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Rebels & Rights

The Dispatch

Dispatches from the movement. Stories, strategy, and the occasional screed.

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The Youth Climate Strikes Are Growing Up. Now What?

Greta Thunberg sat outside the Swedish parliament with a handmade sign in August 2018. By the end of that year, the movement she sparked had millions on the streets. Seven years on — where is it? The short answer: distributed, professionalized, and still working. The climate strikes of 2019 were a particular kind of phenomenon — global, youth-led, photogenic, and energized by the clarity that comes from not yet having had to compromise. Students walked out of school. Millions marched in cities they'd never previously organized in. For a moment, it felt like something fundamental had shifted. Then the pandemic. Then the political cycles. Then the grinding reality that the institutions being asked to change are very, very slow. What the Movement Became The youth climate movement didn't disappear after 2019. It evolved. Some of its leaders moved into electoral politics. Some into policy advocacy. Some into direct action with a sharper edge — blocking pipelines, disrupting fossil fuel infrastructure, facing arrest. Sunrise Movement, which organized much of the US youth climate activism, shifted toward electoral work — endorsing candidates, running canvassing operations, building political power state by state. The Sunrise endorsement became a meaningful signal in Democratic primaries. That's infrastructure that didn't exist before. Internationally, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil adopted a more confrontational posture — disrupting art exhibitions, blocking roads, attracting enormous criticism and significant press coverage. The debate about tactics — whether disruption alienates more people than it activates — is genuine and unresolved. What Science Keeps Saying The IPCC reports don't get less alarming. The window for limiting warming to 1.5°C has effectively closed, by most assessments. What remains is a fight over how bad 2°C gets, and 2.5°C, and beyond. The young people who started marching in 2018 are now old enough to vote, run for office, and understand — in visceral terms — that they will live in the world their governments are currently choosing. That's a different kind of motivation than protest. It's the motivation of inheritance — inheriting a crisis you didn't create and can't fully escape. Where the Fight Connects Climate justice has always been intersectional in the Crenshaw sense — disproportionate harm falling on communities that contributed least to the crisis. Indigenous nations dealing with pipeline incursion and land theft. Low-income neighborhoods adjacent to petrochemical facilities. Global South countries that emitted almost nothing and are flooding, burning, and drying first. The youth movements that have lasted longest are the ones that understood this from the start — that climate can't be separated from racial justice, from housing justice, from the politics of who gets to live where and under what conditions. Rebels & Rights donates to Sunrise Movement and climate-justice frontline organizations from our protest and resistance product sales. The fight is long. We intend to be in it.

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Youth activist holding There Is No Planet B poster
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The Youth Climate Strikes Are Growing Up. Now What?

The kids who skipped school to protest in 2019 are now voting, organizing, and running for office. What happens when the movement enters its next phase? The Moment That Changed Everything In September 2019, somewhere between four and seven million people took to the streets in 161 countries for the Global Climate Strike. It was, by most measures, the largest climate protest in history. The movement was led by teenagers. Many of them skipped school to be there — which became both the point and the controversy. Greta Thunberg, then 16, addressed the UN the following week and delivered a line that will probably be in textbooks: "How dare you." It was the distillation of a generation's fury at being handed a crisis they didn't create and being expected to politely wait their turn. That was seven years ago. Those teenagers are now in their twenties. Some of them are in law school, some are running campaigns, some burned out and stepped back, and some are still in the streets. The movement they launched has grown, fractured, deepened, and transformed. What the Youth Climate Movement Actually Accomplished The strikes didn't stop the Keystone XL pipeline or the Amazon deforestation. They didn't produce a global carbon treaty. By the narrow measure of legislation-won, the movement's direct achievements are modest. But that framing misses almost everything important. The strikes shifted the Overton window on climate policy in ways that are hard to overstate. In 2015, Bernie Sanders was considered a fringe figure for putting the Green New Deal in his platform. By 2020, every major Democratic presidential candidate had a detailed climate policy. The political cost of dismissing climate change as a concern went up substantially. That's not nothing — that's the precondition for everything that comes after. More concretely: a generation of young organizers got trained. They learned how to run a campaign, manage media, coordinate across borders, deal with internal conflict, and move from protest to policy. The alumni of the 2019 climate strikes are everywhere in progressive organizing now — not just on climate, but on voting rights, housing, immigration, and democratic reform. The Tensions That Define the Current Moment Every successful movement eventually has to grapple with its own success. The youth climate movement is no exception. Speed versus depth. The urgency of climate change pushes toward speed — we don't have time for slow deliberative processes. But fast movements often make mistakes that set them back. The youth climate movement has had to learn, sometimes painfully, how to move fast without leaving communities behind. Protest versus power. Strikes are good at naming a problem and forcing attention. They're not designed to pass legislation or implement policy. The movement has been wrestling with when to be disruptive and when to engage inside the system — and how to do both without losing credibility on either front. Whose climate crisis. Early youth climate organizing was criticized, not unfairly, for centering young white activists in wealthy countries while the communities facing the worst climate impacts — in the Global South, in frontline communities in the U.S. — were often absent from the main stage. That criticism has been heard. Environmental justice — the intersection of climate, race, and economic inequality — is now central to the movement's politics in ways it wasn't in 2019. What "Growing Up" Looks Like The teenagers who started this movement are now young adults who can vote, donate, run for office, and run organizations. Some of them are doing exactly that. Sunrise Movement, which grew out of the youth climate strikes, has evolved from a protest organization to a political machine — endorsing and canvassing for candidates, training organizers, and building long-term power in electoral politics. Climate Cabinet, a newer organization, works specifically on connecting climate policy to local and state politics, where a huge amount of the actual work gets done. The Global Climate Strike still happens every September — though the crowds are smaller than 2019. Some interpret that as the movement losing steam. Others argue it reflects a shift from symbolic protest to concrete political work, which is how movements evolve when they mature. What Comes Next The next decade of climate politics will be won or lost in legislatures and boardrooms and voting booths, not primarily in the streets. That's not a defeat for the movement that started with strikes — it's the natural trajectory of successful organizing. The people who learned to organize in 2019 are going to be doing this work for the next forty years. They're angry, they're capable, and increasingly, they have real power. If you want to support them: vote in every election, including local ones. Support organizations doing frontline environmental justice work. And when the next generation of kids skips school to march, remember that you were probably told their tactics were too disruptive too.

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