Climate cultists love the notion of an authoritarian figure dictating what the peasants will do. Forgetting that most of those advocating for this are, themselves, peasants
King Charles should double down on climate change
Last November, soon after his mother’s death, the new King Charles III was scheduled to attend COP27, the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to deliver a major address. The Egypt trip would have been his first overseas trip as king.
Suddenly, his trip was canceled. The also-new Tory prime minister, Liz Truss, who had just succeeded Boris Johnson, nixed it.
Truss, who would be prime minister for about 20 minutes until she blew up her government and got thrown out by her own party, was not a big climate change activist. She marched into a personal audience with Charles and made her objections clear to him. Though those objections were not spelled out publicly, one can only assume they were political. Since a monarch is required to be above politics, and must get the approval of the government for any international trip, the plan was called off.
That’s the way it works now in England, because the monarch and their family do not really have power
But what if the new king’s first instinct — the trip to Egypt — is a harbinger of a reign that could transcend alienated second sons, disgraced brothers and all the other Windsorland tabloid drama?
The way he can accomplish that is to declare, and convince the British public, that the climate crisis is not a political issue. And it is not. If anything, it is a spiritual one. Climate deniers would like to make it about politics, but their real agenda is about money. In the short run, climate action might hurt corporations and big business.
Spiritual? Like a cult?
This is the king’s moment to carve out his own role as a pragmatic spiritual leader. When he is crowned, he will accept his role of Defender of the Faith, though he has said he will be “the defender of faiths” (including “people of no faith”), following in the footsteps of the queen, who was keenly aware of the multicultural society she presided over. He is the supreme governor of the Church of England, which has voted to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions for its operations by 2030. A statement by the church says, “We believe that responding to the climate crisis is an essential part of our responsibility to safeguard God’s creation and achieve a just world.”
In his new role, Charles will be able to present the issue of the climate crisis as one of sacrality, that which inspires awe and reverence. British religious historian Karen Armstrong writes in her new book, “Sacred Nature,” that the great religions of the world embrace the notion of the sacrality of creation. “We have seen how nature was revered by the great sages, mystics and prophets of the past,” she writes. “It is now up to us to revive that knowledge and commitment and recover our bond with the natural world.” She quotes William Wordsworth — “There hath past away a glory from the earth” — as a call to action and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as seeing “the divine as inseparable from nature.”
Yes, a doomsday cult. The WP’s Sally King just barely avoids King Charles making proclamations to force people to comply.
