From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Earlier this year, a group of young climate activists, children mostly, showed up at Senator Dianne Feinstein's office, and they were there to talk about the Green New Deal.

And suddenly, things got pretty testy.

The government is supposed to be for the people and buy the people and all for the people.

You know what's interesting about this group is I've been doing this for 30 years.

You come in here and you say it has to be my way or the highway.

I don't respond to that.

Those activists who ticked off Senator Feinstein were part of the Sunrise Movement.

Apart from a membership that's very young,

the Sunrise Movement sounds pretty different from the big

environmental groups like the Sierra Club, say. Rather than talking about the fate of polar

bears or coral reefs, they tend to frame the issue in these terms. We're the ones who are going to

suffer if we don't do something really fast. Even though the idea of the Green New Deal has been around for at least a decade,

it's really taken on legs because of the sunrise movement.

Here's Eliza Griswold, a staff writer who's just won the Pulitzer Prize.

It was really fascinating during the midterms to get to watch what impact the young people

had, particularly in Pennsylvania, that I was covering the swing state.

And looking at them on the ground, just the number of doors they knocked was incredibly

inspiring.

Eliza talked recently with Varshini Prakash, the 25-year-old co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.

One of the things that I find so exciting about both Sunrise and the Green New Deal is the idea of climate justice,

that finally environmental justice and the climate change movement are getting

...