Carney effect: The G-7's New Cast Bodes Well for the World's Future

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney is likely to place climate action at the forefront of the G-7 agenda in future meetings

- INDIRA RAJARAMAN

As military warfare grew menacing and fearsome in June, the 50th anniversary G-7 meeting in mid-June became a non-event. But because it was held in Canada during a Canadian presidency of the G-7, it highlighted the arrival on the world stage of Mark Carney, the new prime minister of the host country, who has a global reputation for foresight and adroit management of economic turbulence.

Carney could mark an important start in recognition by the G-7 leadership of the role they must play in the fight to contain the usage of—and damage from—fossil fuels.

Paradoxically, the immediate fallout feared from the West Asia war was that it would choke supplies of those very fuels on which we in India, and the rest of the world, depend so critically for our day-to-day needs. War itself is the most wasteful and indiscriminate use of fossil fuels.

Carney has the distinction of having been governor not merely of the Bank of Canada over a five-year term from 2008 to 2013 beginning six months prior to the global financial crisis, but subsequently of the Bank of England over the seven years from 2013 to 2020, which covered Brexit in 2016 and post-Brexit political turmoil.