The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics

On the evening of November 12, 2018, six days after being elected to Congress and six weeks before being sworn in, the socialist Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked into an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. Inside, more than a hundred activists in their teens and twenties milled around a font of holy water, wearing nametags on their flannel and fleece, eating pizza from paper plates. They were organizers with Sunrise, a youth-led climate-justice group that was then about a year and a half old and almost universally unknown. Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez had come from a congressional orientation—their first day of work on Capitol Hill—and they were in business attire, making them the most overdressed people in the room. Ocasio-Cortez, trying to close the sartorial gap, dropped her handbag and blazer to the floor; Tlaib picked them up and, with the silent grin of a forbearing elder sibling, placed them on a nearby folding table.

The Sunrise organizers had gathered in D.C. for a long weekend, spending their days exchanging PowerPoints and, for many, their nights curled up on the church floor in sleeping bags. The trip would culminate, the following morning, in a sit-in at the office of Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Democratic Speaker of the House. Organizers had cased Pelosi’s office at the Capitol, posing as tourists, then returned to the church and rehearsed their blocking, using plastic chairs and recycling bins to approximate the layout. The Democrats had just won their first House majority in eight years, but, when Pelosi was asked about her legislative priorities, addressing climate change did not make the list.

Varshini Prakash, Sunrise’s executive director, was twenty-five. When Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez arrived, she was on a small couch, sneaking a nap. Now she rushed to the nave of the church, carrying a handheld mike, and introduced Ocasio-Cortez, who climbed onto the folding table to give an impromptu speech. At times, she spoke from the perspective of a politician (“We’re tearing it up in there, but we need you to make pressure”); at other moments, she sounded like any movement foot soldier (“We need to show people that this is a fight for our fucking lives”). After a few minutes, she handed the mike to Tlaib, who smiled but kept her feet on the floor: “I’m not getting on the table, sis.” As Ocasio-Cortez put on her coat to leave, she told the activists, “I’ll be tuning in tomorrow.”

Privately, she was considering doing more than that. A couple of days earlier, Evan Weber, the closest thing Sunrise had to a policy liaison, had asked Ocasio-Cortez’s staff if she might be willing to amplify the sit-in on social media. The response was that she didn’t just want to tweet about it; she wanted to join it. For a newly elected Democrat, taking even a minor swipe at Pelosi was risky; joining a protest in her office seemed like political suicide. “It was absolutely terrifying,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “But I felt like if these sixteen-year-olds are willing to sleep in a church and get an arrest on their record and possibly mess up their college prospects, if that’s what they’re willing to risk, then I can risk a committee placement or whatever.”

After the training in the church, a small group of Sunrise leaders and Ocasio-Cortez staffers went to Weber’s apartment to finalize the logistics of the sit-in. Weber alerted his roommates, who didn’t usually take much interest in his activism, that “A.O.C. might be stopping by.” (“I never saw them clean up that fast,” he recalled. “They even made warm cider.”) Ocasio-Cortez had expressed interest in joining every part of the action, which would mean potentially getting arrested. “Some of us thought that could be cool,” Weber said, but “if she was in jail she would miss congressional orientation, and we thought it was important for the movement that she learn, you know, how to be a member of Congress.”

Sunrise’s goal was to reframe the climate crisis as a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Obama Administration had pursued an incremental, “all-of-the-above” energy strategy—a tax credit here, a public-private partnership there. Sunrise argued that only a multiyear, whole-of-government mobilization would suffice, and that it would also spur economic growth, the way the New Deal had in the nineteen-thirties. This is now the default logic on the left, but just five years ago it was considered somewhere between marginal and risible. When Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2016, climate change was not central to his agenda. Everyone knew what kind of health-care system left populists wanted—Medicare for All—but there was no similarly catchy meme for safeguarding a habitable planet. In 2017, Jeff Stein, an economic-policy reporter, tweeted, “What is the left’s demand of the Democratic Party on climate change?”

Ocasio-Cortez, then an obscure candidate polling in the single digits, offered an unsolicited reply: “A Green New Deal, which is a sweeping agenda around jobs, energy, + infrastructure.” This got seven likes—from, among others, a Taylor Swift fan account, a small labor startup, and an anime enthusiast who went by Jesus Christ—and zero retweets.

