Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Carney

Carney’s line weaponizes a quiet panic: the market’s clock is broken. Calling climate change “a different horizon” doesn’t just mean it’s far away; it means it sits outside the timeframes that actually govern financial behavior. Traders live by quarters, CEOs by compensation cycles, asset managers by benchmark years, politicians by elections. Climate risk, by contrast, arrives in decades and then all at once - not as a neat, discountable trend but as sudden repricing, stranded assets, migration shocks, litigation, and physical destruction. The “tragedy” is the mismatch, not the science.

The subtext is an indictment dressed up as technocratic realism. Carney isn’t scolding individual greed so much as pointing to an institutional logic: finance is brilliant at converting the near future into numbers and notoriously bad at valuing what cannot be cleanly priced today. If risk models rely on historical data, climate change is the ultimate model-breaker: it invalidates the past as a guide to the future. That makes it easy for “most actors” to treat it as a moral issue or PR problem rather than a core threat to solvency.

Context matters: Carney popularized the “tragedy of the horizon” while steering central banking circles toward climate stress tests and disclosure regimes. He’s arguing that without policy forcing markets to look up and out - carbon pricing, mandatory reporting, prudential regulation - rational actors will keep behaving rationally in the short term, right up until the long term arrives with a bill.