in World News Carney’s “Values”: Politicians who abandon carbon taxes should be held accountable
By Cosmin Dzsurdzsa, True North Wire
Carney’s “Values”: A new investigative series by True North that takes the Liberal leadership hopeful’s own words as a launch pad to uncover his beliefs, background and vision for the world.
Mark Carney once tried to convince the world to adopt carbon taxes. Today, he’s all but abandoned a significant pillar of carbon pricing in his bid to become the next leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Carney has chops in the climate finance scene. The former Governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, a UN Special Envoy for Climate Action, and an architect of global financial policies to combat climate change, Carney spent years evangelizing for carbon pricing as the backbone of any credible climate policy.
There’s no place where his net-zero agenda for the future is better summarized than in his 2021 book Value(s).
The man who once penned that “backtracking on ambitious climate agendas is more difficult if politicians share the same goals and expect to be held accountable” is, rather incredibly, backtracking on carbon taxes himself.
For years, Carney championed carbon pricing as the essential, unavoidable linchpin of responsible climate governance. In his own words, Carney wrote: “Meaningful carbon prices are a cornerstone of any effective climate policy framework.”
Carbon taxes, he insisted, should increase “in a gradual and predictable way to support an orderly adjustment to a net-zero carbon economy.”
To him, Canada’s federal carbon pricing scheme, first introduced by his fellow ideological traveller Prime Minister Justin Trudeau via the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act in 2018, was the exemplary standard Carney envisioned for the world.