diff --git a/.circleci/config.yml b/.circleci/config.yml
index 54f05b2f9c..c4eb97044f 100644
--- a/.circleci/config.yml
+++ b/.circleci/config.yml
@@ -81,14 +81,7 @@ jobs:
           name: install python deps
           command: |
             apt-get update -q
-            apt-get install -q -y python2 python3-pip
-      - run:
-          name: python2 flake8
-          command: |
-            curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/pip/2.7/get-pip.py --output get-pip.py
-            python2 get-pip.py
-            python2 -m pip install flake8==3.9.2
-            python2 -m flake8 --show-source --statistics --extend-exclude=./scripts
+            apt-get install -q -y python3-pip
       - run:
           name: python3 flake8
           command: |
diff --git a/emsdk.py b/emsdk.py
index 392bbdb518..3dd3058463 100644
--- a/emsdk.py
+++ b/emsdk.py
@@ -1,11 +1,9 @@
-#!/usr/bin/env python
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
 # Copyright 2019 The Emscripten Authors.  All rights reserved.
 # Emscripten is available under two separate licenses, the MIT license and the
 # University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License.  Both these licenses can be
 # found in the LICENSE file.
 
-from __future__ import print_function
-
 import copy
 from collections import OrderedDict
 import errno
@@ -22,21 +20,16 @@
 import sysconfig
 import zipfile
 if os.name == 'nt':
-  try:
-    import winreg
-  except ImportError:
-    # old python 2 name
-    import _winreg as winreg
+  import winreg
   import ctypes.wintypes
 
-if sys.version_info >= (3,):
-  from urllib.parse import urljoin
-  from urllib.request import urlopen
-  import functools
-else:
-  from urlparse import urljoin
-  from urllib2 import urlopen
+from urllib.parse import urljoin
+from urllib.request import urlopen
+import functools
 
+if sys.version_info < (3, 0):
+  print(f'error: emsdk requires python 3.0 or above ({sys.executable} {sys.version})', file=sys.stderr)
+  sys.exit(1)
 
 emsdk_packages_url = 'https://storage.googleapis.com/webassembly/emscripten-releases-builds/deps/'