The prime min­is­ter’s polit­ical jour­ney from cli­mate `vis­ion­ary’ to pipeline pro­moter

This article was written by Allan Woods and was published in the Toronto Star on December 21, 2025.

When Mark Car­ney arrived on the Cana­dian polit­ical stage, Richard Brooks’s col­leagues sought out his pro­fes­sional opin­ion.

Would they be deal­ing in the Lib­eral prime min­is­ter with a friend of the envir­on­ment or a foe?

Brooks, the head of cli­mate fin­ance with Cana­dian advocacy group Stand.Earth, has fol­lowed Car­ney’s met­eoric rise over the past dec­ade from staid cent­ral bank gov­ernor to global cli­mate guru to the Prime Min­is­ter’s Office.

“I regret it now,” he recalled in an inter­view, “but I said at the time, `If there’s one per­son that an envir­on­ment­al­ist or a cli­mate act­iv­ist would choose to be the head of (gov­ern­ment), who under­stands cli­mate issues … Mark Car­ney would be at the top of the list.”

Car­ney had an intim­ate under­stand­ing of how eco­nom­ies work, hav­ing served as gov­ernor of the Bank of Canada dur­ing the 2008 fin­an­cial crisis, then as gov­ernor of the Bank of Eng­land dur­ing Brexit.

He went on to serve as the United Nations spe­cial envoy for cli­mate action and fin­ance, and con­vinced some of the world’s largest fin­an­cial com­pan­ies to endorse a car­bon­neut­ral world by 2050 under the Glas­gow Fin­an­cial Alli­ance for Net Zero.

To Brooks’s mind, Car­ney knew about mar­ket forces and was a true believer in the need to move away from fossil fuels and toward lowe­mis­sion energy sources.

“My opin­ion was based on his his­tor­ical record and what he had said pre­vi­ously,” Brooks said. “The truth is that I think his val­ues have always been about being a banker first and fore­most, and an invest­ment banker in par­tic­u­lar, and those val­ues have been about mak­ing money.”

That word— “val­ues” — is an import­ant one, and not just because it was the title of Car­ney’s 2021 book about “a com­mon crisis in val­ues and (the) rad­ical changes … required to build an eco­nomy that works for all.”

Car­ney has built a repu­ta­tion over the past dec­ade as the ulti­mate eth­ical banker, one able to marry eco­nomic and envir­on­mental interests in the ser­vice of stop­ping global warm­ing.

In 2015, he was hailed as a vis­ion­ary when he warned of the loom­ing cli­mate “tragedy” and the urgent need to drive the bank­ing, invest­ment and insur­ance sec­tors toward activ­it­ies that would save the planet rather than rav­age it.

In 2025, he squandered some of that good faith in strik­ing a deal that con­di­tion­ally backs increased oil pro­duc­tion, weaker reg­u­la­tions and a con­tro­ver­sial pipeline that would take pet­ro­leum from the Alberta oils­ands to the west coast for Asian mar­kets.

The memor­andum of under­stand­ing with the Alberta gov­ern­ment is premised upon devel­op­ment of the Path­ways car­bon cap­ture and stor­age pro­gram, which would pipe harm­ful green­house gas emis­sions under­ground.

Car­ney made the announce­ment in Cal­gary along with Alberta Premier Dani­elle Smith, declar­ing, “This is Canada work­ing.”

The agree­ment main­tains the ulti­mate com­mit­ment to mak­ing Canada car­bon neut­ral by 2050. But it promp­ted the resig­na­tion from cab­inet of Steven Guil­beault, a vet­eran cli­mate act­iv­ist. The Montreal MP warned that the deal could increase emis­sions and was part of a lar­ger dis­mant­ling of Canada’s exist­ing cli­mate change plan.

The Prime Min­is­ter’s Office did not respond to requests for com­ment on this art­icle.

Car­ney said in a year­end inter­view with Radio­Canada that his dif­fer­ences with Guil­beault were not about need to cut emis­sions, but about how to do so. His approach is based not on reg­u­la­tions and restric­tions but on attract­ing invest­ment in tech­no­lo­gies like car­bon cap­ture and stor­age while boost­ing the use of nuc­lear power and renew­able energy.