In Ocasio-Cortez’s long-shot campaign, she’d been trying to popularize the “Green New Deal” slogan, which, by invoking the Greatest Generation, implied that pooling public resources toward an ambitious goal was a traditional idea, even a patriotic one. But some Sunrise leaders were ambivalent, in part because the original New Deal had been racially discriminatory. At the church, as they rehearsed for the sit-in, the Sunrise organizers held up banners that read “GREEN JOBS FOR ALL” and “STEP UP OR STEP ASIDE”; the words “Green New Deal” were nowhere in sight.

The night before the sit-in, Waleed Shahid, a political consultant who had advised Ocasio-Cortez, texted Prakash and Victoria Fernandez, Sunrise’s digital director, to ask if they had settled on a unified message. They hadn’t.

“Pick one!” Shahid responded. He linked to a tweet in which Ocasio-Cortez had written, “We will need a Green New Deal to survive.”

This was enough for Prakash to make an executive decision. “GND!” she texted. The consensus was ratified via thumbs-up.

The following morning, the Sunrise activists knocked on the door of Pelosi’s office, then opened it without waiting for an answer. A TV on the wall was tuned to CNN; a correspondent was reporting from Paradise, California, which had just been razed by wildfire. The activists sat in a circle on the office rug, singing protest songs. After almost an hour, Ocasio-Cortez walked in, trailing a pack of reporters. She wasn’t there to admonish Pelosi, she insisted, but to offer political cover to any elected official who would “commit to a Green New Deal.” An hour after Ocasio-Cortez left, about fifty of the activists were flex-cuffed and arrested, mid-song.

That night, the sit-in was covered on CNN and MSNBC. By January, the Green New Deal had been the subject of thousands of news articles, opinion columns, and TV segments—still polarizing but now part of the dominant conversation. In the next two years, Sunrise’s annual budget exploded from fifty thousand dollars to more than ten million. During the Presidential primary, Sunrise activists bird-dogged the Democratic candidates, repeatedly insisting that they come out in favor of a Green New Deal; in the end, twenty of the twenty-six candidates supported it.

If President Joe Biden’s agenda passes in anything like its current form, it will be the most ambitious climate legislation ever enacted, without a close second. This would have been difficult to imagine when Biden first announced his candidacy, in 2019, much less five or ten years ago. “The Pelosi sit-in has got to be one of the most beautifully handled pieces of political theatre in American history,” Bill McKibben, a climate organizer and a contributor to this magazine, said. Ali Zaidi, who worked in the Obama White House and is now Biden’s national deputy climate adviser, a job that did not previously exist, told me, “The outer reach of what was possible, in terms of climate policy, is now table stakes.” He added that, throughout American history, “whenever we have achieved a phase change it’s been young people making it happen.”

Last fall, Biden delivered a speech in Ocasio-Cortez’s district, while assessing the damage from Hurricane Ida. “He spoke at length about how our approach to climate must create millions of union jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez said recently. “I was, like, This is the message we spent years pushing the Party to adopt, and now it’s so commonplace and widely accepted that it’s coming out of the mouth of the President of the United States.”

This past September, I travelled from New York to an Airbnb in downtown Philadelphia, where a dozen Sunrise organizers were gathering for a retreat. Normally, I’d take the train, or maybe a bus. Gaze out the window, sample the sluggish Wi-Fi, spend an hour dozing off—before you know it, you’ve arrived, without feeling too guilty about your carbon footprint. This time, given the pandemic, I drove. It was a beautiful day, so I cracked the windows, saving fuel by forgoing air-conditioning. But, come to think of it, this created drag, which surely made my gas mileage worse. Then again, my car is a hybrid! Maybe I could offset the trip by planting a tree?

The moment I got to the Airbnb, these frantic mental calculations started to seem a bit silly. The organizers were scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an organizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no. Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken. Or falafel?”

“Dejah,” an activist named John Paul Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone. He started reciting a movement adage, using the singsong rhythm of a call-and-response: “The biggest driver of emissions is . . .” The others joined him, in unison: “. . . the political power of the fossil-fuel industry, not individual behavior.” In other words, if you want the beef, get the beef.

During the retreat, the activists recycled, but they didn’t compost. When they ordered takeout, they didn’t always check the “go green” box to decline plastic forks and straws. At home, some of them aspired to bike everywhere, or to eat vegan; others flew all the time and found vegans annoying. This could seem like apathy, or hypocrisy. To Sunrise’s way of thinking, trying to prevent climate change by giving up disposable straws is like trying to ward off a tidal wave with a cocktail umbrella. Besides, if you want to build a mass movement it’s best to avoid life-style shaming.

