Spare Us the Lectures on Climate Change, Prince William
Fraser Myers has written a great piece on Spiked, lambasting the hypocrisy of Prince William for lecturing us about climate change at the Platinum Jubilee concert on Saturday night. As Fraser points out, he arrived at the concern in a helicopter and thanks to all the helicopters, private jets, motorcades and vast palaces, the Royal Family probably produces a carbon footprint 50 times greater than that of the average U.K. family.
The royals’ hypocrisy on the climate issue is a recurring phenomenon. Who could forget Prince Harry taking a private jet to a Google-run retreat in Sicily, where he delivered a lecture, in his bare feet, on the dangers of climate change? Prince Charles is by far the most vocal of the royals on environmental issues. He proudly displays his green credentials by driving a cheese-powered Aston Martin and having conversations with his plants. But he also has by far the highest carbon footprint of all the royals, largely due to the staggering amount of land he owns.
The Jubilee speech was not Prince William’s first foray into green politics, either. In the past, he has bemoaned the potential impact of space tourism on the planet, he has discussed climate change with David Attenborough at the World Economic Forum, and he launched the Earthshot Prize for green-friendly innovation.
All this green advocacy might all sound harmless – charitable, even. But it is anything but. While the likes of Prince William talk in vague soundbites about ‘restoring our planet’ and ‘taking better care of our world’, what this means in practice is becoming clearer by the day. The Net Zero agenda represents a significant curtailment of our quality of life and an enormous constraint on economic growth. In the U.K., climate policies are already contributing to a near-unprecedented spike in energy prices, causing enormous pain to households and industry.
And this is just the beginning. The UK’s Climate Change Committee believes that more than 60 per cent of future emissions reductions will not come from improvements in technology, which might be painless and unobjectionable, but from ‘behaviour change and individual choices’. Needless to say, these will not be voluntary changes. Efficient, cheap and proven methods of producing energy, heating our homes and moving around will be phased out, banned or taxed very heavily. More expensive and less reliable eco-friendly methods will be encouraged or mandated.
These measures aren’t the inevitable consequence of the situation we find ourselves in. They represent a political choice to place environmental concerns above our liberties and living standards. And their impact will be felt most by the least well-off, who will be priced out of the modern conveniences that we today take for granted. It is simply untenable for an uber-privileged member of the royal family to effectively demand harsh eco-austerity for the public while posing as above the political fray.
Worth reading in full.
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‘They represent a political choice to place environmental concerns above our liberties and living standards.’
I don’t think so. They know it’s a lie. His class has been around long enough to know how good feudalism was for the barons. Don’t think we should credit them with ethics, principles or concern for the planet.
As I have said before on DS, Charlie boy has visions of a return to a Constable landscape where he and his sprogs tour their estates waving at their peasantry in return for the doffed caps – whether the serfs wished to doff or not.
Next Tuesdays the whole bloody lot of them.
50 times? You must be having a laugh.
The average UK home is about 700 square feet.
Buckingham Palace alone is over 800,000 square feet.
That is more than 1,000 times more just there.
And most families don’t have several homes like the Royals do. Balmoral, Sandringham, plus the residences of each of the family members.
50 times. They wish.
I must admit Stewart on seeing that it occurred to me that Mr Myers is clearly worse than me at sums and fings.
Yes. Didn’t that autistic Swedish child-saint Greta wear a plastic mask too?
Yes, here we go…
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“Prince William would do well to wind his neck in.”
A highly commendable way for Fraser Myers to end this piece on the grossly insulting and gratuitous hypocrisy of the Windsors.
Let me repeat – way past their ‘best before’ date.
I felt myself physically retching at William’s virtue-signalling speech, and Fraser Myers here has brilliantly articulated why I, and so many other like-minded people, averse as we are to hysterical sentimentality, reacted that way to it. And it’s nothing to do with helicopters, motorcades or the hypocrisy of preaching net zero carbon fantasies. The revulsion I felt had instead to do with the exploitation of yet another opportunity to spray climate activist propaganda all over an eagerly awaiting crowd. It had to do with the overtly political focus on one single aspect of environmental health at the expense of all others. I have always argued the case that environmental health should be prioritized over other concerns, and still do. But at a time during which the Amazon rainforest, the “green lung” of the planet is being decimated like at no other time in history, we choose instead to advocate zero of the very substance that nourishes it, and express no concern that this very lifeblood of the planet (the thing that provides a vast proportion of the world’s rainfall) is disappearing at an alarming rate. The net-zero agenda is precisely that: an agenda. Nothing more. And it catastrophically takes our… Read more »
If you are surrounded all day by sycophants saying “Yes your Highness, no your Highness” and you don’t have the intelligence to realise it’s all bovine faeces then you’ll carry on speaking crap because you are too stupid to realise what you’re doing.
The Royal Family would be well advised to reconsider their advocacy of political policies. The Net Zero agenda is highly controversial and they should not want to find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion in the future.
Even if it was not highly controversial they should hold their opinions to themselves, always supposing that in all cases they are THEIR opinions and not the scribbles of political advisers.
I do not recall HM The Queen giving her opinion on political integration and the Maastricht Treaty in her Christmas broadcasts – quite rightly we did not know her personal opinion.