Mark Carney’s lacklustre lookahead and the broken hockey stick

Mark Carney gave an economic “lookahead” speech to the Canada2020 think tank on April 08 2024, titled, A Time to Build. He started off with a populist hockey story about himself and how he’s an Oilers fan before going into a later rant about populist politicians.

He led with the adage of the gloomy Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that “Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.” Carney then tried to explain the predicament Canada finds itself in today — in a ‘hinge moment’ — by recounting various hits to the global economy, noting that ‘we prospered through the global financial crisis.’

Canada did manage reasonably well through the 2008 sub-prime mortgage melt-down, which Evert Lindquist of UVic ascribes to a stable banking sector and Canada’s Economic Action Plan (EAP.)

Carney was Bank of Canada governor then. But another reason why we managed was that our economy was operating well. The Tar Sands Campaign had not yet taken its vicious hold.

As Don Thompson, then President of the Oil Sands Developers Group told CBC’s 2011 co-production of The Tipping Point: Age of the Oil Sands — “Even in the heart of the recession, the oil sands was spinning something on the order of $20 billion into the Canadian economy. At that level, you will have employment in Canada dependent on the order of about 450,000 people. The oil sands are the key to the Canadian economy.”

Carney expressed concerns about Canada’s lack of productivity, which the Bank of Canada recently described as time to ‘break the glass’ and pull the fire alarm. He said we can’t redistribute what we don’t have; we can’t pull our weight abroad unless we are strong at home.

He then went off on climate policies, the energy transition and NetZero, none of which will make us a dime and all of which are making us poorer and less competitive as a nation every day.

Climate policies have gutted Canada from end to end. Look what the Green Energy Act did to Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Robert Lyman’s 2019 report recounts that Ontario’s disastrous electricity policy cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and 75,000 lost industrial jobs. “That is quite the tally for zero global environmental benefit.”

Carney made the astounding claim that ‘being low-carbon is a fundamental driver of competition’ — a laughable claim in light of the fact that of the top ten economies (2022) on Investopedia’s list, Germany, the UK, France and Italy are all backing off from various NetZero climate policies as it is driving economic degrowth, public rage and despair, as Dr. Benny Peiser’s recent presentation showed.

The US has not implemented any NetZero goals and has no carbon tax. China and India have set vague, long-distance objectives while revving up their economies with huge increases in industrial output and the consequent emissions.

Carney was happy that the Canadian government accepted ~80% of the “Blueprint” housing plan which he and colleagues put together in advance of the federal housing plan.

According to research by Chris Leinberger, the father of “WalkUPs,” walkable neighbourhoods thus increase property values 112% per square foot.

Returning to hockey, Carney appears to be unaware that fellow Canadians, economist Ross McKitrick and mining analyst Steve McIntyre broke the “Hockey Stick” graph that launched climate hysteria.

However, Carney is surely aware that some of his climate colleagues reinvented a form of climate hysteria with the report Risky Business, which uses an implausible scenario known as RCP 8.5 as if “business-as-usual”, a scenario for a world without any climate policy, one forecasting the use of more coal than exists on earth, one with twice the level of proven crude oil reserves now, plus the current estimate of technically recoverable resource potential. A world with a projection of three to six billion more people than even the UN forecasts. Simply impossible.

But the wide adoption of RCP 8.5 by the financial community and researchers, is the reason there is a push for NetZero. An implausible scenario, corrupted climate science, conflicted, possible antitrust interests on ESG, and trillions of Big Green dollars sloshing around in public policy places, between green philanthropies and environmental groups, pretending to stand for the views of grassroots citizens.

Thus, without the RCP 8.5 scenario, there is no climate crisis and no need for NetZero climate targets.

What Carney did not talk about is the risk of a world without energy security. These are risks he ostensibly helped create with his prophesy, while Bank of England governor, that ‘firms ignoring the climate crisis will go bankrupt;’ demanding that ‘firms must justify investment in fossil fuels.’

Robert Lyman’s new report talks about A Multi-Polar World at Risk; a world without energy security. A world where China holds all the cards on clean-tech.

If we look backward on what has happened to Canada, it is clear that the foreign-funded Tar Sands Campaign drove a stake in the heart of Canada’s economic driver. That made it harder for us all to live forward. But when we look backwards, we see clearly what happened. As Carney said, “demolition is not a plan,” but NetZero will demolish Canada
https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/stirling-mark-carneys-lacklustre-lookahead-and-the-broken-hockey-stick/54142