Just over 10 years ago, the then governor of the Bank of England (a certain Mark Carney) delivered a speech at Lloyds of London which became known as the “Tragedy of the Horizon” speech. It was widely praised at that time. A few extracts:
“The challenges currently posed by climate change pale in significance compared with what might come. The far-sighted amongst you are anticipating broader global impacts on property, migration and political stability, as well as food and water security. So why isn’t more being done to address it?
Climate change is the Tragedy of the Horizon.
We don’t need an army of actuaries to tell us that the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors – imposing a cost on future generations that the current generation has no direct incentive to fix. That means beyond the business cycle; beyond the political cycle; and beyond the horizon of technocratic authorities like central banks.”
“In other words, once climate change becomes a defining issue for financial stability, it may already be too late”.
OK, that still sounds a bit dry and dusty. But in the run up to the climate conference in Paris later that year, with the world seriously concerned at the warnings of climate scientists at that time, it was hugely influential.
For the next five years, Carney was the go-to guy on the international circuit, strutting his stuff from one keynote to another, authoritatively advocating for major shifts in global capital markets to ensure that capital flowed into those investments that would reinforce prospects for financial stability rather than undermine them.
He hit his high point in launching the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) at the COP in Glasgow in 2021 – corralling the support of hundreds of financial players, commanding between them more than $100 trillion of assets under management.
Since then, it’s all gone to shit. GFANZ is no more. The Net Zero Banking Alliance is no more. Trump’s return to the White House earlier this year gave every single one of the CEOs of those companies all the cover they needed to revert to their short term, profit maximising investment strategies. Investment in new fossil fuels rose again in 2024.
No point beating around this particular bush: they’re an utterly despicable bunch of greedy, rapacious human beings. But when Mark Carney next has a chance to rub shoulders with them, now as Prime Minister of Canada, he will fit right in. In fact, they’ll be toasting him to the rafters as a ‘Net Zero sinner’ restored to the very bosom of the Fossil Fuel Incumbency.
In April this year, exploiting the loathing of Canadians for all things Trump, Carney’s Liberals swept to victory over the Conservatives led by Pierre Poilievre. He was seen then to be Trump’s poodle, and far too friendly to Canada’s hugely powerful fossil fuel interests, particularly in Alberta, the heartland of Canada’s enormous fossil fuel reserves.
However, in seven short months, Carney has revealed himself as much more fossil-fuel-friendly than poor little Poilievre ever dared to be, and in the process to have reduced the millions of low-carbon words he put out there between 2015 and 2021 to a barrel full of bitumen-rich slurry.
From the start, he refused to meet with the Canadian government’s own advisers (the Net Zero Advisory Body), opening himself up to massive ridicule in propounding a new ‘Climate Competitiveness Strategy’. He moved rapidly to roll back on Canada’s well-established vehicle emissions standards, and really got into his stride in getting rid of Canada’s carbon tax – an inadequate market mechanism, to be sure, but sort of useful as an indicator of ‘more to come’. He fast-tracked two new Liquefied Natural Gas projects, and cut off any new support for renewable energy.
You might imagine that would be enough to secure his new oily credentials. Not a bit of it. On November 27th, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Danielle Smith (the premier of Alberta and an out-and-out climate denier) to work together to build a new pipeline transporting high-carbon bitumen from the tar sands of Alberta to a port in the north of British Columbia.
This decision has been met with outright fury. Two members of the Net Zero Advisory Body handed in their resignation, including co-chair Simon Donner who had previously ridiculed Carney as being stupider than most high-school students in promising “to deliver decarbonised oil”. A senior Minister, Steven Guilbeault, a real climate expert in his own right, also resigned. And the powerful coalition of First Nations people in British Columbia put him on notice that they would fight his insane pipeline proposal every step of its “seismically fraught” way.
How should we respond to such a dramatic volte-face? My initial answer: may he burn in as hot a version of hell as he is helping to create here on Earth.
That may be a bit harsh. So, let’s take advantage of this ‘teachable moment’ to create a new league table of ‘climate betrayers’. Climate deniers and climate delayers are so yesterday. We urgently need to tap into the depths of the kind of corruption, short termism, and rank, decadal hypocrisy that Mark Carney now epitomises.
(I’ve got a couple of other candidates for this Climate Betrayers league table – but I’ll save them up for another ‘venting day’!)
Mind you, we should perhaps have seen this coming. Revisiting that tragedy of The Horizon speech back in 2015, the signals of a future betrayal were all there: a fixation with ‘voluntary’ approaches, with the usual aversion to effective, government-driven regulation; an over-emphasis on ‘ disclosure’ and ‘investor-relevant information’; repeated caveats regarding the limitations of central banks etc.
If you’re interested in a proper forensic analysis of how the tragedy of The Horizon speech has played out over the last 10 years, check in on Carbon Trackers recent report: https://carbontracker.org/carneys-tragedy-of-the-horizon-and-how-to-break-it/ rather than having to settle for this exasperated rant.
But can you blame me? Mark Carney is an intelligent, once-thoughtful man. He knows his climate science inside out. He’s seen for himself the increasingly severe economic damage that climate-induced disasters are already inflicting on Canadian citizens. That ‘long-term horizon’ that he used to bang on about in his climate-friendly heyday is creeping closer and closer, year by year.
And that’s our real tragedy: constantly being betrayed by self-serving charlatans such as Mark Carney.
Jonathon Porritt, 9 December 2025
Image attribution: Policy Exchange, modified by the author, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0
