Mark Carney's doing it in Canada...............................13 Dec 2025 13:30
Https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/12/01/analysis/climate-world-misread-mark-carney
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.”
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. 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
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