“I have ded­ic­ated most of my career to envir­on­mental issues,” he told Radio­Canada. “I know how we can reduce green­house gases and what invest­ments will be neces­sary to reduce green­house gases.”

It was a “trust me” response to an issue on which there is little good faith.

Ahead of the Alberta deal, Car­ney secured the sup­port of Green Party Leader Eliza­beth May for his first budget with the the prom­ise that enhanced oil recov­ery activ­it­ies — pump­ing gases under­ground to retrieve addi­tional oil — would not be eli­gible for a fed­eral tax credit.

Then he prom­ised Alberta the exact oppos­ite.

“The prime min­is­ter’s word doesn’t mean much, even to him,” May told the CBC.

There is a char­it­able view that sees Car­ney as adapt­ing to unex­pec­ted chal­lenges and real­it­ies of Cana­dian polit­ics.

He leads a minor­ity gov­ern­ment in the House of Com­mons. He leads a frac­tious fed­er­a­tion in which pro­vin­cial demands and threats are the com­mon cur­rency. He’s try­ing to steer a national eco­nomy through the eco­nomic mine­field of U.S. Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump’s trade tar­iffs.

But Car­ney him­self has been something of a Net Zero zealot, with little sym­pathy for those mak­ing excuses to defer cli­mate action.

In 2022, he said the Rus­sian inva­sion of Ukraine, which caused energy prices to spike across Europe, was no reason to delay or aban­don emis­sion­reduc­tion efforts. Con­tin­ued global warm­ing would entail “future costs that will dwarf cur­rent hard­ships,” he said.

“We know the cli­mate doesn’t care why emis­sions hap­pen, only how much occur. The more we emit now, the more rad­ical action will be needed later. We need to speed up, not slow down.”

A year later, in 2023, U.K. prime min­is­ter Rishi Sunak said he was put­ting off emis­sions reduc­tion meas­ures, includ­ing push­ing back an elec­tric vehicles man­date by five years, because the impact on the pop­u­la­tion would be too high in a cost­of­liv­ing crisis.

Car­ney said the decision was “dis­ap­point­ing and mis­taken,” and would muddle the sig­nals to mar­kets and investors who are look­ing to do busi­ness in clean­energy coun­tries.

Car­ney’s inter­na­tional cli­mate prom­in­ence and cred­ib­il­ity came from the lofty pul­pit from which he pro­nounced. Rarely had such a key

We know the cli­mate doesn’t care why emis­sions hap­pen, only how much occur. The more we emit now, the more rad­ical action will be needed later. We need to speed up, not slow down.

MARK CARNEY IN 2022 AFTER RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE

player in the risk­averse global eco­nomy been so will­ing to stick their neck out on envir­on­mental mat­ters.

What pro­pelled him was the 2015 Paris Accord and the global push to achieve car­bon neut­ral­ity (dubbed “net zero”) by 2050.

His first real act of cli­mate advocacy was a 2015 speech as gov­ernor of the Bank of Eng­land, in which he pushed for a pub­lic account­ing of the cli­mate risks to which fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions were exposed so that they could then be factored into busi­ness and invest­ing decisions.

It was Car­ney’s “Field of Dreams” the­ory: pub­licly identify low­emis­sion invest­ments and the self­inter­ested investors would surely come.

It was “ground­break­ing stuff,” said Charlie Kronick of Green­peace U.K., call­ing Car­ney a “vis­ion­ary” com­pared to his cent­ral banker col­leagues and pre­de­cessors.

As a gov­ern­ment appointee, he could only make recom­mend­a­tions, not law. But he did act where he could, intro­du­cing in 2019 cli­mate stress tests for reg­u­lated Brit­ish fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions.

“Firms that align their busi­ness mod­els to the trans­ition to a net­zero world will be rewar­ded hand­somely. Those that fail to adapt will cease to exist,” he warned in a speech at the time.

A few months later, Car­ney was named the UN spe­cial envoy for cli­mate action and fin­ance, a sign of his grow­ing influ­ence and appre­ci­ation.

The stress test­ing was an import­ant ini­ti­at­ive that was widely copied in other coun­tries, said Uni­versity of Oxford’s Ben Cal­de­cott, dir­ector of the Oxford Sus­tain­able Fin­ance Group.

