Did the climate world misread Carney?

Dec. 1, 2025

Mark Carney, the central banker, was the thought leader the climate movement needed: someone who could translate the reality of climate change into the language of finance. As prime minister, he is torching the country’s climate policies, while pouring government time and resources into new fossil fuel infrastructure. To state the obvious, these are not the decisions of a climate champion. 

On Thursday, Carney signed a memorandum of understanding with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith to pave the way for a new oil pipeline to BC’s coast. Some analysts don’t think it will ever happen without government subsidies, given global oil demand is set to peak by the end of the decade and the sheer cost of building such a gargantuan pipeline. Nonetheless, scores of civil society groups condemned it as a “nation-betraying” decision.  

This wasn’t the first time Canadians saw Carney’s maximalist fossil fuel and minimalist regulatory tendencies. A brief run down since his election includes: ditching consumer carbon pricing, energy efficiency retrofit programs, the proposed oil and gas cap, pausing electric vehicle sales mandates, announcing plans to gut anti-greenwashing rules and giving the government power to override environmental regulations and Indigenous consent to build major projects. 

He announced support for LNG Canada Phase 2, the Ksi Lisims LNG terminal, the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline, and supported the auction of 85,000 square kilometres of new offshore oil exploration off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Much of this — along with his campaign for prime minister — was predicated on the threat of US President Donald Trump. 

One of Canada’s foremost public intellectuals has concluded that Carney is using the Trump effect as political cover to pursue the deregulatory agenda he’s long wanted.

“It’s a pretty classic example of what I’ve called the shock doctrine,” said Naomi Klein, a professor in the UBC department of geography, referring to the book she wrote in 2008. (Klein is married to federal NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis.) “Canadians voted for Carney in a moment of shock, and in a moment of fear, because they did not want to be the United States and were saying very clearly we’re a different country, — and he appealed to that with all that elbows up stuff.”

But since his election, “he has capitulated on pretty much every front,” and is now “completely trashing Canada’s climate commitments, and ramming through extractive projects that make a mockery of the commitments to [the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples].”

Carney exploited the shock posed by the US, and is now pursuing a corporate wishlist that predated Trump, she said. 

Since the April election, federal officials have recorded more than 220 meetings with oil and gas lobbyists — more meetings than days. The immense lobbying push was reflected in the federal budget, and continues to shape federal priorities. 

For months, climate experts have been dismayed and confused. Here was the former central banker, who rose to global prominence preaching to the financial world that aligning their investments with a safe climate was vitally important, now turning his back on that very message the moment he has the opportunity to steer Canada into a decarbonized future. Does he not understand the threat posed by climate change? Is he retreating from climate action because of polling? Is he a hypocrite? 

But there’s another option: The climate movement misunderstood Carney from the start.

Manage risks, seize opportunities

Revisiting Carney’s most prolific interventions on the climate file — his landmark “Tragedy of the Horizons” speech and his launch of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) — does not reveal a climate advocate interested in protecting people and the planet. Rather, it underscores an individual with a honed instinct for financial risk and opportunity. 

That now-famous speech outlined to the British financial elite that climate breakdown threatened their bottom lines. Insurance companies were especially liable, but asset owners could see their investments damaged by extreme weather; lawsuits over climate damages would need to be settled; and fossil fuel assets rapidly devalued in a decarbonized world — all of which could trigger risks to the global financial system.

“Once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late,” he said. “Risks to financial stability will be minimized if the transition begins early and follows a predictable path.”

For climate advocates, the warning seemed clear enough: Carney was urging climate action. But to investors, Carney was waving a red flag, practically screaming that profits were at risk if global temperatures continue to rise. Nowhere in that speech are “people” mentioned. 

If climate change is a risk, it’s also an opportunity. That was the message Carney had four years ago when he unveiled the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero (GFANZ). That alliance has since collapsed, but at the time, it included 450 firms from 45 countries, representing assets worth over $130 trillion. 

The stated goal of the alliance was to align capital with a net-zero world, or as Carney described it, the new “plumbing” for the world’s financial system to ensure green investments flow.

"Up until today, there was not enough money in the world to fund the transition, [and] this is a watershed,” Carney said during a panel discussion at COP26 in Glasgow.

“The money is here, but that money needs net-zero aligned projects.”

A report prepared ahead of the financial alliance’s launch presented the commercial opportunity in stark terms. Investors in “new technologies” could expect to double their investments with “enormous opportunities” in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Over the next three decades, more than six billion people will live in urban areas, 400 hundred million homes will need to be built and green infrastructure will be required — “a huge opportunity for investors.”

Throughout Carney’s pitch he said the role for governments was to de-risk private sector investments. Public-private partnerships, where the public assumes risk to help lock in private profit, is the big-picture strategy. 

That call four years ago for governments to de-risk private sector investments is consistent with the agreement signed Thursday that outlines how the federal and provincial governments will use public dollars to help pay for the Pathways Alliance carbon capture and storage megaproject. 

Fusing public dollars with private investment to build big things represents a departure from traditional capitalism where private companies take on risk in exchange for the right to profit. It’s also a break from the government's historic role of using public dollars for the public interest. 

Visionless in the wilderness

Between his time at the Bank of England and his role as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, many climate advocates read Carney as a fellow traveller speaking the language of finance to the corporate world to secure a healthier and safer planet. But another way of looking at it is that he was a financial heavyweight identifying the growing threat to bottom lines, and saw a generational opportunity for the private sector to profit. That’s how Klein sees him.

“He was part of that brief period of capital adapting themselves to very weak and inadequate so-called ‘market based solutions’ that were never real,” Klein said. “But I think that people did want to believe the best in a panic moment.”

As a prime minister in a minority government, Carney is focused on the short term. The long-term reorientation of the Canadian economy to be competitive in a low-carbon future is a project for a different government; massive private capital injections into major projects — aided by a combination of slashing regulations and using public funds to de-risk investments for private investors — is Carney’s vision of progress

.

Whether securing major investments in fossil fuel infrastructure or artificial intelligence, the goal is to pull billions of dollars into the Canadian economy to fulfill Carney’s pledge of being the fastest growing economy in the G7. 

Carney has cast his economic plan as a crucial step-change because the country is at a “hinge moment,” in its history. The world is “more dangerous and divided,” and the “global trading system is being rewired, threatening Canadian jobs and businesses.”

“This is a rupture, not a transition, and it means that our economic strategy needs to change dramatically and rapidly,” he said, when announcing his budget in November. 

Recognizing that Carney’s political vision is fundamentally about using the government’s resources to clear the path for private sector growth is key to understanding what his leadership of Canada practically means.

For Klein, there’s no vision here, “just the crassest way of measuring economic health.” 

“When I look at what he's doing, and what Danielle Smith is doing with this pipeline, I think about the communities that devoted their lives to making a scientific and cultural and spiritual case that persuaded this country more than a decade ago that we must not build this,” she said.

“The stakes of this are enormous, and they're enormous in what this breeds in terms of a sense of nihilism and futility and depression that nothing ever changes.”