Like many in his cohort, Ashik Siddique, a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), got tired of doomscrolling. He may even have invented the term: The Wall Street Journal, no less, has credited him as one of its earliest users. Reading too much about the climate crisis especially can be not only depressing but also politically demobilizing. Siddique, thirty-three, along with many other DSA activists, is instead seeking to turn the despair of the moment into action that could save the world.

In this spirit, many young people in DSA and beyond have been committed to organizing for the Green New Deal, the comprehensive plan, proposed and popularized by socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to decarbonize the economy through investment in green jobs and infrastructure. This legislation and the ideas surrounding it have, over the last couple years, emerged as a top priority among DSA’s membership. But how to win it? The answers haven’t always been obvious.

When Bernie Sanders was running for president, it made sense for socialists most committed to climate to focus on his campaign, since in 2020 he made green jobs central to his platform. After Bernie, it was still clear that we needed to act quickly to save all life on Earth, but this was much easier to type than to do. Surveying the space between what our situation requires — the economy must be decarbonized and almost everything decommodified — and our present reality, “The biggest gap,” says Siddique, a national organizer in DSA’s Green New Deal Working Group and a newly elected member of the organization’s National Political Committee, “is just the lack of organized power to do any of that.”