Mark Carney established himself as climate leader before becoming Canada’s prime minister. Since taking office, though, he’s pursued policies that critics argue aren’t going to help cut emissions. In today’s newsletter, we talk with Carney about his plans and what he views as success. 

Plus, we have an excerpt from a monthslong investigation into birth defects near South Sudan’s oilfields, a dispatch from FEMA workers in Washington, DC, and our top stories of the week. Please subscribe to Bloomberg News to keep up with climate and energy news from around the world.

Carney’s ‘grand bargain’

By Danielle Bochove

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he’s focused on climate policies likely to have the greatest impact at a time of strained resources and multiple crises, denying criticisms that he’s backpedaling on actions to protect the environment.

“What we need to do is to be as effective as possible, in terms of addressing climate change while growing our economy,” he said during a wide-ranging podcast interview for Bloomberg Weekend’s The Mishal Husain Show.

Despite deep green credentials — including a five-year stint as United Nations special envoy for climate change — Carney has scrapped a number of environmental policies introduced by his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, and struck a notably friendlier tone on fossil fuel production. He’s fast-tracked approval for a liquefied natural gas export facility expansion in British Columbia, opened the door to the possibility of a new oil pipeline to the country’s west coast, and hasn’t ruled out abandoning plans for an emissions cap for oil and gas producers.

Pressed on his plans for the cap, Carney repeatedly responded that “a desired outcome” — in this case emissions reduction — “is not a policy.”

“What makes those emissions go down will be carbon capture and storage,” he said. The former central banker has previously said carbon capture could be part of a “grand bargain” with the province of Alberta that would allow it to increase its fossil fuel exports via a new oil pipeline.

Carney swept to power earlier this year on a tide of national fear created by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs and oft-stated desire to acquire Canada. Since then, Trump has been dismantling American green policies at a fast and furious rate, recently telling world leaders that climate change is a “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

While Carney has taken a contrary position to Trump on some issues, notably on the matter of a Palestinian state, he has been publicly silent on Trump’s climate change denialism. Privately, he floated the idea of reviving the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline project to the US president in a recent face-to-face meeting.

All of this has reinforced the pre-election concerns of some who feared he’d be forced to compromise on climate to tackle more pressing issues.

“All of the indicators are that he’s doubling down on fossil fuels, which is bad for the climate, it’s bad for the Canadian economy, and he should know better because he knows the climate science,” said Jessica Green, political scientist at the University of Toronto and author of a recent book Existential Politics: Why Global Climate Institutions are Failing and How to Fix Them.

In September, research by the Canadian Climate Institute concluded that Canada won’t make its 2030 emissions reductions target under the Paris Agreement because of recent weakening of federal and provincial climate policies.

Asked if he’s in danger of squandering his reputation as a global climate champion, Carney told Husain that being prime minister is not about reputation but about doing what’s in the best interests of Canada.

“The question is: how do you make progress toward those issues? And particularly how do you make progress in a way that is most effective?” he said.

“I’m the same me. I’m focused on the same issues.”

Read the full story.

Carney’s conversation with Mishal went well beyond climate. Just seven months into the job of running a country at the forefront of the disrupted world, Carney talks to Mishal about trade battles, President Putin's miscalculations, and what he's learned from President Trump. Make sense of the world with one essential conversation every weekend with The Mishal Husain Show, available on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Climate policies with co-benefits

Your weekend read

Koch County — a neglected corner of one of the poorest countries on earth — is not an easy place to live. Child mortality is high, malnutrition is common and rainy season floods spread cholera. But congenital disease is what families in this region fear the most. 

Birth defects have been devastating families who live near oil wells owned by a consortium led by Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil and gas company and one of the world’s largest crude producers, for almost two decades.

During a weeklong visit this year, Bloomberg spoke with the families of, and doctors who treated, 11 children born with birth defects since 2021. Today’s excerpt comes from a investigation by Simon Marks and Okech Francis that’s based on those interviews as well as meeting minutes, medical records and certified water sampling. Please subscribe for read more award-winning investigative stories.

Nyachianya Duoth holds her son, Kai. Photographer: Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi/Bloomberg

In 2019, Nyachianya Duoth was pregnant with a baby boy, happy news following years of turmoil. She’d spent years in a refugee camp and had only returned to Koch in 2018.

Before she became pregnant, she would collect water from a stream around 10 miles from Petronas’s facilities. Often, she said, there’d be an oily, reddish scum on its surface. The water tasted salty. So she used sachets of chlorine and calcium hypochlorite in an attempt to purify it.

In April 2020, she gave birth to Kai, who was born with no eyes. After a couple of days, she began wondering why her baby lacked motor skills. She walked 50 miles from Koch to the regional capital, Bentiu, where she arrived at a hospital run by the humanitarian organization Medicines Sans Frontieres.

“The doctor told us this deformity had occurred because of where we live near to the oil companies,” she said as Kai, now five years old, rolled around playing on the sandy floor of a hut.

She returned home, but Kai struggled to feed and needed specialist medical care. So Duoth reported her case to Koch County’s health director, who then sent a report to a manager at the SPOC facility.

Soon after, Duoth said, a SPOC official visited Koch, where he promised to provide clean water and drill a new borehole. They also supplied drugs to the hospital. But, she said, “nobody from the company visited me.”

Today, some of the worst moments come when she brings Kai to play in the village — the children just laugh and abandon him in the dirt. “That is what pains my heart,” she said.

Koch County is full of such tragic stories. During a week-long trip in June, Bloomberg interviewed the family of an infant born with seven fingers in 2024, two mothers who had recently lost their babies after they were born with severe deformities and medics who provided pictures of two separate deformity cases: a child with two heads and another born with no genitalia and parts of the abdomen formed outside the body. Both passed away shortly after they were born.

xRead the full story.

By Zahra Hirji

Former and current FEMA workers hold a rally outside the agency on Friday. Photographer: Zahra Hirji

Dozens of current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers — and one inflatable unicorn — stood at the agency’s front door on Friday to call out the Trump administration’s cuts to disaster funding and staffing.

FEMA’s current head David Richardson “said he would run right over the 20% of employees that tried to get in this administration’s way,” said Phoenix Gibson, a current employee speaking at a podium set up on the sidewalk outside of the agency’s headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. “Well, try as they might to run us over — we are not backing down and we are putting up one hell of a fight.”

Gibson has been on administrative leave ever since she publicly signed an open letter in August criticizing Trump-led changes to the disaster agency. “The United States is still in the Atlantic hurricane season and the fact that we have been pulled away from our work assisting disaster survivors while the agency already cannot afford to lose staff is egregious,” she told the crowd.

In recent weeks, FEMA officials started interrogating known letter signers, where those being subject to interviews were told they risk being fired for failing to cooperate and had to sign non-disclosure memorandum restricting their ability to discuss the interviews. After the rally, Gibson declined to comment on the investigations.

The rally comes as the federal government shutdown continues with no end in sight. FEMA staff have so far been spared shutdown-related layoffs that are hitting other agencies, and most staff are still working because their jobs are funded outside normal appropriations. But the agency has lost more than 2,000 people this year, including several agency veterans, due to Trump-related firings, incentive packages, and resignations.

FEMA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.