Mark Carney’s Values: Building a Better World for All is a leader’s blueprint for aligning finance, climate, and culture with shared values.

I enjoyed Values by Mark Carney overall. Some sections were challenging in a good way: the book challenged some of my cynicism about the ability of our government, business, and financial systems to deliver solutions for climate change and other societal challenges.

Other sections were challenging in another way: they were so boring that I had to fight the urge to press the “advance forward” button on the Libby app while playing the audiobook. But hey, reading a history of currencies and central banks wasn’t on my bucket list, but I could spare some time and neural cycles if it built up to the crescendo about climate change and Canada’s role in the world.

I’d give ‘Values’ by Mark Carney 4 stars (out of 5), and I would recommend the book to anyone who is feeling fatalistic about climate change or wants to learn about the connection between finance and various aspects of society we care about.

I listened to Values as an audiobook on the Libby app (great app by the way), enabled by my local library: the Burlington Public Library.

I believed on Mark Carney, and Values only deepened my conviction.

I was looking forward to reading this book because I was an early supporter of Mark Carney. My wife and I bought the hardcover when he was running for Liberal leadership; Kassandra read some, then lent it out to a house guest who saw it on the living room coffee table. I submitted that we weren’t getting it back, so I picked up the audiobook.

I was introduced to Carney on the YouTube shows Uncommons with Nate Erskine-Smith and The Rest is Politics: Leading. I was immediately drawn to his optimistic message on climate change; he was the first person to talk about eliminating greenhouse gas emissions as a solvable problem, and the gears of change were already turning as financial products and decision makers were opening up to green energy and closing for carbon-emitting ventures.

I volunteered for the Liberals in the 2025 election and saw Mark Carney (from afar) at a Liberal rally in Mississauga at the airport at the end of the campaign. It felt like a historic election, and I was happy to be a part of it.

I assumed Carney’s book was the homework for the conclusions that we heard as policy pronouncements and behaviours he was pushing people to as a leader. By listening to the audiobook, I’d be able to peer into the history and thought process that arrived at his governing ethic.

Financial systems may be what pushes society to climate-consciousness.

As I mentioned, Mark Carney is confident that climate change is solvable if the costs of carbon emissions are priced into the financing of projects and the price of goods. This was reflected in the book.

Inaction could mean cataclysmic financial costs for the economy as a whole and individual organisations like businesses and governments. We are already seeing insurance costs skyrocketing for land and structures in areas where the biome is changing, exposing them to new risks like forest fires, hurricanes, and / or coastal erosion. The longer a company or government goes without reducing carbon dioxide emissions or mitigating the consequences of climate change, the more intolerable the costs and the less likely they will be able to be financed. This makes sense on a global scale, but does not make sense on an individual scale because a government or company alone cannot do enough to mitigate their financial exposure to climate change. But if everyone did, everyone would be better off. This is where the influence of financing can be that global force because it will give favourable financing and grants to good actors, and starve bad actors of operating capital.

Carney also believes that climate-consciousness is the future, so carbon-emitting assets will depreciate, and green assets will appreciate. So sell your stock in ExxonMobil to invest in an ESG fund to make more money.

This spurred me into action. I investigated moving my retirement investments to an ESG fund. Unfortunately, there were only standard funds and bonds available through my employer’s matching program. So, I petitioned my company’s HR department to make available the ESG funds, which might get more than just me to get into green investments.

Mark Carney writes in Values with an optimistic tone about the financial system and economic solutions to climate change. It is refreshing, but I don’t know if I share his optimism. There are some challenges that could prove insurmountable.

There are some serious hurdles we need to overcome if we are going to reduce carbon emissions.

Carney warns about the double-edged sword in the middle of green investing and regulation: the carbon bubble. It would be in the best interest of the world to sharply reduce carbon emissions, but a sharp transition could be cataclysmic for the economy. Many people, organizations, and governments have money tied up in assets from an era where it was okay to burn fossil fuels; these are assets like coal mines, oil fields, power plants, generators, fleets of vehicles, and even our family cars. These things will become worthless in a carbon-conscious economy.

Carbon regulations perversely incentivize the immediate use of these assets because the owners better get the most out of them while they still can. For example, if you own an oil field in Texas, you want to drill all the wells now if oil will soon be worthless because it will be illegal or unprofitable to burn gas.

So public policy on reducing carbon emissions needs to be a slow transition – not exactly the best solution for the planet.

There needs to be ways for carbon-emitting asset holders to transition without losing their shirt. It’s easy to say “f–k ‘em.” But pragmatically, there needs to be off-ramps, such as tax write-offs, and investment products, such as green bonds, to let polluters write down their literally toxic assets.

