The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics

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Andrew Marantz
@andrewmarantz
We're nowhere close to solving the climate crisis. But we are one vote away from the biggest climate legislation in history, and it's hard to imagine that happening without the Sunrise Movement. My piece on how they did it, and what comes next:

newyorker.com
The Youth Movement Trying to Revolutionize Climate Politics
Sunrise has already shifted the conventional wisdom about climate change. Now it wants to create a mass movement, combining street protest with policy negotiation, while there’s still time.
9:46 AM · Feb 28, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-youth-movement-trying-to-revolutionize-climate-politics

No paywall
https://archive.fo/fUqfB

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.”

*snip*