Our governing classes have amongst them the biggest bunch of lunatics every congregated in world history. The only thing different is that Mark Carney tells you what he thinks. The questions now are, does anyone appreciate what he is saying, do enough people in positions to make a difference understand that Carney and his colleagues are serious about doing what they say, and will anyone know how to ensure he never gets to do what he wants. And he is by no means alone.

The quotations below are from an article in Canada’s National Post: Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won’t be pleasant. You need to read the whole thing, which is long, but this is a sample of what you will find at the link.

Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.” All are predicated on the claim that COVID, and its disruption of the global economy, provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to regulate climate, but to frame a more fair, more diverse, more inclusive, more safe and more woke world.

Yet another visionary, just like Mao, Stalin and Lenin. So let’s hear more of what he wants and is working to implement.

Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.

A world of lockdown but one which goes on forever. 

The agenda’s objectives are in fact already being enforced, not primarily by legislation but by the application of non-governmental — that is, non-democratic — pressure on the corporate sector via the ever-expanding dictates of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) and by “sustainable finance,” which is designed to starve non-compliant companies of funds, thus rendering them, as Carney puts it, “climate roadkill.” What ESG actually represents is corporate ideological compulsion.

And where does this take us?

Carney has a lot to put straight with the world. According to his new book, and the related BBC Reith Lectures that Carney delivered last year, the three great crises of credit (2008–09 version), COVID and climate are all rooted in a single problem: People in general, and markets in particular, are not as wise, moral or far-seeing as Mark Carney.

And what does he see?

Despite his thorough castigation of market society, Carney somehow also believes this “corroded” society is clamouring to make great personal sacrifices for draconian climate actions and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Carney has been a prime pusher of “net-zero,” the notion that climate-related human emissions must be entirely eradicated, buried or offset by 2050 if the world is to avoid climate Armageddon. He claims that net-zero is “highly valued by society.” In reality, the vast mass of people have no clue what it entails; when Carney talks about this version of “society,” he is talking about a small, radical element of it….

Carney also commends the knowledge and wisdom of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg: “The power of Greta Thunberg’s message lies in the way she drives home both the cold logic of climate physics and the fundamental unfairness of the climate crisis.”

And like all Marxists, he has his own version of what Marx’s message is.

Mark Carney cries crocodile tears at the possible viability of the Marxist perspective in today’s political environment. But if there is one sure sign of a Marxist, it’s a belief that capitalism is — or is about to be – in “crisis.” His new book has an appendix on Marx’s theory of surplus value: that all profits are wrung from the hides of labour. He also cites Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels. In particular he notes “Engels’ pause,” the one period in capitalist history, early in the 19th century, when workers may not have shared the increases in productivity brought about by industrialization.

Of course, there will be a few eggs cracked before the omelette is cooked.

Carney projects that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (a phenomenon much invoked by the WEF) might bring about a similar period [of economic decay], thus providing a source of political unrest. “(I)t could be generations before the gains of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are widely shared,” he writes. “In the interim, there could be a long period of technological unemployment, sharply rising inequalities and intensifying social unrest… If this world of surplus labour comes to pass, Marx and Engels could again become relevant.”

He thinks he sees where all this will go, and how fortunate we will be when it is all done. But first…

Carney claims powerful parallels between Marx’s time and our own. “Substitute platforms for textile mills, machine learning for the steam engine, and Twitter for the telegraph, and current dynamics echo those of that era. Then, Karl Marx was scribbling the Communist Manifesto in the reading room of the British Library. Today, radical viral blogs and tweets voice similar outrage.”

In fact, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, based on a tract by Engels, in Brussels, not at the British Library, but it’s more important to remember where Marx’s misguided and immutable outrage led: to a disastrous economic and political model that generated poverty and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile “outrage” is surely a dubious basis for policy. The outraged are certainly a useful constituency for those seeking power, however, which brings us to the influence on Carney of the man who first tried to put Marxism into practice.

But he does have his vision.

Carney’s plan is global. “We need,” he claims, “to electrify everything and turn electricity generation green.” The problem is that wind- and solar-powered electricity needs both hefty government subsidies and fossil-fuel backup for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Green electricity is inflexible, expensive and disruptive to grids….

His own version involves not the metaphorical and benign process of market innovation making old technologies redundant, but a deliberate suppression of viable technologies to make way for less reliable and less economic alternatives.

How will he get away with it?

Carney’s plan is to control the global economy by seizing the commanding heights of finance, not by nationalization but by exerting non-democratic pressure to divest from, and stop funding, fossil fuels. The private sector is to become a partner in imposing its own bondage. This will be do-it-yourself totalitarianism. Indeed, companies in our one-party ESG state are already pleading like show-trial defendants, making suicidal net-zero commitments, lest banks cut them off.

And how will this be accomplished?

Part of Carney’s strategy is to force “voluntary” standards on banking and industry, then have governments make those standards compulsory. The major accounting firms appear keen to promote the possibility of endless auditing extensions, under which the relatively straightforward metric of money is to be replaced by the infinitely malleable concepts of “purpose” and “impact.”

And where is all this to end?

What Carney ultimately wants … is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism. He suggests that “governments can delegate certain aspects of the calibration of specific instruments… to Carbon Councils in order to improve the predictability, credibility and impact of climate policies.” These carbon councils will be able to demand that national governments “comply or explain” when they inevitably fall short of targets. 

Here’s the final para of the article, summing up Carney’s aims.

Carney is a man on a mission to change global society. “Business as usual” — the most hated phrase in the socialist lexicon — is “ultimately catastrophic,” he writes. There is too much “misplaced acceptance of the status quo.” But somehow the new socialism will not be socialism as usual. This time it’s different. We can because we must. The threat is too great to permit any argument.

I will just end with this quote from the article which seems so exact.

H. L. Mencken observed that “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-front for the urge to rule.” 

These people are lunatics but very powerfully placed lunatics. Madmen in authority, raving at the world but with the power to create enormous havoc.