On a Sunday in November, 170 students filed into the Vermont Statehouse, using the legislature’s chambers to talk about the climate crisis and solutions for their state. Participants in the Youth Climate Congress, who ranged from middle-school to college age, with law students joining the committees to answer legal questions that came up as proposals were drafted, spent the day proposing and debating policies on transportation, energy and heating, agriculture, and environmental justice. The state’s speaker of the House wrote a letter congratulating the students for their day of action. But the Youth Climate Congress participants want more than kudos from the adults in the room—they hope their representatives will use their drafts as a springboard for actual laws.

Standing at the podium at the front of the formal chamber full of red velvet chairs and drapes but bustling like a cafeteria, co-chair Lili Platt, a high-school senior, told the group that the work it did that day would “set an example for Governor Scott and the legislature of what comprehensive climate legislation can and should look like.” But while young people are increasingly taking the lead in climate activism, they still have a hard time getting their elders—the ones occupying the halls of power during business hours—to prioritize their concerns and ideas.

People of different generations may always have different interests. But it’s especially hard to navigate solutions to a crisis that could radically restrict possibilities for young people in a moment when antagonism between generations has become pervasive enough to appear as an internet meme. As Taylor Lorenz wrote in The New York Times in October, when exploring the popular “OK, Boomer” retort that young people are leveling at their elders, “Rising inequality, unaffordable college tuition, political polarization exacerbated by the internet, and the climate crisis all fuel anti-boomer sentiment.”

The starting bell in the generational climate fight came in February, when a group of kids and teenagers visited Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office to lobby her to support the Green New Deal. A video of the lawmaker crankily brushing them off went viral. “Any plan that doesn’t take full transformative action is not going to be what we need,” a teenage girl said in the video. “Well, you know better than I do, so I think you should run for the Senate,” Feinstein responded—the tone a little too icy to be taken at face value. “I know what I’m doing,” Feinstein repeated several times over the course of the conversation. The two figures embodied the two poles of the generational divide—one experienced and inappropriately calm; the other innocent and getting panicky.

A subtler and perhaps more frustrating pattern is when older people respond to youth activism by calling them inspiring, marveling at their combination of gravity and youth, but not doing what they say. When Greta Thunberg, now the poster child for serious youth climate action, visited the U.S. this fall, speaking at the United Nations and leading the Global Climate Strike, she was celebrated. Everywhere she went, someone older than her declared themselves “inspired.” (Myself included.) But as she herself emphasized, she wasn’t honored by this response—she was frustrated. In her now famous speech to the U.N. on that trip, delivered in the state of indignant incandescence singular to teenage girls, she stared down a room full of the most powerful leaders in the world: “You come to us young people for hope,” she said. “How dare you!” That afternoon, she joined 15 other children in petitioning the U.N.’s Commission on the Rights of the Child, demanding that member states take immediate action on climate change and saying that their continued failure to respond to the climate crisis is a violation of children’s human rights.