I want to tell you today about two potential bright spots.

The most obvious joy, of course, came last night in Canada, where citizens of the not-51st-state rejected a Trump-lite figure named Pierre Poilievre (who had been leading by 23 points on January 20!) and instead elected Mark Carney to lead their country. This has been correctly interpreted by all as a reaction to the ham-handed bullying of the canned ham currently resident in the White House. But though he was elected a little by accident (albeit after a brilliant campaign) it means something far more: in Carney we now have the world leader who knows more than any of his peers about climate change. And who knows roughly twenty times as much about climate and energy economics as anyone else in power. He may turn out to be a truly crucial figure in the fight to turn the climate tide.

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I’ve been watching Carney for a long time. A graduate, of course, of both Harvard and Goldman Sachs, he was governor of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis and performed admirably enough that the queen asked him over to run the Bank of England. (It’s probably not quite how that works, but close enough). While in that job, he had the fun of trying to deal with the UK’s Brexit decision, and by all accounts again performed better than one might have expected. So now he gets the task of cleaning up after Trump’s insane tariffs.

But actually it’s the much bigger mess—the one in the atmosphere—that I suspect has long interested him most. In 2014, at a World Bank panel, he quite forthrightly pointed out that we would need to leave the “vast majority” of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we were at all serious about holding the increase in the temperature of the planet below two degrees. This was, on the one hand, clearly obvious to anyone who had looked at the physics, but on the other hand not something that most leaders were willing to say at the time, or to this day. Those of us who had recently launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign found it to be a great boost—one of three or four crucial moments that turned this into one of the largest anti-corporate campaigns in history.

A year later, wearing a tux and speaking at an opulent dinner to the “names” who run the premier insurance brokerage Lloyds of London, Carney went further, giving one of the most important speeches of the climate era. It is well worth reading in its entirety, but here is the crucial section

This talk came in the run-up to the Paris climate talks, and it was one important reason they succeeded; Carney’s sober warning, and his insistence on the need for disclosure by countries and companies of their emissions, helped smooth the way for what is still the high water mark of climate progress.

And the next year, in 2016, he gave the Arthur Burns Memorial Lecture in Berlin. Again, it is worth reading in its entirety, but for a man who is now fully a politician, here is an important passage.

The man who said those clear and bold words now finds himself leading a nation hard hit by climate change: Canada has a front row seat the melt of the Arctic, which is the fastest-heating part of the earth; it has watched its boreal forests burn like never before in recent years.

But the man who said those bold words also finds himself leading a nation that contains Alberta, whose vast pool of tarsands makes its one of the biggest carbon deposits on planet earth.

His predecessor Justin Trudeau could never figure out how to square those facts, because they are not easy to square (and also because Trudeau was a nepo baby to the max). But also because he came into power at a moment when fossil fuel was still cheaper than renewable energy, and hence clearly valuable. Carney comes into power when that equation has flipped: we now live on a planet where wind and........

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