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.

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. 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.