Mark Carney was elected to a full term as Canada’s prime minister Monday with a campaign agenda focused squarely on pushing back on attacks from his counterpart to the South, President Donald Trump. Insofar as climate was a factor on the campaign trail, it was mainly about Carney ditching a key part of his predecessor’s signature carbon tax. But just by virtue of his resume as a leading voice on climate and finance he becomes a climate prime minister that the environmental movement can claim as its own.
The ascendance of Carney as a climate prime minister who didn’t talk about climate is all the more striking when considered alongside last year’s election in Mexico of Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who also avoided talking about the issue in her campaign. She ran on continuing her predecessor’s work, most importantly popular social programs. (The previous president rarely talked about climate.)
The result is that the U.S., where Trump has nixed climate policies left and right, is now the regional outlier, squeezed in the middle of a climate sandwich, with implications for the longtime allyship between the three countries. Beyond that, the success of both Carney and Sheinbaum offers an opportunity for reflection. For the last 15 years, advocates in the U.S. have pushed for climate to take a bigger role on the political stage. The logic being that making climate a top-tier issue would result in more climate leaders in elected office and, in turn, better climate policy. The results, as evidenced by the Biden campaign and presidency, have been mixed: the U.S. has enacted big climate policies but it’s unclear whether the country can sustain them.
Carney and Sheinbaum offer an opportunity to test a different theory. Few who work on climate change would have chosen a route that involved actively not talking about the climate crisis. But if the two leaders can use their positions to implement climate policy strategically while the public remains focused on trade, geopolitics, and bread and butter issues, they will have forged a new model for what it means to be a climate leader.
Anyone who has spent time working at the intersection of climate and economics will have seen Carney in action. A former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Carney later ran Canada’s central bank beginning in 2008 before running the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. After leaving the world of monetary policy, he put climate at the center of his work. As the vice chairman at Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management, he ran the firm’s ESG portfolio and impact investing, launching funds aimed at financing clean energy investments in emerging markets. And, in his spare time, beginning in 2021 he chaired the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which helps financial institutions advance the energy transition. Over the course of the last five years, it was almost impossible to have a conversation about climate finance without hearing Carney’s name invoked.
As the Canadian electoral campaign wound on, I took a look back at the notes from my last conversation with Carney in 2022. He covered a range of subjects when we spoke, from the role of nuclear energy to the gap between climate targets and policies. He focused in particular on the role of financial institutions in fostering the transition.
But the line that struck me most was a simple one, almost a cliche: “We need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.” At the time, we were discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how the conflict had created new incentives for fossil fuel producers across the globe, but the sentiment could just as easily apply today.
To an activist focused on big systemic change, Carney’s climate policy, buried deep in a section on his campaign site titled “Build,” might look almost like dreary stuff compared to bold ideas like a Green New Deal or even a carbon tax. But his proposals—including tax incentives, transition bonds, and a mechanism to tax high-carbon imports—are designed to move the needle all the same. “Different parties, different individuals have different views on whether you use pricing or regulation or subsidies,” he told me in 2022. “Spoiler alert: It is always some combination of the three.”
These efforts might be just drab enough to fly under the radar while also giving companies what they need to keep investing in the transition.
To the south, Sheinbaum, who contributed to the important U.N. climate science reports before her career took a political turn, came out the gate with a modulation of her predecessor’s approach to climate. She promised more renewable energy, and a cap on oil production. But those promises have been far from central talking points as she too has focused on Trump’s trade war.
Does it matter that the U.S. is out of step with its two neighbors, stuck between a climate scientist to the South and a climate economist to the North? In the short term, it might not change things all that much. But, in the long term, the significance shouldn’t be understated.
Trump’s destruction of global trade norms means that the world will need to rewrite the rules of the road almost from scratch. For many countries, those new rules will include climate. Carney references a border tax on his campaign site. Moreover, both Canada and Mexico are home to rich mineral supply chains necessary for the energy transition. Both leaders have suggested they want to work with the U.S., but it’s also possible to imagine they choose to work with more reliable partners elsewhere.
“Critical minerals in particular are a potentially useful tool,” Canada’s energy and natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson told me in March, referring to the possibility that the country looks to partner with other nations to develop them to the exclusion of the U.S. But “we’re not there yet.”
It’s easy to imagine how we could be soon.
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