He may be dubbed “Carbon Tax Carney” by his political rivals, but upon becoming Canada’s prime minister last Friday, Mark Carney cancelled the unpopular carbon levy on consumers.
The former governor of the central banks of England and Canada, who has never before held elected office, will lead the world’s second-largest country amid a punishing trade war with Washington and threats from US President Donald Trump to annex Canada.
His first order of business? With the cameras clicking, Carney slashed the carbon tax rate to zero for consumers, effectively ending what had been the governing Liberal Party’s signature climate change policy since its national launch in 2019.
“This will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians, but it is part of a much bigger set of measures that this government is taking to ensure that we fight against climate change, that our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward,” Carney, 60, said on his first day in office after replacing Justin Trudeau.
The move signals an about-face for Carney, a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, raising broader questions about the best policy tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in today’s tricky geopolitical environment.
“Meaningful carbon prices are a cornerstone of any effective policy framework,” the former investment banker wrote in his 2021 book Value(s): Building a Better World for All. “To meet the 1.5C [global warming] target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets.”
Analysts said Carney’s backpedalling on the carbon tax highlights the success of political attacks by the opposition Conservatives. But, they added, it does not undermine a broader strategy of asking large polluters to pay for their climate-damaging behaviour.
Industrial carbon price remains
While individuals, farmers and small businesses will no longer pay a carbon tax at the gas pump, industrial emitters will still be charged for their carbon footprint under national regulations launched in 2019.
“When it comes to reducing emissions, Canada’s industrial carbon pricing system has done most of the heavy lifting,” said Colleen Kaiser, program director of governance and policy innovation with the Smart Prosperity Institute, a Canadian research group. “It makes sense to continue this program.”
To get voters onside, Carney’s team ditched carbon levies on gasoline and heating oil for consumers – some of whom previously got rebates according to their income – in favour of increased support to go green by retrofitting homes or installing heat pumps.
Experts say using a carrot rather than a stick to catalyse energy-saving behaviour still needs to be funded somehow.
“My sense is the money to pay for that, instead of coming from a consumer carbon price, will come from large heavy emitters,” Chris Severson-Baker, executive director of the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank, told Climate Home. “Something will need to be done to replace what the consumer carbon price was designed to do.”
Popular attitudes on who should pay for climate action have shifted since the carbon tax was announced. In 2020, when asked to choose between protecting the environment and creating jobs, 50 percent of Canadians said jobs should come first, according to polling data from the Consortium on Electoral Democracy, a research group.
Today, amid a cost-of-living crisis, 60 percent prioritise jobs over climate action.
Election politics in play
Against this backdrop, the opposition Conservative Party has rallied around the slogan “axe the tax,” suggesting Carney isn’t serious about doing that beyond a national election expected in the next few months.
“Carbon Tax Carney is pausing the carbon tax until after the election when he no longer needs your vote but still needs your money,” Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre posted on social media on March 14, when Carney became PM. “He’s flip-flopping on his beliefs to trick Canadians into a 4th Liberal government.”
The Conservatives had been far ahead in opinion polls prior to Carney coming onto the national scene and Trump’s tariffs. However, polling data released by Angus Reid this week, indicates a major shift in the political landscape.
“With the Liberals at 42 percent in vote intention, what was a tired, discardable brand just three months ago would be on its way to a fourth term, this time with a majority,” the pollster said.
Aside from ending the consumer carbon tax, specifics on Carney’s green policies remain sketchy. In his first speech after being sworn in as prime minister, he did not mention climate change or carbon taxes.
A spokesperson for Carney referred Climate Home to his official website but did not immediately provide responses to detailed questions about his proposals.
A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, the national government department responsible for climate policy, said it “is currently in a period of transition”.
The oil lobby
In his acceptance speech to lead the Liberal Party, Carney said he wants to make Canada “an energy superpower in both clean and conventional energy”, echoing phrasing from a former Conservative prime minister who had close ties to the oil patch.
Canada is the largest foreign oil exporter to the US and fossil fuels are its most valuable export by far, worth $152 billion CAD in 2023, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the main oil industry lobby group.
Much of this crude comes from the Alberta tar sands, which environmentalists consider some of the world’s dirtiest oil for carbon dioxide emissions. Expanded tar sands production stands in direct opposition to Canada’s pledge to hit net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, analysts say.