In 1988, a NASA scientist named James Hansen gave congressional testimony about “the greenhouse effect.” This was largely understood by the general public as a matter of interspecies altruism (“Think of the polar bears!”), not as an existential human risk. Culturally, the environmental movement overlapped with the crunchy left, but its political instincts were small-“c” conservative, as in “conservation.” The Natural Resources Defense Council, which is now a major environmental group, was founded in 1970; one of its first big cases sought to prevent the construction of a hydropower plant on the Hudson River. The plant would have made New York less reliant on fossil fuels, but it risked disrupting the local ecosystem, including a population of striped bass. When the so-called Big Greens, like the Sierra Club and the Nature Conservancy, made demands, they tended to use patient forms of persuasion such as letter-writing campaigns and amicus briefs. “The proto-environmentalists’ instinct was to convince and convert those in power,” Douglas Brinkley, a historian of the movement, told me. “Not to finger-point or protest outside their homes.”

As the climate crisis has accelerated, though, it has become clear that reversing it will require building a new clean-energy infrastructure, which is, politically speaking, a heavier lift. In 2006, Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary that accurately described the scope of the crisis before offering such solutions as “Plant trees” and “Buy energy efficient appliances + lightbulbs.” William Lawrence, one of Sunrise’s co-founders, told me, “Even if you change all the light bulbs in the country, you don’t come close to preventing catastrophe. What kind of plan is that, where even if you win you still lose?” Sunrise approached the problem the other way around, first determining what would mitigate the crisis—leaving most of the remaining gas, coal, and oil reserves in the ground—and then trying to build the political will to make that happen. The only way forward, as the group saw it, was to act less like a special-interest lobby and more like a confrontational social movement. If the Big Greens were like medical researchers at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, politely asking for more government funding, then Sunrise would be like ACT UP, scattering ashes on the White House lawn.

Internally, Sunrise patterns itself on the civil-rights movement, which was very unpopular in its time. “Some people wanted them to do pure outside game and street protest; others advised them to only negotiate with L.B.J.,” Prakash told me. Instead, she continued, they used a hybrid strategy: “You make the moral case, rally the public, and then you try to secure policies that lock that new common sense into place.” This is hardly a foolproof plan. When Martin Luther King, Jr., first called for a federal Civil Rights Act, it was seen as an impossibility; only after a series of galvanizing events, including the March on Washington and the church bombing in Birmingham, did it become a reality. Taylor Branch, the civil-rights historian, told me that King “spent years groping around in the dark, looking for tactics that would resonate.” He added, “Trying to mobilize people to save the planet now, during a time of deep polarization and cynicism, is, in some ways, a harder task.” This analogy can be interpreted in Sunrise’s favor: maybe the organization’s moment of peak influence is still to come. It’s also possible to read it as a cautionary tale: what if the Green New Deal, like the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, is a dream that will never be fully realized?

Prakash grew up in the Boston suburbs; her family is from South India, which, in recent decades, has been battered by floods, droughts, and heat waves. For as long as she can remember, she has experienced climate change as a source of profound anxiety. “As a kid, you first have the thought, This is the most dire problem, so surely there are adults in the room who are fixing it,” she said. “That quickly turns to, Oh no, the adults are actually the ones making it worse, and no one has a plan.” As a high schooler, she was desperate to take action, but the only group she could join was her school’s recycling club. “Then I got to college and figured out, Oh, you don’t sit around waiting for the people in power to fix things,” she continued. “You have to force their hand.”

As a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2014, she got a call from William Lawrence, then a recent Swarthmore graduate. Both were involved in campus fossil-fuel divestment campaigns, modelled on campaigns that had pressed American universities to divest from apartheid South Africa. Lawrence was starting a nonprofit, the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network, and he asked Prakash to join. The year after she graduated, UMass Amherst became the first large public university to give up its direct fossil-fuel holdings. “But we didn’t feel like we were winning, in the scheme of things,” Prakash said. “Because we kept doing the math: even if we win every single divestment campaign, that still doesn’t get us where we need to go fast enough.”

In late 2015, a coalition of youth organizations—climate groups, racial-justice groups, immigrants’-rights groups, and others—led a march to the White House. “It was supposed to be our show of force,” Sara Blazevic, one of the organizers, told me. “It ended up being a pretty sad scene.” The activists tried to condense their various demands into a cogent message, but “the best we could come up with was ‘Our Generation, Our Choice,’ which didn’t mean anything to anyone.” The White House offered to send a senior official to meet with them, but the activists, unable to agree on who should represent them, turned it down. Afterward, Prakash, Blazevic, Lawrence, and another climate organizer named Guido Girgenti went out for Ethiopian food and had a frank conversation. “The upshot was: We have to take a step back and figure out a new strategy, or we’re going to hit a dead end,” Prakash said.

