An area the size of Scotland burns in Australia. More than sixty lives have been lost to flooding in Jakarta; Zambia teeters on the brink of famine; and oil stocks soar as the president of the United States openly stokes war with Iran. A Green New Deal (GND) — and an internationalist GND in particular — is more urgent than ever. But at the same moment, its advocates are still reeling from a devastating defeat in an election that saw the GND’s first trial in a national electoral contest.

In the wake of the Labour Party’s decisive loss in December, the GND’s proponents have had to grapple with the thought that the GND may have failed its first test at the polls. And if, indeed, it did fail, what now? Where next, as we look ahead to the possibility of further thwarted negotiations at the UN’s COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, five years under an unimpeded Tory majority, and the 2020 US elections?

The temptation to despair in such moments is strong. As is the lure of the conclusion that the GND frame is a failed experiment to be abandoned in favor of a return to discrete, technocratic solutions, in the hope of scoring small wins where we can. But for many reasons, this temptation must be resisted. This turn would be a losing strategy, abandoning the spectacular recent gains the climate movement has made using economic, class, and global justice frames. It would be to abdicate our outsized responsibility in tackling the immense challenge ahead.