Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will save countries at least US$12 trillion by 2050, an Oxford University research team reports. The study concludes that “the decarbonization of the energy system will not only see a major reduction in the cost of producing and distributing energy, but will also help expand energy access around the planet.”

We are in the middle of an historic energy crisis. Recently, news headlines have been overwhelmed by commentaries on the price of energy across Europe, driving governments like Canada’s to make sweeping statements about the future of natural gas and hydrogen. Many of these new climate plans are predicated upon carbon capture and storage technologies.

Paris Marx is one of the leading authorities on all things “tech.” As host of the award-winning Tech Won’t Save Us podcast and author the upcoming Verso book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Marx expertly dissects the countless promises—and far more often, failures—of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and fads like cryptocurrency and the Metaverse.

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.

Far from ensuring the safety of Canadians, the government’s prohibition against Huawei and ZTE dangerously aligns Canada with the NSA and other members of the Five Eyes spy network. This coalition of settler-colonial states may parade as the epitome of liberal democracy, but in fact it is based on the ongoing sagas of Indigenous dispossession and the imposition of empire on subject peoples in the Global South.

With automated systems already trained on inaccurate data—Russia as the trial ground—“publisher classification” systems for analyzing, reporting, targeting and removing dissenting voices, accounts and publications set a dangerous precedent for tracking and blacklisting voices that challenge Canadian foreign policy online with accusations of “fake news.”

Cyberpunk 2077 may have squandered an opportunity to provoke thought, but cyberpunk never had the power to save us. A slick, shiny new computer game is no replacement for supporting your community, organizing in your workplaces and challenging the powers of capital wherever they rear their heads. Power stays with us as long as we have the strength, will and vision to use it.

On March 29, the Government of Canada released its new emissions reduction plan. The document is filled with spending promises and ambitious targets, but it’s important to step back and ask whether anything about the plan is achievable. The report outlines how Canada will, “reduce emissions across the entire economy to reach our emissions reduction target of 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”

Addressing climate without energy justice is only a new version of colonialism, even if it’s clothed in green. In the words of Vijaya Ramachandran, director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute, “Pursuing climate ambitions on the backs of the poorest people in the world is not just hypocritical—it is immoral, unjust, and green colonialism at its worst.”

The extraction of Canadian radium by Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd. (later Eldorado Mining & Refining Ltd.) began with the exploitation of Dene land and labour on the coasts of Great Bear Lake and saw its calamitous fruition in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a still misunderstood act of barbarism that was only made possible with massive supplies of Canadian resources.