They sought the guidance of an organizer-training institute called Momentum. Founded by millennials who had met in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, Momentum aimed to build on the strengths of such spontaneous movements (their ability to galvanize public attention) while correcting for their weaknesses (once they command attention, they don’t always know what to do with it). When organizers want to start something new, Momentum’s trainers lead them through a painstaking, year-long process called front-loading, during which they arrive at a detailed consensus about what they want to achieve and how they plan to get there. Beginning in the summer of 2016, Prakash, Blazevic, Lawrence, Girgenti, and about eight others gathered at rented farms and movement houses, giving their project the placeholder name Divestment 2.0. As students, they had demanded a say in how their universities’ money was being invested. Now they realized that, as American citizens, they also had a stake in a much bigger pot of money—the one appropriated by the U.S. government.

When asked which issues were most pressing, Americans consistently ranked “jobs” near the top of the list and “the environment” near the bottom. The front-loading team brainstormed ways to close this “urgency gap”—to convince the public that overhauling the energy sector would mean not just displacing old jobs but creating new ones. “We know ‘winning on climate’ in the U.S. will generally involve: shutting down the fossil fuel industry; massively transforming our energy system; and responding to existing and incoming crises,” Girgenti wrote in an internal Google Doc. This would require “epoch-defining pieces of federal legislation.”

As for how an incipient far-left group could achieve all of this, the organizers envisioned an escalating cycle of nonviolent actions, including a future campaign called Moral Crisis 2019, which they referred to, in one planning document, as their “Birmingham”: “Choose one iconic conflict, one set of tactics, after the midterm elections, and go HAM.” Paul Engler, a founder of Momentum, and his brother Mark, a writer, emphasize the importance of “moments of the whirlwind,” when formerly niche issues erupt into public view. A well-designed organization can use such a moment to consolidate support, the way a wind turbine harnesses energy. An unprepared organization will let the moment pass, like a gale whistling through an empty field.

The organizers wrote a metanarrative. “We started out telling a very intense doom-and-gloom story: The billionaires have conspired to destroy the planet, and we’re all gonna die unless there’s a revolution,” Weber said. “Our socialist activist friends were into it, but all our normie friends were pretty freaked out.” You can’t build a mass movement by scaring off all the normies. Weber continued, “Where we eventually landed was more of an Obama-Bernie hybrid: Things are bad, but if we pull together we can have a brighter future.” They brainstormed names for their new organization, looking for one that sounded “radically hopeful” and came with an implicit color scheme and a corresponding emoji. Eventually, they settled on Sunrise.

Movements don’t generally go according to plan, but, to an unusual degree, this one did. Sunrise launched in 2017 and engineered its first moment of the whirlwind the following year, with the Pelosi sit-in. In 2019, a group of children and teen-agers walked into Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office and asked her to support a Green New Deal. She responded with remarkable condescension. “You come in here and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway,’ ” Feinstein, arms crossed, chided an eight-year-old. “I don’t respond to that.” Video footage of the encounter went viral, and it was parodied on “Saturday Night Live.” (Child: “Our planet is dying.” Senator Feinstein: “Why don’t you stay in your lane and step the fuck off?”)

Six months later, Ed Markey, the senator from Massachusetts who sponsored the first Green New Deal resolution, found himself trailing his primary opponent, Joe Kennedy III, by fourteen points. Sunrise amassed an army of volunteer phone bankers to save Markey’s seat. The Democratic Party took note. The day after Markey won the primary, Weber got a call from the office of Senator Chuck Schumer, who wanted to co-sponsor a piece of climate legislation.

In the 2020 Democratic Presidential primary, Sunrise endorsed Sanders, whose campaign platform, this time around, prominently featured a Green New Deal. After Biden secured the nomination, he and Sanders convened six “unity task forces,” hoping to bridge the gaps between the center and the left of the Party. The task force on climate was co-chaired by John Kerry, Biden’s climate czar, and Ocasio-Cortez; one of the other delegates was Varshini Prakash. “It was really constructive,” Kerry told me. I asked him whether it was difficult to reconcile the activists’ moral outrage with the calmer register of diplomacy. “They’re right to be angry,” he said. “Everyone should be that angry.”

