The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 29, 2025


Carney's Green bank alliance collapses after Trump ends support!


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

188.0645

Word Count

2,103

Sentence Count

106

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss the collapse of the Green Banking Alliance, and what it means for the future of the green energy sector in Canada. We also discuss what it says about Mark Carney's business background, and why he should be worried about public finance.


Transcript

00:00:00.080 Hey guys, Wyatt Claypool here. We have a funny story to go over today that I think gives a lot
00:00:06.200 of insight into Mark Carney's business record over time, as well as how his liberal government
00:00:11.540 is probably going to perform like over the next couple of years. Mark Carney has been a long-time
00:00:17.820 proponent of an energy transition, wanting to move away from oil and gas and towards things like
00:00:23.780 solar and wind. He supports subsidizing EV plants, battery factories, all that sort of thing. He was
00:00:30.460 pushing it when he was Justin Trudeau's economic advisor, and I don't think he's going to stop now
00:00:35.100 that he is prime minister himself. But this is a story that came out of the CBC yesterday that I
00:00:40.960 honestly didn't see a lot of people cover. The headline here reads, Green Banking Alliance Carney
00:00:46.020 helped create pauses activities, holds vote on his future. Now, when they say he helped create it,
00:00:51.940 it very much was that he was like the quarterback to this entire idea. And as the subhead indicates,
00:00:58.020 several members, including Canada's major banks, left group after Trump's re-election. Now, what does
00:01:03.460 that tell you about the Green Banking Alliance that President Donald Trump being re-elected in the U.S.
00:01:10.700 would cause it to effectively collapse because he doesn't want to subsidize green energy and EVs
00:01:16.480 anymore? It should tell you that this entire thing is kind of scammy. The idea is that the
00:01:21.760 only way this whole Green Banking Alliance works is not if the members just really believe in it and
00:01:27.500 want to back, you know, green projects and whatnot, and it's good for the environment. So let's do it.
00:01:32.480 The only reason they were doing it was because it was profitable because governments like the United
00:01:37.760 States back when Joe Biden was the president were dumping money into these initiatives. So they can be
00:01:43.400 grossly inefficient. But if there's money pouring in, there's a lot of money to be made.
00:01:47.800 And the fact that this was considered a great idea of Mark Carney, and now we've just seen it
00:01:53.360 collapse, is really telling about his business history. Brookfield Asset Management is heavily
00:01:58.860 invested into EV plants, into battery plants, into green energy. The thing is that all of this is run
00:02:06.960 off of green subsidies. It's not because these are great growing industries. Whenever people talk about
00:02:13.200 how the industry is growing, just look at the subsidy chart that comes along with it.
00:02:19.200 Oh, wow, green energy is really going up. And then you look at the subsidy chart on how much money the
00:02:23.900 government is giving to green energy projects, and it will be skyrocketing too. It's no coincidence.
00:02:29.580 It's a very scammy industry that only exists off of taxpayer money for the most part. Obviously,
00:02:35.460 some people want solar panels on their houses. Obviously, in some areas, maybe a wind farm makes
00:02:40.920 sense, but not in the proportions that we've been seeing it. But let's read a little bit of this
00:02:46.340 article. And then I want to cut over to the interview attached to the CBC article where Rosemary Barton
00:02:51.620 four years ago had Carney on to talk about this. It says,
00:02:55.860 An international green banking alliance that Prime Minister Mark Carney helped establish
00:03:00.340 is now suspending its activities and holding a vote to determine its future.
00:03:05.300 The Net Zero Banking Alliance, NZBA, is the industry-led banking element of the Glasgow Financial
00:03:11.740 Alliance for Net Zero that was created when Carney was the UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and
00:03:17.740 Finance. The NZBA is a global alliance of banks that has worked to help financial institutions make
00:03:25.040 green investments that will help the transition to Net Zero society and mitigate the impacts of
