In years to come, will we look upon Coney Barret’s confirmation as the final nail in the coffin of green democratic socialist politics? The supreme court is now stacked in favour of the global-heating-denying GOP for a generation. 1/4

Coney Barret, remember, called the climate crisis “contentious”. Supposing a future president wanted to take the ecological crisis seriously (ie not Biden), they’d need to work against a GOP-leaning, “originalist”, supreme court that will resist action every step of the way. 2/4

Emboldened by a supreme court majority, I expect conservatives will call become practiced at calling all presidential action on the climate crisis a form of unconstitutional executive overreach. Policy will be blocked, slowed, for refomed to the point of toothlessness. 3/4

All of which is to say that I can’t see how anyone could hope for a Green New Deal to pass through the US state within a meaningful timeframe. The contradictions are sharpening. It’s ruin or revolution, socialism or barbarism. 4/4