"The kids whom Feinstein was talking to are going to be dealing with climate chaos for the rest of their lives.... This means that youth carry the moral authority here..."

"... and, at the very least, should be treated with the solicitousness due a generation that older ones have managed to screw over. Feinstein’s condescension, though it’s less jarring in the video of the full encounter, which also shows gracious moments—including one when she offers a young person an internship—echoed that of Nancy Pelosi, from earlier this month, when the Speaker of the House talked about 'the green dream, or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?'... The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been 'doing this for thirty years,' she described the precise time period during which we could have acted... If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory.... Given the failure of old-style politics on this issue, it is no surprise that youth are taking the initiative. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in American history. The Green New Deal was hatched by the Sunrise Movement, which is composed of recent college graduates. And they are ancient compared with the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who was in Paris last week to watch thousands of French youths join her in spreading the Friday for Future strikes, in which students skip school to demonstrate for climate action."

From "The Hard Lessons of Dianne Feinstein’s Encounter with the Young Green New Deal Activists" by Bill McKibben (in The New Yorker).