This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.

This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Mark Carney likes to talk green, but he’s just another agent of the status quo

By: []

Date: 2021-12

In fact, an analysis by Unearthed revealed that Brookfield is a leading shareholder in at least five sprawling fossil fuel projects, including a tar sands pipeline in Canada, a coal port in Australia, and an 860-mile gas pipeline in India. Moreover, the concept of ‘avoided’ or ‘offset’ emissions is all but useless in the fight against climate change. One way or another, a ton of carbon churned into the air is a ton of carbon churned into the air. No amount of corporate strategizing or green window dressing can change that. (Challenged by environmental campaigners including Greenpeace, Carney eventually qualified his claims regarding Brookfield’s net-zero stance. “I have always been – and continue to be – a strong advocate for net-zero science-based targets, and I recognize that avoided emissions do not count towards them,” he wrote in a brief statement posted to Twitter on 26 February. “Brookfield’s 20 GW of operating renewable assets represent one of the largest private portfolios in the world.”)

Carney’s supporters are nonetheless effusive about his talents. He is the “outstanding central banker of his generation”, said then UK chancellor George Osborne in 2013, when he appointed Carney, as a relative outsider to British politics, to the Bank of England. “A numbers guy with dazzling recall,” Maclean’s magazine gushed last year. Born in the Northwest Territories in 1965 to a modest middle-class family of Irish descent, and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Carney studied first at Harvard and then at Oxford, where he completed a PhD, in 1995, on the “dynamic advantage of competition”. After university, he moved into finance, building a successful, multi-year career at Goldman Sachs, with stints at the firm’s London, Tokyo, and New York City offices. In 2003, Carney made the transition into public life, becoming, at the age of 38, deputy governor at the Bank of Canada. Five years later, on the eve of the global financial crash, he was promoted to governor.

Under Carney’s watch, Canada emerged from the Great Recession comparably unscathed. “None of its banks collapsed and its economy returned to growth far faster than those elsewhere,” the Financial Times noted in 2012. But his tenure was less impressive than the glowing press coverage suggests. Having weathered a financial crisis in the mid-1990s, Canadian regulators were well braced for 2008. Carney’s subsequent decision to slash interest rates turbocharged the country’s housing market, generating some of the highest living costs and rates of private indebtedness anywhere in the world. (Ironically, Canada’s growth at this time was also reinforced by a boom in resource extraction, fuelled by bitumen exports from Alberta’s heavily polluting oil sands.)
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