“For years, I haven’t eaten meat and fish on two days a week and I don’t eat dairy products on one day a week. If more did that, you would reduce a lot of the pressure.”

In a major interview with the BBC this week, Prince Charles discussed how everyone can do their bit in the fight against climate change.

Personally, the lifelong environmentalist has limited his meat and dairy consumption ‘for years’ and also uses bio fuel to run his cars.

“I haven’t eaten meat and fish on two days a week and I don’t eat dairy products on one day a week,” the heir to the British throne said. “If more did that, you would reduce a lot of the pressure.

“…The business of what we eat of course is important.” ⠀

Charles also said he had converted his 51-year-old Aston Martin, to run on what he described as “surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process.”

Other cars in his fleet have been adapted to run on biodiesel made from used cooking oil.

He however did acknowledge that low carbon travel still remains a huge challenge especially in aviation, but hopes that flying “will become easier and more sustainable” when new bio-fuels - using carbon captured from the air with sustainably sourced hydrogen – become available. 

On other fronts, the prince informed that heating systems in some of his royal residences use biomass boiler systems while solar panels are installed at his London Clarence House and on the farm buildings of Highgrove, his home in Gloucestershire, as a way to reduce his carbon footprint.

In the interview, Charles also deplored the impacts of intensive animal agriculture, industrial fishing, and deforestation on the planet and its beings.

He denounced the ‘endless perverse’ subsidies in industrial fishing and intensive animal agriculture industries calling it ‘crazy’ and one of the reasons for scaling emissions.

His views on the COP26 summit

Speaking about the two-week COP26 summit in Glasgow starting on 31 October, he said he worried that world leaders would “just talk”.

While refusing to comment on whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s UK government was doing enough against the climate crisis, he warned that the failure to act would have dire consequences, saying the world had taken “far too long” to take climate change seriously.

He added that his message to world leaders ahead of COP26 would be: “This is a last-chance saloon, literally, because if we don’t really take the decisions that are vital now, it’s going to be almost impossible to catch up.”

 On the topic of eco-activists, the 72-year-old said he clearly understood their frustration, and agreed with Greta Thunberg’s view that more action, rather than words, or “blah, blah, blah” as she put it, was needed from world leaders.

“I totally understand the frustration, the difficulty is how do you direct that frustration in a way that is more constructive rather than destructive. The point is that people should really notice how despairing so many young people are,” he noted.

“The problem is to get action on the ground,” Charles added.

• Read: Boris Johnson says climate activists are “irresponsible crusties”

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Mohsina Dodhiya

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