Final Word from Thursday, March 20, 2025

The selection of Mark Carney by the Liberal Party as the prime minister of Canada has a potentially important bearing on the Czech Republic. As governor of the Bank of England, Carney threw down the gauntlet to the fossil-fuel industry on Sept. 19, 2015, by issuing a blunt warning that investors faced "potentially huge" losses from climate-change action that could make vast reserves of oil, coal and gas "literally unburnable." The fossil-fuel assets could be "stranded," he said. We wrote about this at the time, saying that it could be a risk for ČEZ and EPH. Carney later served as the U.N. special envoy on climate action, and then as special adviser on climate finance to U.K. PM Boris Johnson. In Feb. 2020, Carney said that climate investments "could become the greatest commercial opportunity of our time." For some people they did; for others it has been a disaster. Czechs are now trying to pull out of the Green Deal, yet they're also heading into a coalition of the willing with Carney and others who share his views on the climate situation. Before officially joining this new coalition, Czechs need to know what exactly they're signing up for. [ Czech Republic Ukraine European Union EU central ]