Prince Charles seems to be way ahead of other public figures, not only in terms of taking a stand on global warming, but also in making changes to his personal life. He is pursuing many of the themes that we have been reporting on: sustainable food and agriculture, reducing one’s ecological footprint, and even peak oil (see the Energy Bulletin article The Prince and the Peak).
-BA (at EB)
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Charles comes clean on his carbon realm
Christopher Morgan and Robert Booth, Times (UK)
THE Prince of Wales plans to label his Duchy Originals range with details of the greenhouse gases emitted in making the products, which range from sausages to shampoos.
Under the scheme, to be announced by Prince Charles this week, every stage will be analysed to quantify how much climate-changing gas is released in producing each of the 200 items.
Some restaurants and food producers already display “food miles” – the distance an item has travelled before being sold. But Charles wants Duchy Originals, which is already mostly organic, to go further.
A Clarence House official said the idea was to give consumers the most comprehensive green information available on any product in Britain. Prince Charles wants “people to know the cost of their food in greenhouse gas terms as well as in terms of pounds and pence”, she said.
The prince’s latest green foray follows his instruction to aides last month to use bicycles to help cut down the carbon emissions of his household. Other eco-friendly moves have included experimenting with biodynamics, a form of organic farming that involves planting according to the phases of the moon.
The prince will outline the Duchy Originals plan at a meeting on Wednesday at St James’s Palace attended by business, political, religious and charity leaders, including Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Lord Browne, chief executive of BP. Duchy Originals, founded in 1990, makes a profit of about £1m a year, which goes to the prince’s charities.
The company is preparing a “life cycle analysis” of each of its products to quantify the emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other gases blamed for warming the climate.
(3 Dec 2006)
Prince recruits Gore for ‘green’ campaign
Andrew Alderson, Telegraph (UK)
Theirs is an unlikely alliance: the heir to the throne, the leader of the Church of England and the man who so nearly got the most powerful job in the world.
But the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Al Gore will this week launch a new project to encourage big business to become more “green”.
Prince Charles is said by aides to be “totally committed” to the scheme in which companies will be urged to assess – and reverse – the damage they are doing to the environment.
The Sunday Telegraph can also reveal that Prince Charles recently held a private meeting at Highgrove, his country home, with Mr Gore, the former presidential candidate, to discuss their shared passion for saving the environment.
Now Mr Gore has agreed to provide a video message, which will be screened to nearly 200 politicians, businessmen and other guests at St James’s Palace on Wednesday night. The former vice-president was in Britain in September to promote his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which warns that the world has just 10 years to save itself.
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Prince Charles will be one of three speakers at the launch of his Accounting for Sustainability project. The others are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of BP, the petroleum giant.
(3 Dec 2006)
The greening of Highgrove
Andrew Alderson, Telegraph (UK)
Few question the Prince of Wales’s green credentials. For those who might, however, he is about to dispel any vestige of doubt.
As part of a wide-ranging package of “green” measures to make his country home more environmentally friendly, he is planning not only to go easy on water consumption with the odd eco-friendly kettle or two but also to produce his own bio-diesel – organically, of course.
Royal sources say that Prince Charles is determined to lead by example because he believes that climate change is “the greatest challenge to face mankind” and should be tackled with greater urgency.
The prince has introduced new measures at Highgrove House, near Tetbury, in Gloucestershire, in recent months to save both water and energy. They include the collection of rainwater to flush lavatories and irrigate land, a reed-bed sewage system to process waste, and eco-friendly insulation and double glazing to increase heating efficiency.
At Home Farm, the prince’s 900-acre organic farm near Highgrove, there are plans to produce and sell bio-diesel – an environmentally friendly motor fuel made from rape-seed oil and vegetable fats.
The prince has also started using solar panels to provide heating and hot water at Home Farm and is now looking into introducing them at the main house.
The reed-bed waste system is an artificial wetland that converts sewage back to clean water, while allowing the solid matter to be returned to the soil in the form of manure.
