King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down
By Rupert Darwall
May 04, 2023
This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history. No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly. Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.
In 2000, the BBC invited the then-Prince of Wales to give the last of the 2000 Millennium Reith lectures on sustainable development. Charles spoke of his belief in the “bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which sets limits to our ambitions and define the parameters of sustainable development.” He name-checked the founders of the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson and Fritz Schumacher, authors, respectively, of Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful. He embraced the precautionary principle, warning that the absence of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences from genetically modified (GM) crops should not be taken as a green light to exceed nature’s limits.
Instead of looking to science for all the answers, mankind should work with the grain of nature, Charles argued. If a fraction of the investment going into GM technologies was devoted to improving traditional systems of agriculture, “the results would be remarkable,” he declared. He then praised fellow Reith lecturer Vandana Shiva, an environmental campaigner and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, for condemning large-scale commercial farming “so persuasively and so convincingly.”
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/05/04/king_charles_iii_has_a_climate_record_to_live_down_897662.html