But public discussions around building new pipelines from western Canada’s tar sands to consumers in the country’s east have intensified amid Trump’s annexation threats.
The Pembina Institute’s Severson-Baker expects “lots of talk” about new pipelines in the coming months, even though he said “there is no actual economic case behind them”.
“The government truly has failed to reduce emissions from the oil sands sector,” he said. “That highlights how difficult it is for any government in Canada to regulate that sector.”
The CAPP did not respond to specific questions on Carney’s record and Canada’s shifting climate policies, but provided a statement.
“Canada is in a precarious position partly because for too long the federal government neglected the importance of our own energy and economic security,” said the group’s president and CEO, Lisa Baiton. “Following the imminent federal election, the next Government of Canada will need to address these critical issues with urgency, both for Canadians and for the oil and natural gas industry.”
Shifting business priorities
In what analysts consider an olive branch to the oil sector, Carney has removed carbon tax supporter Steven Guilbeault from the environment ministry, shuffling the former Greenpeace activist who regularly drew ire from Alberta politicians to culture minister and other roles.
The new environment minister is Terry Duguid, a lawmaker from Manitoba province who had not previously held a cabinet role.
Carney may also feel the need to appease members of the financial elite he once courted, as they jettison their support for net-zero investment goals.
Back in 2021, the central banker helped spearhead the the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an initiative of major investors that pledged to support companies with clear climate goals.
After the election of Trump, US stalwarts including J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock quit the initiative. Most of Canada’s big banks followed later in another sign of shifting commercial priorities.
Back in 2021, making the financial case for investing in net-zero, Carney told an interviewer at the UN: “Don’t assume that your politician cares about this issue as much as you do.”
How much Canada’s new prime minister cares about the climate today – and the amount of political capital he’s willing to invest in protecting it – will be tested in the coming months by electoral pressures and businesses emboldened by the US dumping its climate promises.
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Canada’s new leader culls carbon tax seen as burden on voters
In the shadow of Ankara’s new international football stadium, a group of visiting journalists – including Climate Home News – perched on tiny chairs watched over by mannequins dressed in old mobile phones, newspapers and bottle tops.
As they sipped Turkish tea in a room meant to educate visitors – mostly schoolchildren – about recycling, they were addressed by Ekrem Yıldırım, lead on zero waste at Türkiye’s environment ministry.
After Yıldırım spoke of Türkiye’s plans to pursue “zero waste”, one journalist asked why the sugar cubes for the tea were individually wrapped in plastic and why water had been served in single-use plastic pots.
Yıldırım accepted that this kind of packaging is a problem and glass or porcelain is preferable. He added that legislation to ban single-use packaging has been introduced to parliament, but is not yet finalised.
The situation symbolised what Turkish experts and environmental campaigners flag as a contradiction between the “zero waste” image that the government – represented by First Lady Emine Erdoğan – presents to the world and the reality of rising Turkish waste generation, significant climate-wrecking methane emissions from landfills and a politically influential industry producing plastics from oil and gas.
International campaign lacks domestic punch
Türkiye’s Zero Waste initiative – which is a vague plan to reduce waste generation and increase recycling, rather than a specific goal to reach zero waste by any specific date – was launched in 2017.
It came at a time when the Turkish government was under fire for its coal mines, its refusal to ratify the Paris Agreement and its brutal response to protests against plans to turn Gezi Park in Istanbul into a barracks and shopping mall.
Ümit Şahin, climate lead at Sabancı University’s Istanbul Policy Center, said the Turkish government saw then, and still sees, the initiative as “a way to build its international reputation on environmental issues”.
“Recycling gives the government something visible to point to,” he said. “It can promote the campaign without taking on powerful fossil fuel interests or changing its development priorities in mining and energy.”
The campaign has been led by Emine Erdoğan, the wife of Türkiye’s long-time president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In 2022, she convinced countries at the UN General Assembly to create an annual International Day of Zero Waste on March 30.
COP31 President Murat Kurum has picked up on the theme, saying that zero waste is “one of the main pillars” of Türkiye’s COP31 presidency. In September, he reminisced at a press briefing in the northern city of Trabzon about old-fashioned Turkish rural life where food waste would be given to animals, ripped clothes would be mended, and new attire was only for religious festivals.