The Sunday Telegraph has learned that Prince Charles brought in his latest green measures after an outside review at the 18th-century Highgrove, by Forum for the Future, a charity that works with business, the public sector and others to build “a sustainable future”.
The new measures come on top of now-routine ones that the prince has pursued in recent years, including the recycling of paper and household waste. He has also introduced eco-friendly kettles and other electrical appliances at Highgrove and Clarence House, his London home.
Prince Charles spoke of his concerns about global warming in an interview for the BBC last year. “We must think of future generations. We should be treating the whole issue with a far greater degree of priority than is happening now. We must take action to reduce pollution,” he said.
“If you think about your, and my, grandchildren, this is what really worries me. I don’t want them, if I’m still alive by then, to say, ‘Why didn’t you do something about it, when you could have done?’ – and this is the point.”
Prince Charles is going “green”, too, over transport. When in London, he and his staff sometimes use a Toyota Prius, one of a new breed of “hybrid” cars which combines a gas engine and an emissions-free electric motor for fuel economy.
Furthermore, the prince is “offsetting” his carbon emissions through another outside agency, Climate Care…
(29 July 2006)
Sounds like permaculture to me. -BA
Queen Elizabeth Upset At Charles’ “Green” Replacements
Maira Oliveira, All Headline News
Even though Prince Charles wants to make everything around him green and environment friendly, first he must double-check with the lady who runs the palace before taking the plunge.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is reportedly furious with her son Prince Charles for demanding all the royal family abandon their private jets.
The 58-year-old royal has released green plans to snub the royal helicopter and plane in favor of public transport and he is urging his family to do the same. However, his 80-year-old mother fears the new travel arrangements will be a security nightmare.
…Charles hopes to have his new travel arrangements in place for him and wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, by February. He has even ordered his staff to travel by bicycle when they check on arrangements ahead of his royal engagements, and he has also advised aides to find a more environmentally friendly fuel for his fleet of cars.
One source said,, “He wants to be known as the Green Prince and to leave what he calls a small carbon footprint and there is a lot of support for that. But there has been quite a bit of hair-pulling over this one. It is all well and good saying we have to go totally green but there are a lot of difficulties involved in sorting this out.”
(27 Nov 2006)
A familiar story for anyone who’s tried making environmental changes that affect other people in the household. -BA
The Prince and the Peak
Shepherd Bliss, Energy Bulletin
England’s Prince Charles convened and keynoted a dialogue in San Francisco on “Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Business Action” on Nov. 7. The University of Cambridge Programme for Industry organized the event and invited 300 high-level guests from corporations, government, and non-profit groups to attend.
“We simply can’t go on as we are,” Prince Charles said to the select audience, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. He cited statistics and stories about global warming and oil depletion, contending, “Somehow we have to find the courage to reassert the once commonplace belief that human beings have a duty to act as the stewards of creation.”
…”Peaking of World Oil Production: We Must Prepare Now” [was the title of] Richard Heinberg’s presentation to open the day’s dialogue. Heinberg’s books include The Party’s Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies and Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World.
“The significance of the gathering was mainly who was there and the fact that Peak Oil was number one on the agenda,” Heinberg said in an interview with Energy Bulletin. Most of the guests were members of major corporations (Ford, Shell, Dow Chemical, Daimler Chrysler, Cisco, Agilent), mayors (San Francisco, Oakland) and other government representatives (NASA, CalEPA), banks, utilities (Pacific Gas and Electric, Calpine) and universities, as well as a few environmentalists. Most were major members of the financial elite or their representatives.”
…In an email after the day Heinberg reflected, “The Prince’s lecture was an excellent sermon on ecological economics. He used phrases like ‘natural limits in resources’ and ‘rapidly rising oil prices.’ To me, the greatest significance of the occasion was that this was a very high-profile event with peak oil at the top of the bill.”
(10 Nov 2005)
