Prince Charles has been trying to convince our prime minister to attend a climate change summit and has said his car basically drives drunk. Just when you thought 2021 couldn’t get any more wild.
The soon-to-be king fessed up to his car being fuelled by wine during an interview with the BBC.
He revealed that he runs his Aston Martin on “surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process”.
Technically, Prince Charles isn’t shoving wedges of brie and pouring bottles of Cabernet into his ride. The fuel his 51-year-old Aston Martin runs on is called E85, a flexible fuel that blends ethanol with some percentage of gasoline. Ethanol can be made from a bunch of different plant byproducts, most notably corn and sugar, but certain leftovers from the wine and cheesemaking processes can also be used.
In a truly zany interview with the Telegraph from 2018, he described how he basically forced the Aston Martin designers to figure out a way to get his car to run on the fanciest combination of foods they could find:
“They discovered they could run it on surplus English white wine, but also I hadn’t realised that they had mixed whey into it too,” he says.
“The engineers at Aston said, ‘Oh, it’ll ruin the whole thing’.
“I said, ‘Well I won’t drive it then’, so they got on with it and now they admit that it runs better and is more powerful on that fuel than it is on petrol.
“And also, it smells delicious as you’re driving along.”
In that 2018 interview, Prince Charles also revealed that he’d gone to “battle” with the operators of the Royal Train, a special line used a handful of times a year to get the Royal Family around the country, to get the train to run on used cooking oil. (“They say it clogs up the engine or something,” he added.)
But that’s not all. Prince Charles also told the BBC this week he’s cut back on consuming meat and other animal by-products, such as dairy. He believes if more people did that, it would reduce a lot of the pressure on the environment.
The prince has become a bit of an ally for those of us pushing the people in power to take our concerns of climate change more seriously.
During that same interview, Prince Charles said he sympathises with ‘young people’, including Greta Thunberg.
“All these young people feel nothing is ever happening so of course they’re going to get frustrated,” he said. “I totally understand because nobody would listen and they see their future being totally destroyed.”
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Prince Charles is also trying to convince Scott Morrison (and other world leaders) to attend the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, calling it a “last chance saloon, literally” to save the planet.
“If we don’t really take the decisions which are vital now, it’s going to be almost impossible to catch up,” he said.
“It’ll be catastrophic.”
It’s likely the PM will backflip on his decision, but he reckons his priority is talking to Australians about this stuff, not people overseas. Ok PM, talk to us about it, we’re waiting.