Just Shut Up Old Man Or We Won't Put the Shiny Hat on your Head

Prince Charles has said that “profound changes” to the global economic system are needed in order to avert environmental catastrophe, in an uncompromising speech delivered in front of an audience of senior business leaders and politicians.

The heir to the throne – often criticised for his meddling in political affairs – argued that ending the taxpayer subsidies enjoyed by coal, oil and gas companies could reduce the carbon emissions driving climate change by an estimated 13%.

Although the prince’s passion for environmental causes is well known, the speech delivered on Thursday evening in St James’s Palace, London was particularly pointed in its criticism of companies that protected vested interests and came with a report that proposed raising taxes on them.

Speaking at a event for the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), of which he is a patron, the prince complained that “the irresistible power of ‘business as usual’ has so far defeated every attempt to ‘rewire’ our economic system in ways that will deliver what we so urgently need”.
He said: “Yet if we are to limit climate change, conserve resources and keep ecosystems functioning, while at the same time improving the health and wellbeing of billions of people – including the several billion who are projected to be added later this century – then we will need to see profound changes.”

The prince also attacked what he characterised as the wastefulness of modern society. “The challenge now is to go much further and much faster, progressively eliminating waste by developing a circular economy that mimics nature’s loops and cycles, rather than perpetuating our largely unsustainable and linear way of doing things,” he said.

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Cue the usual complaints about interfering in politics, and How dare you have an opinion on anything when your lifestyle is funded by the taxpayer.  As if Charles asked to be born into that family...into that role.  His mother, who entered the monarchy rather unexpectedly at a young age had a fairly straightforward (if unasked-for) role of maintaining relative stability between the traditional institutions of Empire and the New, which she has performed admirably, though hardly ever knowing another life, outside of her early girlhood.  Charles has grown up in the declining post-Imperial world, living entirely in the shadow of his mother, and rather than simply accepting a future (if now, ever) role as figurehead, has tried to find some way to make the monarchy relevant beyond the role of pure figurehead, a role that could just as easily be filled by a stuffed doll, by a religious icon, by a tamed zoo-animal.  For which I can't blame him.

He's tried to find a niche for himself, and had greater success in some areas, such as those relating to the environment, than others, such as when he's interjected himself into discussions of architecture or popular culture.  I rather suspect that Charles sees himself as future-monarch as 'The Conscience of Britain'.  His son on the other hand, I suspect* would willingly toss anything potentially political or controversial aside, and accept his role as being granted a handsome lifestyle with the price being that he has to wave at the commoners periodically, give up more than a little of his family's privacy, and give a political speech once a year or so in which he is a puppet into which the words, however outrageous, of the ruling party at the time are poured.  Can't blame him for that, in his way.

With his own advancing age, and the continuing absurd desire of some in the public to see him forsake the throne for his son, in the name of Saint Diana, we may never see what sort of king Charles would make**.  I for one, would welcome Charles' final ascendancy to the throne, if only to see which particular individuals' heads explode, and how.


* Lot of suspecting going on here, huh ?

** We still don't know of course what his actual regnal name would be.