Prince Charles: 96 months to save the world

Prince Charles delivers another argument for the end of monarchy. He’s not just a fear-mongering oligarch, he’s a very specific fear-mongering oligarch.

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales has warned in a grandstand speech which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.

And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the "age of convenience" was over.

Compare this with Mr Obama’s assertion during the campaign that, "We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.” It looks like the message is clear: individual freedom is on the outs.

The environmental elitists are inextricably bound to the idea that free market is bad, that capitalism is bad, that individuals buying the “wrong” things and controlling the temperature in our homes is bad. The only way to address climate change is to destroy the liberties that allow people to decide for themselves how to spend their own money and live their lives. We can argue about how best to generate electricity and power our cars. Those are technological issues. But to the statists, the technological problems are secondary to their desire to centralize control and to remake the world into one where they get to say what we make, what we buy, how we live.

It’s not an issue of technology to them. It’s an issue of politics.

Despite his attack on the materialism of the modern age, the Prince has been criticized for his own indulgences, including dozens of staff to run his homes and hundreds of thousands of pounds spent travelling around the world. While his private estates on the Duchy of Cornwall generate record profits his tax bill was lower than the year before.

Last night the Prince said: "But for all its achievements, our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the Earth and we must face up to the fact that the Earth cannot afford to support it. Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts – and paradoxically also facing calls for a return to so-called ‘old-fashioned’, traditional banking – so Nature’s life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too.

He’s a hypocrite. He’s a man of extreme privilege, wealth and property telling the rest of us to stop consuming the world’s resources. He wants to stop us from ever acquiring any level of prestige or power or wealth that’s even a fraction of what he has. He invokes the economic crisis that was primarily caused by government policy as an argument against capitalism and freedom. He’s always been a goofy buffoon, but now he’s a dangerous goofy buffoon.