A Royal With Some Sense

In response to the death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, The Global Warming Policy Forum reposted a piece from a few years ago by the (now deceased) British climate skeptic Christopher Booker, entitled "The time Prince Philip wrote to me in praise of my views on global warming."

Written on the occasion of the prince's retirement from public life in 2017, Booker mentioned that he'd been very touched to receive a "long, thoughtful and sympathetic letter" from Philip after the publication of his best-selling book The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? The prince had wanted to correct one minor error in the book which pertained to himself;

I had said he was still a supporter of the World Wildlife Fund, which he co-founded in 1961. In fact, he said, he had withdrawn from the WWF after it switched from its original focus on saving endangered species to relentless campaigning against global warming.

Booker didn't spell out Philip's position on global warming any further than that -- to do so would likely have been to betray a confidence -- but that anecdote, along with a few others (several obituaries have mentioned his recently describing the wind farms popping up all over England as “disgraceful” and “absolutely useless”) paint a pretty clear picture.

Unfortunately, Prince Philp's progeny don't seem to have inherited his good sense. The green enthusiasms of the Prince of Wales are well known. Booker even mentioned that Charles was rather disturbed by his "views on global warming," and that he'd been immediately cut from the heir apparent's Christmas Card list after the publication of his book. We've previously had occasion to comment on the vacuity of Prince Charles's younger son, Harry, and his American bride, la Markle. And his elder son, William, is in on the act as well, recently tacitly endorsing Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset in a recent speech, saying:

All of us, across all sectors of society, and in every corner of the globe must come together to fundamentally reset our relationship with nature and our trajectory as a species.

This generation of royals are clearly grasping at celebrity, which is why they've embraced the self-righteous environmentalism so common among the glitterati. What they seem to have missed is that celebrity and royalty are diametrically opposed concepts, the one obsessed with self-assertion, with proclaiming "my truth," and the other  concerned with duty, honor, and self-abnegation. You don't have to be a monarchist -- I am not -- to appreciate that Philip was a man who embodied these latter qualities.

Britain would be better off if his children and grandchildren took after him.