W hatever his flaws as a politician turn out to be, Mark Carney does at least possess self-awareness. “You’re supposed to campaign in poetry and govern in prose,” he said in his final campaign speech on April 27th, on the eve of the election. “As the assembled media will tell you, I campaigned in prose. So I’m going to govern in econometrics.”

The ascendance of Carney as a climate prime minister who didn’t talk about climate is all the more striking when considered alongside last year’s election in Mexico of Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist who also avoided talking about the issue in her campaign.