Every year, the world’s elite gather like the Illuminati in the Swiss chalet town of Davos for the World Economic Forum, where they discuss how to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Often that results in comically out-of-touch conversations, such as the idea, put forth at this year’s summit, that digital “upskilling” can solve economic inequality. But sometimes it provides a platform for someone like the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who appeared before these elites like the prophet Cassandra.

“Either we prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming or we don’t,” she said at the summit in January. “Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

Thunberg’s bluntness is warranted: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last October that humanity has roughly twelve years left to prevent a rise in world temperatures that would make civilization unsustainable in its current form by the century’s end. Virtually all of the Davos attendees will be dead by the time that happens. Thunberg and the rest of her generation are now desperately trying to get them and other world leaders to act before climate change becomes irreversible.

Widespread student protests are largely unheard of in the United States, but there are notable exceptions. The marches and sit-ins against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s come to mind, as do last year’s walkouts against gun violence. In each case, young people were angry about a mortal threat to their lives: dying in a futile overseas conflict, or being murdered in one’s classroom by a heavily armed gunman. This year, another student movement is taking shape, this time to stop an existential threat to humanity itself. In February, thousands of students walked out of schools across Europe to call for stronger international action. Another student strike is planned for Friday in the United States and more than 70 other countries.

The anti-war left ultimately succeeded in pressuring Washington to abandon the conflict in Vietnam, but it took around a decade for small campus protests to grow into a mass movement, and their tactics sparked a conservative backlash that helped elect (and reelect) a Republican president. Millennials hoping to force leaders to act on climate change can learn something from their success—and even more from their failures.