00:03:30.040 climate change. Obviously, there's no conflict of interest there, seeing as Mark Carney was the
00:03:35.160 chair of Brookfield, and he was heavily investing them into green initiatives, and then he's getting
00:03:40.740 every other bank on board to basically invest in the same ones. So much of his career is just
00:03:46.200 networking. It's just networking and getting people to stick money in the same stupid thing that he's
00:03:51.420 sticking money into. It's not because he's good at finding value. I think we've already seen that as
00:03:56.520 Prime Minister. A $92 billion deficit, no real substantial tax cut, and no ability to actually
00:04:04.060 pay down the debt in the future should tell you about his business acumen. When you're the government,
00:04:11.140 you can't rely on the government coming to subsidize you because you are literally the government.
00:04:15.840 You are now the entity that is taking it on the chin to subsidize all these stupid initiatives,
00:04:20.120 and now he's going to either have to desist from his green energy transition beliefs and actually
00:04:25.260 take public finance seriously, or he's going to keep going down this road and we're going to keep
00:04:29.400 racking up debt for no real economic benefits. I know he says he wants to build ports and pipelines
00:04:35.620 and whatnot, but still, as many people are pointing out, other than announcing that he's creating a
00:04:40.820 body that may announce something someday, he hasn't done anything. And yeah, he's only been Prime Minister
00:04:46.300 for over 160 days. But at some point, you think early on, he would have announced that he was in
00:04:51.880 favor of a certain project. Well, let's keep going down this article, then we will get to the interview.
00:04:58.700 It says, while it started with just 43 member banks in 2021, it rose to have as many as 120 before the
00:05:06.260 re-election of President Donald Trump saw the US abandon many of its climate initiatives.
00:05:10.840 Canada's five largest banks all dropped out of the alliance in January. In a statement,
00:05:15.780 NZBA said it will hold a vote on its remaining members on a proposed transition from a membership
00:05:20.860 based alliance to a, quote, a new framework initiative, unquote. The result of the vote will
00:05:27.300 not be shared publicly until the end of September. Now, the hilarious thing is I read down and heard
00:05:32.620 what the new sort of format of the group will be. Basically, they're saying, okay, the group's
00:05:38.340 dissolved. And how about we all just do our own thing? And we just say that we've basically evolved
00:05:43.160 past the need for this group. They didn't evolve past it. The group died because the US is no longer
00:05:49.360 subsidizing inefficient energy projects. It's no longer subsidizing the purchase of EVs. It's no longer
00:05:56.060 subsidizing battery plants. Now, I don't like government subsidies. But I will admit at times,
00:06:02.040 you may need to subsidize something, something that is critical for a nation's survival,
00:06:07.480 if you ever lose a trade route. You know, like, I actually don't mind Joe Biden's Chips Act in the
00:06:13.320 United States, how they're going to subsidize the creation of very complex microchips within the US,
00:06:19.860 so that if the flow of microchips from Taiwan ever gets cut off, the US does have its own homegrown
00:06:25.920 supply. That's fine. So, you know, to be fair to Joe Biden, that was actually a good policy on his part,
00:06:32.060 didn't have very many good ones. But you know, that makes sense. The green subsidies are not
00:06:37.900 safeguarding us. We have oil and gas products in this country, and we're working very hard to keep
00:06:42.720 them in the ground. That's a problem. And everything Mark Carney has been indicating since
00:06:46.900 he started running for prime minister, and he became prime minister, has said that the green energy
00:06:52.120 subsidies are going to stay, even though that is a massive area of cost savings that we could just
00:06:58.000 cut down in order to actually get our public financing back in line. But now let's drop down
00:07:03.840 here and get to this interview he had with Rosemary Barton. You know, general objectives to meet the
00:07:09.680 Paris Accord or to have sustainability. But once you have a net zero objective in a country, it is a
00:07:15.440 reasonable question to ask a bank or a business, well, what's your plan? What's your plan to get to net
