There’s an inspiring new slogan gaining traction among venerated pundits and politicians of a certain age that claim steadfast commitment to the cause of stopping catastrophic climate change: “Get off my lawn.”

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Most recently, California senator Dianne Feinstein, 85, scolded a group of middle-schoolers with the group Youth v Apocalypse, who had joined the Sunrise Movement to call on Feinstein to back a resolution in the Senate supporting a Green New Deal. In a now infamous exchange, Feinstein barked that “I know what I’m doing” and that she has “been doing this for 30 years”, so they better just bugger off and let the adults work. (To be fair, the video was edited to comply with Twitter’s content guidelines. In the full clip she also offers them an internship.)

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced their resolution for the Green New Deal, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, 78, off-handedly called it the “green dream or whatever”, before backtracking later in the day and voicing support for the enthusiasm of the idea – just not the resolution itself. Months earlier, Congressman Frank Pallone, 67, battled Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution to create a select committee on the Green New Deal based on unfounded, territorial fears that it would undermine the authority of his prized energy and commerce committee.

Former Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen, 72, recently told the Financial Times the Green New Deal was simply too expensive to work, joining a record number of economists in backing a modest carbon tax as the more “feasible” and “sensible” option. New York Times columnist Gail Collins, 72, mused that Green New Deal campaigners would be better off sticking to “one really important climate-control thought”, perhaps – she spitballed – wind power: “If the country really threw itself into wind power, we could, er, breeze toward our goals on that alone.”

None of these figures deny climate change in the conventional sense of spouting junk science from rightwing thinktanks. They have all agreed publicly and even forcefully that climate change is a pressing issue, and that human activity is its cause. Several have been vocal advocates for climate action of one sort or another. But none have proposed a workable alternative to the economy-wide mobilization the Green New Deal sets out to accomplish, to rapidly electrify the American economy and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Details still need to be worked out on that plan, of course. But it remains the only idea on the table even remotely approaching the “wartime footing” climate scientists are increasingly insistent is necessary to avert catastrophe.

The kids, in other words, are right. They will also be the ones forced to live with the consequences of the choices politicians make in the next several years. That’s not an unfamiliar dynamic in climate politics. Residents of climate vulnerable nations who are already dealing with rising tides and temperatures have long been the ones pushing for the most ambitious action at the international level, chanting “1.5 to survive” through the halls of UN climate talks. Communities in the US forced to live with the health impacts of extraction – from Houston to the Bay Area – have for years sought an end to the drilling that’s threatening to cook us. As they have in the last few weeks, adults in the room – whether US negotiators at the UN or big beltway conservation organizations – have in each case offered sage counsel: be realistic!

Yet realism on climate means something different than it did even a decade or two ago, when a modest carbon tax and a smattering of tax credits might have gotten the job done. As the IPCC noted in its latest report, avoiding climate breakdown at this point will mean a “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, including massive investments in renewable energy and new technology and going to war with the world’s most powerful industry, fossil fuels.

Thankfully, Sunrise, Ocasio-Cortez and other Green New Deal advocates are updating our shared definition of what being realistic in a climate-changed 21st century looks like. The adults in the room would do well to listen.