Mark Carney Shoots the Net Zero Fox at Davos

The Canadian PM declares it's time to stop pretending to go along with the ideologies of the powerful and speak the truth

According to Prime Minister of Canada – and formerly governor of both the Bank of England and Bank of Canada – Mark Carney, the Communist Party’s tyranny of the Soviet Union was sustained by ordinary people’s acquiescence to the regime’s claims. In a speech at the World Economic Forum, Carney channelled Polish dissident Václav Havel, who observed that the benighted shopkeeper in the eastern bloc would put a sign in the window, bearing the slogan, “workers of the world unite”, but that “he doesn’t believe it”. The performance was intended to “avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along”. And so “the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false”. The speech comes amid what appears to be a spectacular global chaos, which overturns much of what the WEF has long seemingly stood for. In the light of Carney’s previous speeches on the global stage, his latest is remarkable.

Carney wasn’t speaking primarily about the USSR, of course. His comments were directed towards the “rules based international order”, which now seems to be disintegrating with speed.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

Partially false?

Carney is interesting to me, as an observer of climate politics. (NB: not climate ‘science’ – the seeming legitimising basis for climate politics, but which is actually green ideology’s descendent, not its forebear. But that’s another story.) For it was Carney, in his then role as UN special envoy for climate action and finance, who said, just a few short years ago on ‘finance day’ at the COP26 meeting in Glasgow:

Our goal for COP26 has been to build a financial system in which every [financial] decision takes climate change into account. … These seemingly arcane — but essential — changes to the plumbing of finance can move and are moving climate change from the fringes to the forefront, and transforming the financial system in the process.