During the primary, Biden had called for the United States to be carbon-neutral by 2050; after the task-force negotiations, he pledged to decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035. The Administration adopted several other demands, including a call for a Civilian Climate Corps, modelled on a popular work-relief program from the New Deal. “Obviously, there’s a part of me that just goes, ‘Who gives a shit that we got this commitment or we’re having that discussion—just pass some actual bills or shut up,’ ” Prakash said recently. “But there’s another part of me, the part that remembers how irrelevant we were a few years ago, that goes, ‘It’s sort of wild that we’re at the table at all.’ ”

Sunrise’s original front-loading plan was meant to last only long enough to weather the Trump era. In 2020, the organizers assembled a new core team to draft a second four-year plan. They called it Sunrise 2.0. A few axioms would be carried over (“We are a movement to stop the climate crisis by winning a Green New Deal”). The rest was up for debate.

I joined the team at the Airbnb in Philadelphia, which had industrial-chic light fixtures, exactly one house plant, and a bright-blue accent wall. “I watch a lot of home-décor TikTok, and color-blocking is a huge thing,” Lily Gardner, an organizer from Kentucky who had just graduated from high school, said. Sunrise’s founders were in their late twenties, which, in youth-activist years, made them movement elders. The new team included a couple of holdovers, Prakash among them, but it mostly consisted of the next microgeneration of Sunrise leaders, several of whom were teen-agers.

The original front-loading team had been overwhelmingly white, Northeastern, and middle class, which was both an optics problem and a practical one: you can’t build a mass movement by appealing only to middle-class white kids. Aru Shiney-Ajay, who had helped assemble the new team, had asked applicants in detail about their racial, regional, and class background (“owning class,” “professional managerial class,” “working class”). Of the eleven front-loaders there, only three were white, and four were younger than twenty. No one in the room opposed having children on carbon-emissions grounds, but none had got around to it yet. “People with kids is pretty much the only kind of diversity we didn’t select for,” Shiney-Ajay told me. Perhaps most conspicuous was a diversity of personal style. Some people wore the hiking sandals and moisture-wicking layers you might find in any earth-loving, fashion-agnostic crowd; others were intimidatingly stylish, with outfits so ahead of their time that I couldn’t always understand which articles of clothing I was looking at, much less how they fit together.

Prakash stood in the kitchenette, wearing a lime-green sleeveless dress and a nose ring, making a cup of tea. Two weeks earlier, she had married a data analyst she met in college, which made her the only married person on the team. “I definitely can’t bring myself to say ‘wife,’ ” she said. “I keep thinking, If I were an eighteen-year-old Sunrise staffer, how would I feel about my executive director being”—she affected an old-crone voice—“a married woman?” In other contexts, Prakash was the boss; at the Philadelphia retreat, she tried to wear her power lightly. Once each day, she sat outside and meditated using the Calm app on her phone. Even when negotiations in Washington demanded her attention, she tried not to cancel therapy appointments or break phone dates with friends. “My job is to wake up every day and stare into the abyss of human suffering,” she said. “If I didn’t stick to certain habits that keep me grounded, I would one hundred per cent lose my fucking mind.”

Each front-loading session started with an “energizer,” such as a group song, or a “grounding exercise,” usually a guided stretch. The organizers spent as much time discussing their internal culture as they did their long-term goals. The book on Prakash’s bedside table at the Airbnb was not “Capital” or “The Uninhabitable Earth” but “Dare to Lead,” by Brené Brown. The front-loaders often repeated the mantra “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” which was coined by the management consultant Peter Drucker and later became a staple of employee training at Ford and Google. Haven Vincent-Warner, an organizer from Massachusetts, told me, “We’re anti-capitalists, but good advice is good advice.”

Sunrise abides by what it calls the Rule of Threes: “Any group of three people can take action in the name of Sunrise,” provided that they follow the group’s basic principles, such as nonviolence. This has helped the organization grow quickly, but it also allows local chapters to go rogue, which can put Sunrise’s leaders in the awkward position of being outflanked by their more radical disciples. The front-loading team spent a ten-hour day debating the balance between centralized leadership and local autonomy. Should hubs report to national leadership? Should they have to get permission before issuing a city-council endorsement? A tweet? Gardner wrote a few dozen proposals on pieces of butcher-block paper, then broke out boxes of multicolored rhinestone stickers.

“You’re going to go around voting on how you feel about all these proposals,” Gardner said.

“Bedazzling,” Shiney-Ajay said. “You’re going to bedazzle how you feel.”