“That actu­ally did a lot of work in terms of get­ting big insti­tu­tions to do things dif­fer­ently and to lay the found­a­tions for an ana­lyt­ics industry, I sup­pose, in this area that has become very help­ful,” Cal­de­cott said.

After his Bank of Eng­land term ended, Car­ney became an adviser to U.K. prime min­is­ter Boris John­son ahead of the 2021 cli­mate change sum­mit in Glas­gow. The sen­ti­ment at that global meet­ing was per­haps best summed up by the late Queen Eliza­beth II, who was over­heard com­plain­ing of world lead­ers, “It’s very irrit­at­ing when they talk but they don’t do.”

But one source of hope was the Glas­gow Fin­an­cial Alli­ance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group of fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions that had pledged to reach car­bon neut­ral­ity by 2050. Car­ney was the alli­ance’s chair.

He earned a splashy head­line at the Glas­gow cli­mate con­fer­ence with a news release stat­ing that “$130 tril­lion of private cap­ital is com­mit­ted to trans­ition­ing the eco­nomy for net zero.”

The ini­tial excite­ment and adu­la­tion turned to egg on Car­ney’s face when he was forced to admit that the enorm­ous sum he cited was the value of the assets the com­pan­ies in his coali­tion con­trolled, not the amount they were com­mit­ting to the cre­ation of a cooler planet.

In fact, hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars were inves­ted in fossil fuel indus­tries.

“That didn’t come from any­one but him,” said Cal­de­cott, who helped organ­ize the Glas­gow sum­mit. “That was his line. That’s what he wanted to com­mu­nic­ate, des­pite advice to the con­trary and, you know, that was very mis­lead­ing and set expect­a­tions at an incred­ibly high level.”

Ulti­mately, aca­demic ana­lysis of Car­ney’s push to have fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions dis­close their cli­mate risks showed that it largely failed to drive invest­ment away from car­bon­intens­ive activ­it­ies.

Brooks recalled a testy con­fer­ence call at the Glas­gow cli­mate sum­mit in which Car­ney con­fron­ted those who were cri­ti­ciz­ing GFANZ for not hav­ing set stricter con­di­tions for mem­ber­ship.

“What I recall from that con­ver­sa­tion was this level of arrog­ance that his way was the right way,” Brooks said.

He said Car­ney argued the greater the num­ber of fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions mak­ing the net­zero pledge, “the greater the chance that the waters will rise all boats.”

“What we ended up see­ing in the end is many of the big­ger fin­an­cial insti­tu­tions who were heav­ily invest­ing or fin­an­cing fossil fuels … were basic­ally pulling the plug out of the bathtub and lower­ing the water.”

Trump’s re­elec­tion as U.S. pres­id­ent promp­ted Amer­ican banks to flee the net­zero alli­ance. Cana­dian banks soon fol­lowed. Car­ney him­self resigned his vari­ous lead­er­ship pos­i­tions when he entered fed­eral polit­ics in early 2025 with a pledge to scrap prime min­is­ter Justin Trudeau’s con­tro­ver­sial car­bon tax.

In Octo­ber, the remain­ing mem­bers of the Net Zero Bank­ing Alli­ance, a GFANZ sub­si­di­ary Car­ney had hailed in 2021 as “the break­through in main­stream­ing cli­mate fin­ance the world needs,” voted to dis­band.

Now, the man who warned about the cli­mate tragedy lurk­ing on the hori­zon, has some con­tem­plat­ing a dif­fer­ent sort of tragedy, one of unreal­ized prom­ise, of a true believer poten­tially tain­ted by real­politik.

How to recon­cile the Car­ney who, in a 2020 speech, pitched the low­car­bon eco­nomic trans­ition as “the greatest com­mer­cial oppor­tun­ity of our time” with the one doub­ling down on the Alberta oils­ands, back­ing pipelines, scrap­ping clean elec­tri­city reg­u­la­tions and prom­ising fossil fuel sub­sidies?

“It’s hard to know the real­it­ies of gov­ern­ment and doing those sorts of jobs. I do have sym­pathy for the need to make com­prom­ises some­times,” said Cal­de­cott. “He’s still early in his premi­er­ship. Can he turn things around? I hope he can. We all hope he can.”