This month US Americans got a small glimpse of what a coup might feel like, and they are rightly outraged. One might hope this would provoke some reflection on the *actual* coups that the US itself has perpetrated around the world. Here are some of them:

1953: Mohammed Mossadegh, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Iran, was deposed in a US- and British-backed coup because he sought to restore national control over Iran's oil reserves.

1954: Jacobo Árbenz, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Guatemala, was deposed in a US-backed coup because he sought to restore land to small farmers and Indigenous communities that had been dispossessed by US fruit companies.

1961. Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Republic of Congo, was assassinated in a coup backed by the US, UK and Belgium, because he sought to restore control over the country's mineral reserves. They installed the Mobutu dictatorship in his place.

1964. João Goulart, the progressive, democratically elected leader of Brazil, was deposed by a US-backed coup and replaced with a right-wing military junta.

The right have attacked the Green New Deal on the grounds that it will hurt economic growth. In response, the left have defended it by saying it will *increase* growth. And maybe it will. But taking this approach is a bad strategy for a number of reasons:

1. If the GND *does* generate growth, that will drive aggregate resource use and energy demand up, and therefore make it paradoxically more difficult (and probably unfeasible) to decarbonize the economy in the short time we have left.

2. Clean energy infrastructure requires material extraction (for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc). More energy demand means more extractivism, which will have significant social and ecological impacts - on global South communities in particular.

3. Climate change is not our only problem. More growth means more resource use, which means rising ecological impacts across all other planetary boundaries. (See:

4. All sorts of regressive social and ecological policy is justified in the name of growth, including cuts to labour standards and environmental regulations. When we affirm growth as the ultimate objective, we play into the hands of neoliberals.