President Erdoğan told leaders at September’s UN General Assembly in New York that an “incredible desire for consumption” was fuelling a “culture of waste”. “We cannot speak of justice in a world where tonnes of food are thrown into the garbage on one side while hundreds of millions of people collect food from garbage containers on the other,” he railed.
Sedat Gündoğdu, a marine biologist and environmental researcher at Türkiye’s Çukurova University, told Climate Home News that zero waste is a worthy concept. But when it comes to putting words into action at home, he said, the government has failed. Official statistics show the amount of waste each person in Türkiye generates has remained broadly unchanged since 2010 and the total annual amount has increased by 15%.
Single-use plastics ban
To help fix this, an European Union-style ban on single-use plastics – like plastic cutlery, cups and stirrers – was reported by state media in March to be working its way through parliament and expected to come into effect on September 1.
But PAGEV, a Turkish plastics industry trade association, argued that such “restrictive” policies had failed in the EU and would damage the Turkish economy and take away jobs.
Despite COP31 shining an international spotlight on the Turkish waste sector, the ban has yet to be approved by President Erdoğan. Gündoğdu and Greenpeace Türkiye campaigner Berk Butan fear that, if it is approved, it will be watered down so that Turkish companies can make single-use plastics in Türkiye even if they can no longer sell them in the country.
The latter restriction, Gündoğdu argued, would be “meaningless” because it cannot be enforced. Similar measures in Germany and Italy have failed, he said, because manufacturers just relabelled single-use products like plastic straws as multiple-use straws.
To close these loopholes, he said, strict definitions and design criteria are needed, which the Turkish legislation does not have. Butan added that single-use plastics could still be made in Türkiye, and then exported, used and dumped abroad, causing the same environmental damage somewhere else.
Türkiye’s other flagship waste prevention measure is a tax on plastic bags, which led to an immediate drop in usage when introduced in 2019. But, despite rampant inflation, the tax has risen from 0.25TL in 2019 to just 1TL ($0.02), meaning it’s several times less in real terms than in 2019.
“You can’t even buy chewing gum with one lira,” said Gündoğdu. “If you see one lira on the ground, you will not take it. So that’s why it’s meaningless.” Butan added that the government did not invest in creating behavioural changes among the public, such as encouraging them to shop with reusable textile tote bags. “They just put in the tax and they didn’t do the rest,” he said.
Landfills tidied up but still leaking methane
While the amount of waste generated keeps rising, there has been progress in dealing with the waste so that it is at least out of sight. Official statistics suggest more and more of it is being collected and, while the vast majority is still sent to landfill rather than recycled, those landfills are now covered and more advanced than they used to be.
On the outskirts of Ankara, waste management company ITC gave Climate Home News a presentation showing one such transformation. A before image shows what the nearby Mamak landfill looked like in 2006 – a huge open pile of garbage known in Türkiye as a “wild landfill”.
Another image shows what the site looks like now with the rubbish covered up with soil. ITC says that Ankara’s garbage is brought to them on trucks, and sorted into recyclables and biodegradable waste, which is then turned into compost or burned for energy. Waste heat is used to grow blueberries, tomatoes and lavender or to warm shoppers in a nearby branch of the Swedish furniture giant Ikea.
But despite this progress, satellite observations from Carbon Mapper shows the site is still leaking methane – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. Exactly how much is unclear from Carbon Mapper’s limited observations but the nearby Sincan landfill leaks about 1,200 kilogrammes of methane an hour into the atmosphere. Climate Home News analysis suggests this does similar damage to the climate as 73,000 petrol cars. ITC did not respond to a request for comment.
In October, a Guardian investigation showed these methane leaks were happening at landfills across Türkiye and are some of the worst in the world. Researchers from the University of California (UCLA) said they were “mind-boggingly large”. Aside from the climate damage, local residents near one Istanbul landfill report a smell so bad they told the Guardian they have to sleep with their windows closed even on hot summer nights.
Waste imports from Europe
Dealing with its own growing waste is difficult enough, but Türkiye also imports mountains of plastic from its European neighbours too. Ever since China restricted waste imports, the European Union has exported more plastic waste to Türkiye than to any other nation by far.
