The Beaver Lake Cree nation’s battle over Treaty rights and industrial overdevelopment is one of the core stories featured in Toronto publisher Between the Lines’ The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada. According to the authors, it illustrates both where the climate justice movement needs to go and, at least partially, how we get there.

Rachel Carson gave us a vivid and compelling description of the barren world that the agrochemical industry was creating. But hidden within that was a clear analysis of why it was happening: the inherent drive to accumulation within capitalism and the willingness of corporations and capitalists to use every tool available to them, including the state itself, to create markets and grow profit.

Canada’s efforts to be the last country producing oil have led to a strategic alliance with a transnational energy industry interested only in ensuring it can keep producing fossil fuels ad infinitum. Which means that despite the country’s stated commitments on climate change, Canada is wielding its power to ensure that the world fails to limit warming to less than two degrees.

Earlier this month, a pair of young activists with a group called Just Stop Oil threw soup on a Van Gogh painting at a gallery in London. As Nick Gottlieb writes, we need to be taking actions that confront and challenge power structures in direct ways, and it is important these activists put it all on the line in an attempt to do just that.

The fossil fuel industry’s decades long campaign to discredit climate science and block climate action hasn’t come to an end, it’s just reached a new phase. The industry, with its army of public relations firms, is painting itself as an ally in the fight against climate change. Governments like Canada’s are helping them do it, gaslighting us at every opportunity.

Retrofitting existing buildings is one of the only tools for mitigating climate change that virtually everyone can agree on. There are large numbers of poorly insulated buildings using fossil fuels for water and space heating. Abandoning those buildings would be a colossal waste, so to move towards a zero emissions future, they need to be retrofitted. Canada is no exception.

Last week, the Liberal government took the first steps toward actualizing the emissions cap they promised during the last election for the oil and gas sector. In response, the Globe and Mail published a flurry of articles culminating in an editorial in which the paper’s board argued that climate policy aiming to cut total oil and gas production in Canada “is not an option.”

We need to restore the stable, livable climate of the Holocene, the only climate that human society as we know it has ever existed within. That means challenging some of the fundamental assumptions that limit climate ambition today: assumptions like, “we can’t live well without perpetual economic growth.” And it means challenging the powerful interests defending those assumptions.

Do we need carbon removal? Almost certainly, but not because we need to offset “hard-to-decarbonize” industries: we need it because we’ve already disrupted the climate to dangerous levels. Just ask any of the billion people who just endured a 50 degree heatwave on the Indian subcontinent. But the far higher priority is immediate and rapid decarbonization and an end to fossil fuel expansion.

Emissions are higher than they’ve ever been, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is higher than it’s been in four million years. The idea that this is climate progress does nothing but justify the status quo, a status quo that is accelerating the destruction of all life on our only home planet for no reason other than to further enrich a powerful few. We have to demand better.