The carbon bubble is alarming to me because the only way I can see out of it is for the government to buy the assets from the businesses and people to let them sit or be destroyed. This would be like a gun buyback program for polluting assets. Alternatively, it could be a tax incentive, but effectively it is the same: money or future liabilities for assets.

There is a societal benefit to removing these things from use, but society has to make the owners financially whole. This means the government of Canada giving money to an oil company just to close down an oil field and fire all the workers and cripple the local towns. It means giving people with gas-guzzlers a monetary incentive to trade in their vehicle and buy electric.

Both the industrial side and the consumer side seem politically unworkable; people who are not bought into climate change, exactly the people working at oil fields and driving internal combustion engine vehicles, are going to feel forced instead of being blessed to get money for their toxic asset.

There is another challenge if regulations tighten: regulatory arbitrage. We see economic players do regulatory arbitrage and move their activity to another jurisdiction to keep prices low. It is hard to stop, because if a company accepts the regulation and increases their prices, they will get outsold by another company that sells cheaper by circumventing the regulations by moving production across borders. We have seen this with worker safety standards, local environmental regulations (e.g., not polluting the local body of water), tariffs, and sanctions.

If most nations enact strict regulations on carbon emissions, then the holdouts will have a substantial advantage in the form of cheap energy. Like rainwater going downhill and cutting streams around rocks down to a lake, the world economy will find ways around the local regulations towards the bad actors.

We saw money and fossil fuels flow around regulations when Russia was sanctioned by most western countries for invading Ukraine, but the energy that was being sold to Europe just went to India. The world economy finds a new equilibrium and the net result of consumption often is not that much different than before.

But that is just my pessimistic take. Smart people designing green energy technology and government policy have the potential to change the game.

This speaks to the overall theme of Values: our societal values can become disconnected from what the market values, and we need to take action if the market prices are to price in what we truly value. For example, if we truly value worker safety and we don’t want our cheap goods to come at the cost of life and limb of some of the people who made it, then the cost of worker safety should be priced into every product – but it is not. Sweatshop apparel should be expensive and undesirable because of the human cost, but they are cheap and easy to sell. It takes leadership to align those values.

Accounting for carbon is harder than it seems.

Carney offers a buffet of regulation options for dealing with climate emissions, but it feels like he prefers a carbon tax and rebate. Adding in the cost of carbon at the root (the fuels and energy) lets the markets and financial system price it and alternatives, so change behaviour as it does with many other things that would be externalities. But we now know that he believes that the carbon tax is not politically viable (at least on the consumer side), so we now need to pick from the best of the bad options, which may necessitate a parallel accounting system for carbon.

This is something I have personal experience with because I have run life cycle analyses on products that I have designed. It is very challenging to attribute what emissions are a consequence of the product or tangential activities related to the product.

When running the analysis, I have to ask: Do I assume a product is being recycled because I’ve designed it to be easily recycled? I get to discount the footprint of my solution by half because it lasts 2X longer than alternatives? Do we assume what mix of traditional and renewable energy sources were used to make the product based on where it was made?

There are hundreds of questions like that which you have to make as the evaluator, or whose policy answers and assumptions are built into the software calculator you are using. If the answers to these questions are up in the air, then people will choose the ones that put their product in the best light.

It’s a challenging enough problem that it has made me throw my hands in the air and say life cycle analyses have to be comparative. The evaluator must put their product and the reasonable alternative through the same calculations with the same assumptions and policies, so you can get two sets of figures that you can compare. That way, a product designer can confidently know if they are headed in the right direction or not. Having figures for one thing is useless – you need two points for a direction.

In Values, Carney is pushing for a standardized set of policy answers and assumptions to be required for reporting. This is similar to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which standardized financial reporting for US publicly traded companies and other companies so investors could compare their quarterly reports one-to-one. This makes sense because companies are already having to report environmental statistics if they want to take investment money from ESG funds (Environmental, Social, and Governance). But I know these standards must be crystal clear and ironclad, or everyone is going to make themselves look like angels, and the devils will be hiding off the books.

A history less on the banking system was not something I signed up for.

The most boring part of Mark Carney’s Values was the chapters of history of the banking system and central banks, and Carney’s anecdotes about being in the middle during events of similar historical significance. I enjoyed this section of the book more than I thought I would. I thought my problems had scale as an industrial designer often sorting out problems with mass production of thousands of items, but that pales in comparison to the chair of a central bank whose positive or negative indication on an unexpected phone call can cause the collapse of the market. There is almost no tolerance for the wrong move of a central bank because our fiat currency hinges on the trust of the national bank.

