When Mark Carney became governor of the Bank of England a dozen years ago, he and his wife Diana flaunted their achingly green credentials.
She waged war on teabags, declaring that they were harmful to the planet.
He ruffled feathers in the staid corridors of Threadneedle Street by telling bankers the financial system was vulnerable to shocks from climate change well before it was fashionable to say so.
Such was Carney’s kudos in the arena that he was made UN special envoy for climate change and finance, an appointment to send Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, er, green with envy.
No doubt it is still loose-leaf only in the teapot chez Carney, but it didn’t take him long in the job as prime minister of Canada to discover his inner enviro-pragmatist.
Faced with Donald Trump threatening annexation and turmoil on world energy markets, Carney very sensibly ignored yelping from the green lobby and shifted towards a more tolerant stance on fossil fuels.
Drill ban: Energy secretary Ed Miliband (pictured) appears reluctant to open up the North Sea to drilling despite the Britain facing soaring energy costs
It’s a sharp contrast with Miliband’s attitude and it forms the background to Shell’s takeover of Canadian operator Arc Resources, its biggest deal in more than a decade.
Arc works in the Montney shale basin in Alberta and British Columbia, where the FTSE oil giant already has assets.
Shell says the deal will boost reserves and help it deliver on its production targets, and that Arc is a low-cost, low carbon-intensity producer.
Back in the UK, permissions to proceed with the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields in the North Sea remain beached on a government desk.
Miliband is content to see UK industry saddled with exorbitant energy costs and our North Sea bounty being squandered. He should take a lesson from the Carney playbook.
Every Lidl hurts
The mood in the retail sector may be darkening, as the CBI points out in its latest report, but the relentless expansion of the Lidl empire continues. No thanks to the Government.
The German discount grocer planted its first store in the UK in 1994, opened its thousandth supermarket in East Grinstead, Sussex, last year and has just published a wish-list of sites.
The hope is to open more than 50 new outlets in the next 12 months. There is even a finders’ fee for anyone who identifies a previously unknown location that leads to an actual store being built.
Ryan McDonnell, the chief executive, believes there is room for at least one more Lidl in virtually every town and city.
These would not just be handy places to shop, but would also create thousands of jobs and support UK food producers as two-thirds of Lidl’s products are from British suppliers.
What’s to stop them? The planning system, that’s what. As Lidl’s UK property chief complained this week, the planning system moves at a sometimes glacial pace, despite promises from the Government to get Britain building.
It’s refreshing to see Lidl in growth mode in defiance of everything Chancellor Rachel Reeves has thrown at retailers along with the upward pressures on food inflation courtesy of Trump.
Unfortunately, no business can entirely avoid the dead hand of this government.
Tech alert
It’s a big week for British savers with money in global funds. Whether they realise it or not, large chunks of their investment are likely to be in the Magnificent Seven tech stocks that dominate markets in the US and beyond.
Five of the seven – Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook and Microsoft – are about to publish their results for the first three months of the year.
These will be even more avidly watched than usual given the febrile mood over the Middle East, tariffs and the threat of a private credit meltdown.
Artificial intelligence is the biggest spending spree known to humanity. Tech giants are making circular investments in one another that arguably are ramping up the vulnerabilities in the system.
Many worry that AI will take jobs from humans. This is already happening and not just in ‘legacy’ industries: Big Tech itself is cutting thousands of staff.
The vast outlays are fuelled by FOMO – or fear of missing out – but no one knows what the returns will be, when they will arrive and the extent of the risks and trade-offs involved.
The Bank of England is right to warn that share values do not reflect the reality.
Alex Brummer is away
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