For the first few months of Mark Carney’s prime ministerial tenure, Canada’s climate community of advocacy groups, think tanks, journalists, and scientists held their judgement—and their breath. A former United Nations special envoy on climate action and finance was now running the country; surely, that was a good thing. But the moment he took office, he stopped talking about emissions. Where was this going, exactly?

Give him a minute, the thinking went. Consider the political landscape. Canadians elected Carney to confront United States president Donald Trump, not climate change, and fair enough. If rising temperatures were a malignant tumour, America’s sudden hostility was a speeding bullet. First things first.

And so, we got our first clue (or was it a red flag?): the Building Canada Act, which raced through Parliament’s spring session to become law within two months of Carney’s victory. The act envisioned a self-reliant Canada building its way out of US dependence. Industrial megaprojects “in the national interest” would be sped to fruition through a Major Projects Office.

From a climate perspective, it all resembled a national Rorschach blot taking shape before our eyes: those who wanted to believe in Climate Carney could focus on the wind power, nuclear, and critical mineral projects, among the first announced in September; others beheld fossil fuel expansion, in the form of increasing liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, and the rising drumbeat of an oil pipeline to British Columbia’s north coast. That pattern was repeated in November, when Carney announced the second tranche of major projects.

Confusing, yes, but not yet terribly surprising. Carney had been promising to make Canada an “energy superpower in both clean and conventional [i.e., fossil fuel] energy” since the campaign trail in April. He put it in the Speech from the Throne. But what did that mean for emissions—the currency of climate policy? Was the investment into carbon-free energy somehow supposed to atone for a simultaneous expansion of the fossil fuel sector? Was carbon capture going to save the day? Or might emissions reductions in other parts of the economy—housing, say, or transportation—make up........

© The Walrus