The history of the banking system, while boring, underlies the point that the whole monetary system is based on trust and integrity. The money we hold in our hands or see in our banking app was, and still is, an IOU slip that was physically easier to transfer than gold, livestock, crop, or whatever store of value people had. Carney’s point is well taken: if the nested promises implicit in the dollar are not trusted, then the whole exercise of currency is meaningless, and people will quickly move to another store of value. This results in bank runs, runaway inflation, market collapses, etc.

I listened to a person who lived through the recent period of runaway inflation in Argentina, who talked about the cultural practice of people buying and storing bricks on their property when they had extra cash. When you are not sure the dollars you hold will have any value in the future, bricks seem like a safe alternative because someone will want to build something with those bricks in the future. I am glad I live in Canada where I know the dollars I earn today will have most of their value tomorrow thanks to responsible governance.

The book made me appreciate dynamism, or the lack thereof.

A concept the book helped me understand was dynamism. I thought dynamism in the economic context was how reactive the economy was to sudden changes in demand, supply, or the business environment. For example, reacting to COVID. But Carney explains that dynamism is the economic process of shedding off the old and ossified to make way for new and better thinking to take over.

An economy that is not dynamic has old players entrenched with barriers to their removal and has planted impediments to the success of new and better competitors. An economy that is properly dynamic allows new ideas to play out and potentially win.

For example, digital photography was allowed to advance, and it was preferred by consumers and less expensive overall, so film and film camera companies adapted or were taken out (like Kodak). My piece of wisdom: companies must be the first ones to subsume their legacy business if a new technology does it better or makes it irrelevant.

The talk about dynamism made me realize how little we value it in Canada. We valorize old companies. We tolerate monopolies and oligopolies. Thankfully, we don’t let lobbyists have as much power as other parts of the world, but we often have regulation that assumes the way it is will be the way it always is, salting the earth for new ideas with regulation.

Mark Carney shares some simple and usable lessons of leadership.

Mark Carney’s lessons on leadership were an unexpected aspect of the book, peppered throughout the chapters, and very enjoyable. Carney’s main piece of wisdom is exceptionally simple, and he is consistent about it:

Plan beats no-plan. What beats a plan? A plan that is well executed.

He often repeats it to his peers and directs at various positions he recounts in the book. Planning out what you are going to do is always going to get better results than winging it. This is something I know well as a designer, where I notice I am equally designing things as well as a plan to make those things. The meta point is urging people to precede their actions with thoughts to get better results.

But a plan is only as good as how well it is executed. Carney makes the point that execution includes adapting the plan as you learn more about what is working and what isn’t.

Carney clearly admires the people of history who execute their plans with iron wills. I have heard that he can be a little tyrannical about the people in his office dressing up, being punctual, and putting in the time required. I imagine this commitment to these things is more about the discipline required for the execution of plans than anything taken individually.

Carney’s narration of the audiobook leaves something to be desired.

Mis-delivery of certain lines in the audiobook was another thing peppered through the book, but was not enjoyable. Mark Carney narrates the audiobook himself. Having the author narrate the audiobook is usually the best choice for non-fiction because the author will be more connected to the lines than a professional narrator.

Most of the time, Carney is reading in a delivery style that simply gets from A to B; every line can’t be a roller coaster ride, or the book would be tiring. But Carney sometimes realizes the importance of a line mid-way through reading the sentence and changes up his delivery to land the point. He and the producer should have just rerecorded the line to nail the points.

Carney also has this cadence to his speech which is great for politics and communication, but sucks for audio books. He talks quickly through the first two-thirds of a sentence, then slows right down, delivering the last words like the beat of a drum. This drove me nuts as an audiobook listener because I always speed up the playback to 1.25- or 2-times speed. But if I speed up Carney, the first parts of his sentences are too fast, and the end is just right.

It’s not a dealbreaker; I enjoyed the book and am glad Carney read it himself. But having since listened to books from Barack Obama, Robert Reich, and Kara Swisher, all of whom delivered nearly every line like they were connected with their original emotion when writing it. The production and narration of the audiobook are not ideal for Values.

Conclusion

Values by Mark Carney was worth reading. It helps to understand that sometimes our societal values are not reflected in the prices and activity in the market. Looking at our society through that lens can be unflattering. If we say we value something but we are not willing to pay for it, do we really value it? Carney prescribes leadership; people need to step up, inspire people, and make tough decisions if we are to align what we value and what we are willing to pay for.

I feel like I understand Carney and his worldview now that I have read Values. Someone who has written a book about societal values has done the homework to be a national leader. We are in good hands.