It seems Charles III wasn’t just crowned King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the weekend. Apparently he also became the king of the world. “The world has a climate king,” said one green watcher. A writer for Forbes went one better, imploring His Majesty to be a ‘climate monarch’ and use the ‘power of the bully pulpit’ – seriously – to ‘influence climate policy’ around the world. The best thing about having a climate king, says this commentator who wants His Majesty to bully us environment-damaging plebs, is that his power means he will be able to sway British minds. AND non-British. Because when a king speaks, ‘people tend to listen, even outside Britain’. Your majesty, go out and civilize the climate-damaging aliens!
It is amazing that one wing of the liberal elite is discussing Elizabeth II as a ‘colonizer queen’ while another is begging Charles III to effectively be a colonizer king, to use his God-given royal power to precious the eyes of the ignorant. of small people at home and abroad. An editorial in Sydney Morning Herald, a newspaper published in one of the countries where Charles is now king, humbly implores His Majesty to ‘use his position to pursue the greater good when it comes to the environment’. Strikingly, the paper says that while the British monarch’s ‘official domain’ may have shrunk in recent decades – more than a dozen nations removed the Queen as head of state during her 70-year reign – it doesn’t matter because Charles- style of eco-activism is what ‘the the whole world waiting’ (my emphasis). In short, forget the historical limitations that mankind placed on monarchical power, the most important of which is undoubtedly that a monarch has no power outside his ‘official sphere’ – our glorious new eco-king must still use the ‘influence of the throne his’ to encourage global. climate action.
This plea for the king to act globally, to go beyond his ‘official sphere’ with his environmental preaching, is remarkable and alarming. What happened to national sovereignty? Even the old idea that Britain’s monarchs were mandated to rule by God himself was held in check by the principle of nationality. The divine rights of kings did not count in vain against the national rights of states that did not wish to be ruled by said kings. So Queen Elizabeth’s godly position as sovereign was destroyed when the citizens of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and others exercised their higher sovereignty and chose to remove her as head of state. Thomas Paine put it best in his revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sensewhere he described how perverse it was for a British monarch to enjoy dominion over America: ‘Even the distance at which the Almighty has placed England and America is a strong and natural proof that the authority of the one over the other was never the design of heaven .’
But the distance at which the Almighty placed the nations counts for nothing, it seems, when it comes to ‘saving the planet’. Nor national independence, the fundamental right of a people not to be disturbed by a foreign king. Forget all that, say the green browbeaters – Charles III should use his position as ‘perhaps the most important environmentalist in history’ to effect global change. Of course, it’s not clear that Charles will be as irritatingly outspoken as king as he was as a mere prince. He said “I’m not that stupid” when asked if we would continue to ‘mix’ politics when he ascended the throne. But the fact that he is being asked, and the distinct possibility that he will, given his particular devotion to the god of environmentalism, should worry all who believe in democracy.
All the talk of a ‘climate king’ is very revealing. He confirms that one of the most tyrannical things about climate change alarmism is the threat it poses to national sovereignty. Where even kings, even the command of God himself, met their match on the borders of independent nations, the climate change movement knows no such obstacles to its cultural supremacy. The idea that climate change is a globalized threat, a uniquely destructive force that crosses borders and poisons everyone, has been a major contributor to the weakening of the ideal of national sovereignty. Nation-states, we are told, are powerless to deal with this ‘greatest threat ever faced by mankind’, in the words of our new king. So what we need are globalized elites, post-border institutions that can design green plans for us all to adhere to. The UN, the EU, Davos, all those COP meetings – these, it seems, are the post-national, post-democratic bodies we need to deal with this deadly global threat. These globalized elites have long loved Charles precisely for his willingness to be a world monarch. He is a powerful influencer with global reach‘, burst out Washington Post last year (my emphasis).
So the Almighty may have placed your nation thousands of miles from Britain, thousands of miles from the ‘official office’ of Charles III, but still he can exercise his ‘powerful influence’ upon you. It won’t be God or the divine right of kings that gives him the authority to do this – it will be the ideology of environmentalism. This is now the means by which elites fed up with democracy and inclined to bypass the low-informed masses pursue their misanthropic agenda of less growth, safe in the knowledge that the nation-states’ democratic right to dissent has been abrogated by the claim hysterical that climate change is such a threat that it renders nations senseless. No wonder Charles is so comfortable with the globalized elites. He swans around with billionaire eco-warriors in Davos. He gives pontificating speeches at the COP. They hail him as the ‘climate king’ because they know what that means: that he will be a king of the global elites who will represent their post-border, post-growth ideology far more loyal than he culture and culture and traditions of the nation – what an old-fashioned idea! – who declared him king.
Some critics focus on Charles’ green hypocrisy. it it’s a staggering level of hypocrisy. Last year it was calculated that the senior members of the Royal Family – the Queen (RIP), Charles, William and Harry and all their partners – produced around 3,810 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. This compares to 37.6 tons of CO2 per year generated by an average family of four. So our royal besties produce about 50 times more carbon than us pesky plebs. There is definitely something repulsive in the eyes of Charles – not to mention Harry and Meghan – flying to the summits of climate change to scream and cry about the destruction of the planet. Worse, Charles III is now being talked about by some as the king who can help restore the industrial advances of the country he rules. “His reign” is that of a nation that “helped lead the world to industrialization more than a century ago,” says one green writer. That Industrial Revolution that the new king and his eco-fans hate so much helped free us former serfs from slavery to landowners and allowed us to move into cities, into knowledge, into democracy, into freedom. It is easy for the literal king to look out of the window of his great palace and say, ‘The Industrial Revolution destroyed my world.’ The rest of us look out of our humblest windows and think: ‘The Industrial Revolution saved our lives.’
But there is something worse than hypocrisy. It is the fact that the ideologies of environmentalism and technocracy could encourage Charles III to be a clever, world-conquering king, preaching his sermons to all and sundry. Charles III would do well to remember the words of that great Briton who agitated so articulately against the rule of Charles I: John Milton. In his excellent pamphlet on the necessity of restraining kings— Mandate of kings and magistrates – Milton said that the authority of a king rests only in that which is “transferred and committed.” [him] in trust from the people, to The common good of all, in whom power still remains in the foundation and cannot be taken from them without violating their natural right. If we are to have a king – and my republican preference is that we haven’t – then surely he should think about what the people of Britain might need and want rather than allow the flattery of global elites go to his head. Listen to Milton, Charles, not Davos: the ‘common good’ of the British people is far more important than the narrow, selfish good of global elites.
Brendan O’Neill it’s with spikes‘s leading political writer and host of with spikes podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
