At a fancy dinner in Massachusetts, in the opening minutes of Just Look Up, the mood suddenly shifts. Members of the activist group Climate Defiance turn out to be among the guests, and they take over the stage to embarrass a senior banking executive. Who are these young idealists, and how do they operate in the run-up to the crucial 2024 presidential election?
The subject of this energetic portrait is Michael Greenberg, who wants to fight the climate crisis in the spirit of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s struggles for civil rights. For Greenberg, nonviolent but hard-hitting protest is a way to jolt people into action. Disrupting an event may not immediately change a politician’s or billionaire’s behavior, but it does generate valuable attention.
The struggle is far from easy for Greenberg and his fellow activists, who are regularly arrested with considerable force and sometimes even face resistance from their own parents. But this generation of activists refuses to be discouraged, however grim the political landscape may look.
