 percent and the cost of wind turbines by close to one-third in the past eight years.

P3In many parts of the world renewable energy is already a principal energy source. In Scotland, for example, wind turbines provide enough electricity to power 95 percent of homes. While the rest of the world takes the lead, notably China and Europe, the United States is also seeing a remarkable shift. In March, for the first time, wind and solar power accounted for more than 10 percent of the power generated in the US, reported the US Energy Information Administration.

P4President Trump has underlined fossil fuels—especially coal—as the path to economic growth. In a recent speech in Iowa, he dismissed wind power as an unreliable energy source. But that message did not play well with many in Iowa, where wind turbines dot the fields and provide 36 percent of the state’s electricity generation—and where tech giants like Microsoft are being attracted by the availability of clean energy to power their data centers.

P5The question “what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?” has provided a quick put-down for skeptics. But a boost in the storage capacity of batteries is making their ability to keep power flowing around the clock more likely.

P6The advance is driven in part by vehicle manufacturers, who are placing big bets on battery-powered electric vehicles. Although electric cars are still a rarity on roads now, this massive investment could change the picture rapidly in coming years.

P7While there’s a long way to go, the trend lines for renewables are spiking. The pace of change in energy sources appears to be speeding up—perhaps just in time to have a meaningful effect in slowing climate change. What Washington does—or doesn’t do—to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.

P1American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years. The complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers.

P2Congress has obstructed efforts to create a more straightforward visa for agricultural workers that would let foreign workers stay longer in the U.S. and change jobs within the industry. If this doesn’t change, American businesses, communities, and consumers will be the losers.

P3Perhaps half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants. As fewer such workers enter the country, the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. Today’s farm laborers, while still predominantly born in Mexico, are more likely to be settled rather than migrating and more likely to be married than single. They’re also aging. At the start of this century, about one-third of crop workers were over the age of 35. Now more than half are. And picking crops is hard on older bodies. One oft-debated cure for this labor shortage remains as implausible as it’s been all along: Native U.S. workers won’t be returning to the farm.

P4Mechanization isn’t the answer, either—not yet, at least. Production of corn, cotton, rice, soybeans, and wheat has been largely mechanized, but many high-value, labor-intensive crops, such as strawberries, need labor. Even dairy farms, where robots do a small share of milking, have a long way to go before they’re automated.

P5As a result, farms have grown increasingly reliant on temporary guest workers using the H-2A visa to fill the gaps in the workforce. Starting around 2012, requests for the visas rose sharply; from 2011 to 2016 the number of visas issued more than doubled.

P6The H-2A visa has no numerical cap, unlike the H-2B visa for nonagricultural work, which is limited to 66,000 a year. Even so, employers complain they aren’t given all the workers they need. The process is cumbersome, expensive, and unreliable. One survey found that bureaucratic delays led the average H-2A worker to arrive on the job 22 days late. The shortage is compounded by federal immigration raids, which remove some workers and drive others underground.

P7In a 2012 survey, 71 percent of tree-fruit growers and almost 80 percent of raisin and berry growers said they were short of labor. Some western farmers have responded by moving operations to Mexico. From 1998 to 2000, 14.5 percent of the fruit Americans consumed was imported. Little more than a decade later, the share of imports was 25.8 percent.

P8In effect, the U.S. can import food or it can import the workers who pick it.

P1Now that members of Generation Z are graduating college this spring—the most commonly-accepted definition says this generation was born after 1995, give or take a year—the attention has been rising steadily in recent weeks. Gen Zs are about to hit the streets looking for work in a labor market that’s tighter than it’s been in decades. And employers are planning on hiring about 17 percent more new graduates for jobs in the U.S. this year than last, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Everybody wants to know how the people who will soon inhabit those empty office cubicles will differ from those who came before them.

P2If “entitled” is the most common adjective, fairly or not, applied to millennials (those born between 1981 and 1995), the catchwords for Generation Z are practical and cautious. According to the career counselors and experts who study them, Generation Zs are clear-eyed, economic pragmatists. Despite graduating into the best economy in the past 50 years, Gen Zs know what an economic train wreck looks like. They were impressionable kids during the crash of 2008, when many of their parents lost their jobs or their life savings or both. They aren’t interested in taking any chances. The booming economy seems to have done little to assuage this underlying generational sense of anxious urgency, especially for those who have college debt. College loan balances in the U.S. now stand at a record $1.5 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

P3One survey from Accenture found that 88 percent of graduating seniors this year chose their major with a job in mind. In a 2019 survey of University of Georgia students, meanwhile, the career office found the most desirable trait in a future employer was the ability to offer secure employment (followed by professional development and training, and then inspiring purpose). Job security or stability was the second most important career goal (work-life balance was number one), followed by a sense of being dedicated to a cause or to feel good about serving the greater good.

P4That’s a big change from the previous generation. “Millennials wanted more flexibility in their lives,” notes Tanya Michelsen, Associate Director of YouthSight, a UK-based brand manager that conducts regular 60-day surveys of British youth, in findings that might just as well apply to American youth.

P5“Generation Zs are looking for more certainty and stability, because of the rise of the gig economy. They have troubles seeing a financial future and they are quite risk averse.”