Youth demonstrate outside COP26 UN Climate
Summit, November 2, 2021.
On October 29, Prime Minister Trudeau spoke to
a joint meeting of members of the Senate and the
House of Commons of the Netherlands. His
comments were followed by an exchange amongst
them, including questions on Canada's policies
on the climate crisis, in anticipation of the
COP26 Summit about to get underway. The exchange
revealed how Trudeau never ceases to invent new
ways to answer a question in a manner that is
obscurantist.
Dutch MP Jesse
Klaver, leader of the Green-Left Party, asked
why Canada's greenhouse gas emissions-reduction
targets are less than what the European Union
has pitched. Klaver asked why Canada's
expressions of concern about the climate crisis
aren't matched by action on emissions targets.
The transcript of the news conference shows
Trudeau saying that the fight against climate
change can't be defined by targets alone; they
must also be matched by a realistic plan to
shift the economy to cleaner energy sources.
Canada, as a major oil and gas producer, cannot
be easily compared to a country like the
Netherlands that engages less in fossil fuel
extraction, Trudeau said.
"So much of the energy is around setting the
targets rather than digging into actually having
a concrete plan or roadmap to get there,"
Trudeau said.
At an international climate summit in April,
Trudeau promised Canada would reduce emissions
by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
This "would cut total emissions much more than
the target first pitched by the former
Conservative government and agreed to by former
environment minister Catherine McKenna at the
Paris climate talks in 2015," a writer for the
CBC's parliamentary bureau informs.
"One of the commitments I made at Paris six
years ago, even as Canada was stepping up in its
climate leadership, was that we would not move
forward in announcing targets until we had a
real and concrete plan to meet them and that's
what we've been working on over the last number
of years," Trudeau said to Klaver.
According to what Trudeau said, Canada is
"demonstrably on track to meet 36 per cent below
the 2005 targets" and will push to go even
further at it hastens the transition away from
fossil fuels.
To know why
Trudeau spoke with such confidence requires
looking into the wheeling and dealing and
agreements that will come out of the COP26
Summit and the role of the global financiers led
by Mark Carney, [1]
UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.
Carney, former governor of the banks of both
Canada and the UK, was tasked with the job of
amassing the trillions of dollars controlled by
various private entities for the green deals
that are to be rolled out. Going back decades,
the financial oligarchs have been building the
regulatory and organizational structures to put
the financiers squarely in charge and turning
national governments into their enablers.
When Carney was appointed to the role, he says
he put together a team to accomplish "a simple
but vital task ... to have in place by COP26 ...
all the necessary foundations so that every
financial decision takes climate change into
account." He describes the aim of the task as "a
fundamental reordering of the financial system
so that all aspects of finance -- investments,
loans, derivatives, insurance products, whole
markets -- systematically take the impact of
their actions on the race to net zero. The
objective is a financial system in which climate
change is as much a determinant of value as
creditworthiness, interest rates or technology,
where the impact of an activity on climate
change is a new vector, a new determinant, of
value."
Carney launched two finance capital organizing
projects: the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net
Zero (GFANZ) and the Net-Zero Banking Alliance
(NZBA). There is also a Net-Zero Insurance
Alliance. Carney boasts that some "1,300 of the
world's largest companies ... supported by
financial institutions controlling balance
sheets totalling over $170 trillion, including
the world's largest banks, pension funds, asset
managers and insurers" have committed to this
new financial system. This system will include
things such as new standards for Enron-style
corporate annual reports and prospectuses to
show who is worthy and who is not of being the
recipient of the funds flowing for the "net
zero" economy.
Serving these companies and their financiers,
and wheeling and dealing with them within the
supranational bodies through which executive
powers are exercised also sheds light on the
reason why Trudeau needed to call an election in
a bid to get a majority government so as to
claim he has a mandate to push this through.
However, the ruling elite of the world are
undaunted by not getting a majority and pushing
through the new agenda based on the diversion
that the problem is extremists who pose the
greatest danger to security under conditions of
climate crisis.
The takeover of climate policies by the world's
financial oligarchs was declared at the Opening
Ceremony of COP26 by Charles, Prince of Wales,
who is being paraded nowadays as the forthcoming
"King of Canada," and hopeful to head the
Commonwealth, not a "hereditary" position, in
the not too distant future. He told the gathered
world leaders that "independent initiatives
running in parallel" would not do to tackle the
climate crisis. "The scale and scope of the
threat we face call for a global, systems-level
solution," he declared.
Unabashed, the Prince told the assembled
leaders: "Here we need a vast military-style
campaign to marshal the strength of the global
private sector. With trillions at its disposal
-- far beyond global GDP and -- with the
greatest respect, beyond even the governments of
the world's leaders -- it offers the only real
prospect of achieving fundamental economic
transition."
As to the question which loomed large in the
background: "Who pays, and how?" the answer
given was: "to align private investment behind
these industry strategies to help finance the
transition efforts, which means building the
confidence of investors so that financial risk
is reduced."
"More than 300 of the world's leading CEOs and
institutional investors have told me that,
alongside the promises countries have made ...
they need clear market signals, agreed globally,
so that they have the confidence to invest,
without the goalposts suddenly moving," the
Prince announced.
It is clear to the peoples of the world that it
is up to them to settle scores with this new
more extreme anti-people financial order that is
in the making, which is going to impact their
lives in a very big way. Everyone must lay the
claims on society which they must and not permit
decisions being made behind their backs and at
their expense to decide the outcome of the
crises which are taking place due to the fact
that ruling elites have become a huge weight
that is unsustainable. The solutions that favour
the working class and people are sensible and
must prevail.
Notes
1. Mark Carney is one of the world's
largest finance brokers, he himself a minor
wealth holder with a net worth of U.S.$35
million. He is currently a Vice Chair of
Brookfield Asset Management and Head of
Transition Investing. His work at Brookfield
is described as "the development of products
for investors that will combine positive
social and environmental outcomes with strong
risk-adjusted returns." From 2013 to 2020, he
served as the Governor of the Bank of England,
having served as the Bank of Canada's Governor
from 2008 to 2013. He was Chairman of the
Financial Stability Board from 2011 to 2018.
Prior to 2008, he worked at Goldman Sachs, and
in the Canadian Department of Finance. He is a
member of the Global Advisory Board of the
Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO),
which is in turn owned by Allianz SE, whose
major holdings including Apple, Microsoft,
Amazon, Facebook, United Healthgroup, Alphabet
and Tesla.
Carney was taken on as a board member of
Stripe, a global technology company building
economic infrastructure for the internet. It
welcomed Carney to the board in February 2021
as someone who would benefit the company "as
it rolls out its climate efforts globally,
enabling millions of businesses to bring more
funding to emerging carbon removal
technologies." It adds that Carney's UN role
has allowed him to "galvanize climate action
and private finance ahead of the forthcoming
COP26 conference in Glasgow."
Carney is also a member of the Group of
Thirty and the Foundation Board of the World
Economic Forum, and sits on the boards of
Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Peterson
Institute for International Economics and the
Hoffman Institute for Global Business and
Society at the European Institute for Business
Administration.
Quotes attributed to Carney in this
article are from his book, "Value(s):
Building a Better World for All," published
in March 2021 by McClelland and Stewart.
This article was published in
Volume 51 Number 11 - November 7, 2021
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2021/Articles/M510113.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca
Email: editor@cpcml.ca
