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Cutting off the flow of money to fossil fuel as a “socially undesirable” activity is certainly the prime objective of Mark Carney, who is about to become the world’s leading public proponent of the idea that global financial markets need to be controlled and manipulated. The former Bank of Canada governor leaves his post as head of the Bank of England to take up a new role as the United Nations’ “special envoy on climate action and finance.”

The UN Secretary General’s announcement last month summarized Carney’s new mission: “He will focus on ambitious implementation of climate action, with special attention to significantly shifting public and private finance markets and mobilizing private finance to the levels needed to achieve the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement. This will include building the frameworks for financial reporting, risk management and returns in order to bring the impacts of climate change to the mainstream of private financial decision-making and to support the transition to a net zero carbon economy.”

In short, Carney will assume the role of chief advocate for a centrally planned global financial system whose primary aim is to reduce carbon emissions to zero. In a year-end interview with the BBC (as part of a program guest-edited by Thunberg), Carney outlined the tricky part. The market cannot do the job since it is based on “selective information, spin, misdirection.” Instead, he said, there needs to be a “shared understanding about what’s necessary. It is reasonable for there to be debates at the margin about where does the role of the state stop — and what’s the role of markets.”