As the director of the horror show that was the Supreme Court’s 2022 term, Chief Justice John Roberts on Thursday opted to script his movie with the same plot twist as Don’t Look Up. In an environmental ruling literally issued on Asteroid Day, Roberts channeled President Janie Orlean and aborted the government’s nascent effort to halt the climate crisis imperiling the planet — a decision making it more likely that the human story will mimic the film’s ending.

Amid desperate screams from scientists about the impending climate catastrophe, Roberts limited the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon emissions. He declared that “capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ but it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme” to halt the disaster.

As our reporting has shown, today’s cataclysmic ruling (though slightly narrower than it could have been) is part of a larger judicial coup fueled by dark money that has bought both sides of the justice system — the petitioners and the arbiters.