Gardner blasted “Good 4 U,” by Olivia Rodrigo, and the organizers bopped around the room, sticking rhinestones to the paper, to themselves, and to one another. It was the most fun I’ve ever seen a group have while debating organizational bylaws. “None of us are here because we inherently love spreadsheets,” Leah Spinner, a twenty-four-year-old organizer from North Carolina, told me. “I would much rather be a young person just living my life and going to festivals and stuff. When the world is burning, that just doesn’t feel like a serious option.” A few minutes later, Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” came on, and Vincent-Warner, who is seventeen, said, “I actually did just get my driver’s license last week!”

During one of the dinner breaks, I chatted with Mejia, who is from Miami. He was brought up by his mother, a Colombian immigrant who worked as a cleaner on yachts and party boats. When he was in eighth grade, they moved to an apartment complex built on hastily reclaimed land. “The building was so new that when you went to Google Maps and looked at the satellite image it wasn’t even there,” Mejia told me. “Just swamp.” During Hurricane Irma, the building’s superintendent told the residents to evacuate, and, Mejia said, “a lot of people had nowhere to go.” The following year, Mejia—inspired by Greta Thunberg’s climate-strike movement, and by students in nearby Parkland who became activists after the mass shooting there—organized a climate walkout at his school. Two years later, he founded Sunrise’s Miami hub.

Mejia is now a first-year student at American University. “I’m supposed to be finishing up a paper for a sociology class called ‘Hazards, Disasters, and Society,’ ” he told me. He tilted his screen to show me what he was actually working on: a heavily footnoted essay about “ruptures in neoliberal hegemony,” for a front-loading session. Mejia was one of several organizers I heard referring to Sunrise as “my religion”—a joke, but not entirely. Sunrise aims to make canvassing feel like a calling, to transform a 501(c)(3) into a beloved community. When the organizers first told me about the Rule of Threes, it sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Then I remembered Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

If any year was going to inaugurate “the decade of the Green New Deal,” as Sunrise puts it, last year started off looking auspicious. In January, on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked the incoming Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, to list his legislative priorities. The first word Schumer said was “Climate.” That April, President Biden asked Congress to pass the Build Back Better Act, the biggest component of which was half a trillion dollars to ameliorate climate change. “I try never to be naïvely optimistic, but this looks promising,” Weber, then Sunrise’s legislative director, told me.

The swing vote in the Senate was Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia. Manchin has taken conflicting stances on climate through the years, but he has never given up his personal stake in Enersystems, a coal-brokerage firm that he co-founded in 1988. His shares are now in a blind trust, but it continues to pay him dividends and interest, which in 2020 amounted to nearly half a million dollars. The centerpiece of Biden’s climate plan was an emissions standard called the Clean Energy Performance Program; Manchin refused to support it. “We’re this close to winning the biggest climate and jobs package in history and one man stands in the way,” Prakash wrote in a mass e-mail. She promised that Sunrise members would “act quickly,” but it wasn’t clear what leverage they had.

Nikayla Jefferson, a twenty-two-year-old Sunrise organizer from San Diego, decided to act anyway. Taking advantage of the Rule of Threes, Jefferson and a few friends put out the call: a hunger strike in front of the White House. Subsisting on water and packets of electrolytes, the protesters would fast until the reconciliation bill passed or until it was medically necessary to stop.

When I got to Lafayette Square, which abuts the northern gate of the White House, I found five strikers under a shade tent, three slouched in camping chairs and two dozing on top of sleeping bags. It was a warm October day, and the square was bustling with the usual democratic circus: venders hawking T-shirts, teen-agers in MAGA hats, a guy called the Truth Conductor playing Motown at an ear-splitting volume. Few gave the protest a second glance.

Earlier that day, Kidus Girma, a hunger striker from Dallas, had confronted Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, as he walked across Lafayette Square. “We’re asking your boss to fight for us,” Girma said.

Zaidi gestured toward an AirPod in his ear and said, “I’m on a call.” A couple of hours later, he joined a Zoom meeting with the directors of a few climate organizations, including Varshini Prakash. “Five young people are outside the White House right now, starving themselves, because nothing is getting done,” Prakash said.

“I know,” Zaidi said. “They just stopped me on my way here.” Apart from that, the closest the strikers had come to an audience with the President was the thrum of Marine One passing overhead.

