“It’s like any other think tank. They do briefings and that sort of thing,” said Trent, the spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez. He described the division of labor among the Green New Deal’s allies: The Justice Democrats PAC works on electoral strategy, the Sunrise Movement leads the youth campaign, New Consensus “[creates] some space in the think-tank world,” and Ocasio-Cortez herself works on the inside in Congress.

These groups have a claim on the “real” Green New Deal in a way that others don’t. That has sometimes led to tense interactions with the already-existing climate and environmental movements. None of the five people who work at New Consensus have worked extensively on energy or environmental policy before. Drummer was a community organizer in Chicago, where he worked on land-use policy and founded a program to teach high schoolers on the South Side how to code. Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a Rhodes Scholar who now leads the think tank’s Green New Deal effort, was previously policy director for Abdul El-Sayed’s 2018 progressive gubernatorial campaign in Michigan.

Many of the difficulties came to a head in March, when New Consensus held an initial meeting on the Green New Deal. Its leaders invited more than 80 participants, including legal scholars and environmental-justice activists, to the trendy Line Hotel in Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood.

As Drummer understood it, the meeting was a “research-planning meeting,” a getting-to-know-you with the field. New Consensus had four big questions for people already working on climate policy, Drummer told me: “What are the questions we should be asking? What are the debates we should be aware of? Who are the people we should be talking to? … And also, what are your thoughts on how we as an organization can get this done?”

The invite list, he said, “was a sampling” of groups who might ultimately advise New Consensus. But in the delicate world of environmental politics—where coalitions are carefully managed and the most technical phrases can carry huge rhetorical weight—news of the meeting reverberated. It seemed as if Ocasio-Cortez’s favorite think tank was developing the official Green New Deal. It mattered who was invited and who wasn’t. Many activists still say that the 2009 climate bill failed in part because legislators ignored the environmental-justice movement while drafting it.

Read: The Green New Deal hits its first major snag

The meeting was bumpy from the first hour, when two environmental-justice activists interrupted proceedings to protest the absence of the Climate Justice Alliance, a national network of urban, rural, and indigenous groups. The alliance had been asked to endorse the Green New Deal, but it had not been asked to help write it, the activists charged.

There were other odd gaps, too. Todd Vachon, a labor-studies researcher at Rutgers University who attended the meeting, told me he was surprised that no union officials were present. “We were kind of there, looking around and saying, Where are the labor people?” he said. “There weren’t really any active presidents of unions—people who have the authority to speak on behalf of an organization. It was academics and researchers on one side, and grassroots organizations on the other.” Other participants told me they were surprised at the broad lack of climate-policy knowledge among the assembled.