The population seems increasingly aware of climate change, with groups such as Fridays for Future spreading awareness and organising demonstrations worldwide to pressure political leaders into taking action. However, false beliefs concerning climate change are widespread, even among the politically active (Eurobarometer 2019, Leiserowitz et al. 2019). Such false beliefs may lead them to concentrate their efforts on ineffective actions. For example, they may focus on separating recyclable material from their waste, which are minimally effective in addressing climate change. They may also engage in radical activism that risks being counterproductive, though they intend to foster public support and political action (Patterson & Mann 2022). Such phenomena show a lack of orientation among activists , who often have trouble understanding how to become effective agents of change. My consideration posits that perhaps for younger generations to actively participate in climate change mitigation, they need more than awareness of civil disobedience and of climate change itself. Perhaps there is the need to rethink, and fully grasp, young people’s roles both as individuals and as members of a collective. As individual agents, humans can contribute to cutting emissions by reducing their own. As collective agents, they can exercise pressure on political leaders to promote a climate agreement. These actions are not mutually exclusive, but they are different and presuppose the acquisition of different kinds of knowledge: individual agents aiming to cut emissions need to know how to best to go about that, while collective agents aiming to exercise pressure on political leaders need knowledge of the most effective approaches/channels for getting their message across. This contribution will specifically focus on activists’s aim to exercise pressure on institutions through civil disobedience and demonstrations. Through argumentative analysis of texts produced by activists and spread through their web pages or social media channels, interviews, and slogans used in demonstrations, I aim to identify intellectual attitudes or postures ("epistemic vices” – Cassam 2019) that tend to produce suboptimal epistemic outcomes. Furthermore, it will be shown how, in many cases, young people seem to lack an understanding of deliberative processes in democracies. This results in ineffective actions; complaints and protests either directed toward people who have only limited responsibility, or performed at the wrong time. I ultimately argue that (young) activists would benefit from a deeper knowledge on the functioning of deliberation in democracies, and need a more thorough understanding of the decisional processes leading to climate policies.

Cassam Q. (2019). Vices of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press EC (2019), Special Eurobarometer 490, Climate Change. https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion Leiserowitz A., Maibach E., Rosenthal S. et al. (2019) Climate change in the American mind: November 2019. Yale University and George Mason University. Yale Program on Climate Change Communication Patterson S., Mann M.E. (2022) Public Disapproval of Disruptive Climate Change Protests. Annenberg Policy Center, Penn State University.