At the beginning of the hunger strike, Sunrise staffers had asked some of their allies in Congress, including Ocasio-Cortez, to join the protest. But then Sunrise’s D.C. hub put out an unrelated statement disavowing a voting-rights rally. The rally was hosted by a coalition of more than two hundred progressive organizations; the hub was objecting to three of them, Jewish groups that were “in support of Zionism and the State of Israel.” Representative Jamie Raskin condemned the hub, calling the statement “frightful sectarian scapegoating.” Sunrise’s national arm apologized and publicly repudiated the D.C. chapter; behind the scenes, the repudiation was even harsher. (A Sunrise staffer told me, “I called the kid who wrote the statement and went, ‘If you needed to spout some dumb shit, couldn’t you at least have waited until we were not in the middle of negotiating a once-in-a-decade climate bill?’ ”) Still, Ocasio-Cortez kept her distance. Instead, she tweeted about a different hunger strike being held at the same time, in Manhattan, by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.

The next day—their fourth without food—the strikers traded in their camping chairs for wheelchairs. “Our doctor told us we were wasting too many calories walking to and from the bathroom,” Ema Govea, a striker from Sonoma County, said. The doctor, an internist in her sixties, came to check on the strikers at around dusk, wearing a white lab coat.

“My stomach really hurts,” Govea said. “Is that normal?”

“I don’t like how much weight you’re losing,” the doctor said. “If you keep it up, I’m going to advise you to stop.” Govea nodded. It was five days after her eighteenth birthday.

The strikers were spending their nights at an Airbnb nearby, and Weber showed up to give some of them a ride. “Thank you for putting your bodies on the line,” he said, making eye contact in the rearview mirror. At the apartment, Govea warmed up a pot of water by running it through an empty coffeemaker. “My dessert water,” she said. The previous day, volunteers had scoured the apartment for stray calories, lest the strikers succumb to temptation, throwing away a few old packets of ketchup and soy sauce. Outside, I asked Weber if there was any hope of reviving the clean-energy program. “It’s gone,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking, but it’s not coming back.”

Two weeks later, after three of the strikers were hospitalized, they called off the strike. They stayed in D.C. and started bird-dogging Manchin instead. One morning, they followed him from his houseboat to a nearby garage and surrounded his car, which was, they discovered, a Maserati Levante. (“Coal baron drives a Maserati,” Mejia said. “Too perfect.”) Schumer and Biden continued negotiating with Manchin, desperate to come up with an energy standard that he would accept. Two months later, he announced that he would not be voting for the bill after all.

With climate legislation stalled in the Senate, Sunrise has come in for more criticism. The Beltway insider magazine Politico recently ran a piece arguing, as Politico might be expected to argue, that Sunrise “may not be so savvy when it finally comes down to governing”; the socialist magazine Jacobin ran a piece arguing, as Jacobin might be expected to argue, that Sunrise should adopt “a more clearly defined ideology,” e.g., socialism. One climate expert, a former senior environmental official, told me, “At first, my feeling was: They’re mobilizing their generation around the crisis—that’s awesome. But then, when you see the fine print, it’s, like, Wait, you guys are opposing this hydropower project, or that nuclear-power plant? I thought you said there was a crisis!” The expert called this “the Sunrise chaperon problem—these kids get all fired up about how we have to dream big and overhaul our infrastructure, but then the boomer parent who’s taking them to the march goes, ‘Yes, sweetie, but not like that.’ ” Some of the most reliable climate hawks in Congress, including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argued for decommissioning the Indian Point nuclear plant, an action that increased New York City’s carbon emissions by at least twenty per cent. (Sunrise is not categorically opposed to nuclear energy, but it didn’t take a formal position on Indian Point.) The generous interpretation is that activists want to move forward judiciously. The less generous one is that they sometimes fall into a classic trap: supporting development in theory but opposing it when it’s sited in their back yard.

Matthew Yglesias, an independent journalist, has been particularly dismissive of Sunrise, calling it a “fake climate group” that “doesn’t move the needle on things that really matter.” In addition to calling for emissions standards, a Green New Deal would include a federal jobs guarantee and universal health care. Sunrise argues that a climate transition without a social safety net would occasion a broad backlash, the way fuel taxes in France led to the gilets jaunes protests. Yglesias and others contend that this is a Trojan-horse maneuver that makes climate legislation harder to pass. “Sunrise talks the talk of a big grassroots movement, but Democratic politicians actually prioritize climate change more than their base is demanding, not less,” Yglesias continued. “If they’re a mass movement, who are the masses they’re speaking on behalf of?” He conceded that Sunrise has been around for only five years, and is still growing: “It’s totally possible that twenty years from now they’ll be a super-powerful movement and I’ll look like an idiot. So far, though, I don’t see it.”