00:07:20.520 zero? And use that logic and that imperative to build up the necessity to have a plan to work
00:07:28.200 together in order to support the type of investment that's needed to get to a sustainable economy that
00:07:34.120 has net zero emissions.
00:07:35.940 And he's talking about how we need to support the necessity in order to invest more in these like
00:07:42.020 green initiatives and reduce emissions. It's like, no, that's called like coercion. Him saying that
00:07:47.860 we need to get governments on board to basically make this a requirement so that people will do it.
00:07:52.320 If you need to make it a requirement, it means that it's a bad plan. You shouldn't have to require
00:07:57.780 people to do something that's supposedly such a great thing.
00:08:00.860 You've touted the alliance as representing 130 trillion US dollars, but obviously those are assets.
00:08:07.080 Not all of that money is being used to fight climate change. How do you, how much do you expect of
00:08:12.820 that money that will be actually gearing towards green investments? Is it over a long period of
00:08:18.780 time? Will they have to quantify that at some point?
00:08:22.300 Well, they'll have to quantify it. They'll have to quantify it on an annual basis. So they'll have to
00:08:26.440 account every year for how much of their money is being invested in a, or being lent in the case of a
00:08:34.060 bank, consistent with the transition to net zero and consistent with the transition to one and a half
00:08:39.560 degrees. So the strictest objective that we have, you know, the nature of investment, the nature of
00:08:47.240 lending is that it turns over. And as money becomes available, it gets reinvested. Of course, that can
00:08:53.040 happen quite quickly in equity markets. It happens more slowly. When you have outstanding loans, people
00:08:57.940 have to pay them back and then you decide where to put the money. But to put this in context, again,
00:09:03.300 the estimates of how much it's going to cost the world to get from where we are today, which is a
00:09:09.200 bad place, to where we want to get to tomorrow, which is a net zero, one and a half degree economy,
00:09:15.840 those estimates are about a hundred trillion dollars. So we have the assets, we have the
00:09:21.800 commitments. And what you're listening to here is effectively a green zealot. The idea that we are
00:09:29.020 going to have to worldwide try and incentivize the pouring out of $100 trillion in order to meet this
00:09:36.420 goal by investing in inefficient energy is insane. And the idea that this guy was touted as a great
00:09:43.380 businessman because Brookfield Asset Management did well was stupid. Brookfield Asset Management
00:09:49.400 is not a good company. It doesn't make a lot of money. Sure. But it very much has cornered the market
00:09:55.540 on subsidy industry. Anything that is subsidized, Brookfield will try and get involved in. And you
00:10:01.840 could say any financial institution, any investment firm would love to be invested in something where
00:10:06.280 the government basically guarantees success by pouring in money. But when that is almost his
00:10:11.080 entire record is messing up as the governor of the Bank of England, doing a good job as the
00:10:15.920 governor of Bank of Canada because he was listening to what Flaherty and Stephen Harper were telling him
00:10:19.500 to do. And then when he went off on his own with Brookfield, the only reason he had success was
00:10:23.640 because the government was guaranteeing it. And now as he's prime minister and he's flopping all
00:10:28.180 over the place, you have people being like, oh, I thought he would, you know, I thought, like,
00:10:33.180 why is he messing up on the trade deal? Why can't he get a budget out? It's because he's not that
00:10:37.540 competent. He needs training wheels from the government in order to make any of his plans
00:10:41.560 come to fruition. And now that he is in the seat of the government, he can't rely on another government
00:10:46.080 doing the work for him. He has to do it himself. But anyways, that was just a short video. I just
00:10:51.680 wanted to go over this story that not a lot of other people had covered. Hopefully you'll like
00:10:55.760 this little insight into a Kearney initiative that went south. But if just, you know, wrapping up here,
00:11:02.100 just wanted to mention if you like the videos, make sure to give a like on this video,
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