Despite European Commission concerns about how well Türkiye deals with the waste, the trade is expected to grow as an EU ban on exports to non-OECD countries – a category that does not include Türkiye – comes into force on November 21.
The export of waste to Türkiye has seen European countries accused of waste imperialism. Butan and Gündoğdu said Türkiye should ban waste imports. But COP31 President and Turkish environment minister Kurum pushed back on this during a press conference in Trabzon in September.
“You called it waste imperialism,” he said through a translator, but “nobody is forcing anyone” to import waste. He added that handling the waste creates jobs in Türkiye and that it doesn’t matter to the environment where the waste is recycled as long as it is.
But most of Türkiye’s municipal waste is currently not recycled. Turkish official Yıldırım said that the country’s recovery rate is currently around 30%. The most recent statistics available from the EU suggest Türkiye in 2020 had a recycling rate of 12%. The EU country average in 2024 was about 50%.
At the zero waste centre in Ankara, Yıldırım said Türkiye is improving its recycling rate and wants to do even more. The aim, he said, is to reach a rate of 70% by an unspecified date, up there with global frontrunners like Germany.
To achieve that, he said Türkiye is raising awareness of the importance of recycling including through cartoons for children and initiatives for football supporters to collect and redistribute unwanted toys.
As he spoke to journalists, a portrait of the ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ made from buttons, a sultan made from old plastic straws and a horse and wolf made from metal cogs and screws looked on. “The world is something that has been entrusted to us, and waste is something you steal from the future,” said Yıldırım.
Climate Home News’ travel and accommodation for the trip on which much of this article was reported was funded by the Turkish government.
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https://www.climatechangenews.com/2026/11/11/turkiye-pushes-zero-waste-at-cop31-but-is-it-delivering-at-home/
More than 92,000 people have registered to attend the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, potentially making it the largest COP in history.
Carbon Brief analysis of the provisional lists of delegates, published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reveals that more than 14,000 delegates have been registered as “host country guests”.
For comparison, the provisional list for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, last year included only around 1,000 delegates in this category.
As with COP30, Donald Trump’s US government has not sent a delegation. Other no-shows include Israel and Myanmar.
It was reported ahead of the summit that Taliban officials from Afghanistan had been registered for the event as observers; however, there are no delegates from observer states in the provisional lists.
With more than 3,000 “virtual” delegates signed up to attend the summit online, the total number of people registered for the event surpasses 95,000.
Further analysis of the participant lists will be added to this article in due course.
Party delegates
With 92,934 participants registered, COP31 is provisionally the largest COP in history – topping COP28 in Dubai, which was attended by more than 80,000 people.
This total is based on the delegates that have registered to be at the summit in person. The UNFCCC releases the final figures – based on participants collecting a physical badge at the venue – after the summit has ended.
The chart below shows how the provisional figures for COP31 compare to the final totals in previous COPs – going back to COP1 in Berlin in 1995.
The participant lists provided by the UNFCCC are divided between the different types of groups and organisations attending the summit. The largest group at COP31 is for delegates representing parties. These are nation-states, plus the European Union, that have ratified the convention and play a full part in negotiations.
This group adds up to 18,812 delegates – the second largest after COP28.
Membership
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(In keeping with recent COPs, the UNFCCC has published spreadsheets that name every single person that has registered for the summit – excluding support staff. Previously, COPs have typically included thousands of “overflow” participants in which countries and UN agencies could nominate delegates without their names appearing on their official lists.)
For consistency with Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous COPs, the above chart includes overflow delegates as a single group. However, the participant lists do divide the overflow delegates between parties and observer groups. Including the overflow numbers takes the total for party representatives to more than 34,000.
Nations
The map and table below present the delegation size – split between party and overflow badges – for all the countries registered for COP31. The darker the shading, the more delegates that country has signed up. Use the search box to find the data for a specific party.
Unsurprisingly, host nation Turkey has registered the largest delegation for COP31 – with 2,950 people.
Following behind are Brazil (1,994 people), Nigeria (1,506), China (1,021) and Indonesia (978).
The rest of the top 10 is made up of Australia (835), Uganda (627), Italy (607), Japan (588) and Kazakhstan (557).
The UK comes someway down the list with a delegation of 255.