In 1977, more than fourteen hundred activists broke into a construction site in Seabrook, New Hampshire, where a nuclear-power plant was being built. They wanted to draw attention to the national anti-nuclear-energy movement, which was then considered either marginal or risible, among people who were aware of it at all. (This was two years before Three Mile Island, and nine years before Chernobyl; the Nixon Administration had launched Project Independence—a plan that called for, among other things, the construction of a thousand nuclear-power plants—to little resistance.) The protesters were arrested, and they spent the next two weeks in jail. “During those two weeks, nuclear energy became a worldwide public issue as the mass-media spotlight focused on the activists,” a movement strategist named Bill Moyer later wrote. “We wondered how on Earth they did it.”

When Moyer went to meet with some of the protesters, though, they “arrived with heads bowed, dispirited, and depressed, saying their efforts had been in vain.” After a year of activism, they hadn’t even blocked the construction of the Seabrook plant, much less all of Project Independence. Moyer thought that they had it all wrong. Their first year wasn’t a waste; it was an unusually effective start to a multi-decade project. He came to think of this as a universal law of social movements: When you set out to achieve the impossible and merely achieve the improbable, you feel like a failure.

He wrote what he called a Movement Action Plan, laying out “the eight stages of successful social movements.” The anti-nuclear activists, he argued, had rushed from Stage One, “Normal Times,” to Stage Four, “Social Movement Take-Off.” This was the good news. The bad news was that they were now entering Stage Five, “Identity Crisis of Powerlessness.” “After a year or two, the high hopes of movement take-off seem inevitably to turn into despair,” Moyer wrote. “Most activists lose their faith that success is just around the corner and come to believe that it is never going to happen.”

“I keep trying to tell everyone: Sunrise is in Stage Five,” Mejia said to Nikayla Jefferson. He delivered this news as if it were a cancer diagnosis, but he meant it to be reassuring. “You read Moyer and you’re, like, ‘Oh, yeah, it sucks right now because it has to suck.’ ” They were in downtown Chicago, in an old union hall with W.P.A.-style murals on the walls, meeting with hub leaders from around the country.

An organizer named Stevie O’Hanlon gave a PowerPoint, previewing some of what the front-loading team had come up with, and then led an informal poll of the room. “I’m going to list three things that Sunrise 1.0 set out to do, in 2017, and you respond with how well you think we did,” they said. “The first is ‘Get the public to agree that there’s a crisis.’ ” Most of the thumbs went up.

“Cool,” O’Hanlon continued. “No. 2: ‘Get the public to agree on our solution.’ ”

Some thumbs up, some thumbs sideways.

“Fair enough,” they said. “Last one: ‘Get the government to enact our solution.’ ”

A near-unanimous vote of thumbs-down. Mejia leaned over and whispered to me, “See? Stage Five!”

The Build Back Better Act is dead, but Joe Manchin indicated last month that he’s willing to “come to agreement” on “the climate thing.” If this doesn’t happen—if Congress falls one vote short of passing the largest climate-change bill in history, and then Republicans gain control of the House or the Senate in 2022, or the White House in 2024—it’s hard to imagine the identity crisis of powerlessness that could result. When I asked John Kerry about this scenario, he said, “I’m only going to think positively, because the worst outcomes are so problematic.” When I asked the Sunrise 2.0 organizers about it, they shared with me a Google Doc outlining a “Twilight Zone” strategy, to be implemented if the Democrats lose their trifecta in Washington. At that point, would it make more sense to focus on corporate boycotts? Could pieces of the Green New Deal be won at the state or city level, building momentum from there? The short-term outlook might be dispiriting, but the over-all strategy and the long-term goal remain the same. “We fight for massive federal intervention no matter what,” the document reads.

In Chicago, when their work was done, a group of organizers went to an all-ages bar and arcade. Some, who were older than twenty-one, ordered drinks; others, who weren’t, ordered French fries and played shuffleboard. Mejia and Jefferson squeezed into a banquette, musing about the threat of societal breakdown and the possibility of revolution. At some point, somehow, Jefferson ended up acquiring a stranger’s half-eaten birthday cake. “There are still beautiful things in this world,” she said.

Stage Seven of Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan is “Success,” but, of course, not every movement gets there. There is now an operational nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, but it’s one of fifty-five nuclear plants in the country, not one of a thousand. It’s debatable whether this is a good thing, but it’s proof of what movements can achieve against long odds. Today’s climate activists face even longer odds, and they have less time. According to Moyer’s model, they may not win major concessions for several years. The question, at that point, will be whether it’s too late. ♦