Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney — long seen as an ardent critic of fossil fuels — now insists that oil and gas investments are necessary to “facilitate” the green energy transition. .And that includes oil sands. .Speaking on CTV’s Question Period on Sunday, Carney said: “There still does need to be some investment in fossil fuels,” he said. “If you look at our economy, look at the oil sands, and at other aspects of our fossil fuel economy, we need to make that competitive..“There's still going to be demand for oil and gas over the course of the next few decades, so how do we make sure we maintain our share, but our share in a way that doesn't produce additional emissions? We have a solution for that, we have the expertise for that, we need to put tens of billions of dollars from industry first, but also supported by governments in order to make that transition,” Carney said. “We can do it, and in my view, we should do it.”.It seems like a huge about face for a man who led a group of more than 450 global financiers — including Canada’s big five chartered banks — dubbed the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) aiming to raise $130 trillion in green investments. . Mark Carney Values .Firms that sign onto the GFANZ agreement agree to 24 financial commitments that ensure they are making green investments a priority. It doesn’t, however, include financial institutions from the world’s biggest emitters — China, Russia and India. .Carney who was also formerly the governor of the Bank of England, is presently vice chairman and head of ‘impact investment’ for Brookfield Asset Management, a Canadian ‘alternative investment firm’ that had more than $725 billionUS under management in 2022, for used on real estate, renewable power, infrastructure, credit and private equity..According to Wikipedia, the company was founded in 1899 as the São Paulo Tramway, Light and Power Company by William Mackenzie and Frederick Stark Pearson. It operated in the construction and management of electricity and transport infrastructure in Brazil..Carney was born in Fort Smith, NWT and was raised in Edmonton. He attended St. Francis Xavier high school before graduating from Harvard in 1988 and was appointed governor of the Bank of Canada by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008. In 2020 he was appointed United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance as he prepared to step down as governor of the Bank of England..In December 2020, Carney delivered the first of four Reith Lectures — the BBC's flagship series — dubbed "How We Get What We Value – From Moral to Market Sentiments", that eventually became the basis of his 2022 book Value(s) Building a Better World for All. In it he said society had come to esteem financial value over human value and moved from market economies to market societies. The series covers a trio of crises—credit, Covid and climate..In his CTV interview, Carney said he was encouraged by the fact that investments in clean energy matched fossil fuels for the first time in 2022 but added that it would take an amount greater than the world’s entire GDP to meet targets set in the Paris Accord..“But that ratio, by the end of this decade, to be on track to where the world needs to get to, needs to go to about four-to-one or five-to-one, clean to fossil fuels,” he said.
