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.

The impacts of climate change itself appear to be exceeding even our worst case expectations, but the regime of fossil capitalism has no interest in a change of course. To rebuild our future, we need to learn from the past: if we want to overcome fossil capitalism, we need to become ungovernable. We all have a role to play in that.

Canada is codifying domestic climate goals while continuing to grow its own oil and gas production and export. Put bluntly, the nations most responsible for climate change are attempting to profit from worsening it right until the very end. This troubling reality illustrates aptly where we are today: until there are real, binding limitations on the production of oil and gas, climate policy is a whole lot of “blah blah blah.”

Sport utility vehicles (SUVs), known best for their cultural significance among suburban families and upper middle class urban couples, are responsible for more carbon emissions than all but five nations globally. The world’s SUV fleet is growing rapidly and the segment alone accounts for more emissions growth since 2010 than aviation, shipping, or heavy industry.

The world’s wealthiest live in Le Guin’s Omelas: while they may or may not be “happy,” they have access to everything they could ever want. The only cost? The four billion people in the “basement” of the world, the Global South, who are being driven past the brink into a future that would be unimaginable if it weren’t already here, with water sources running dry, forests burning and crops failing.

Canada, like most of the Western (wealthy) world, is a self-styled “liberal democracy,” broadly considered the gold standard in global development. Liberal democracies are founded on a commitment to universal human rights and freedoms, values codified in international law. But in the last week in Canada, we have seen these liberal values rocked to their core.

Climate change isn’t a technical problem, it’s a power imbalance problem. And polite participation in electoral politics—perform your civic duty then return to a quiet life of economic production—has never successfully challenged power before. We shouldn’t expect it to be able to now. Instead, we need to draw our lessons from major social breakthroughs of the past.