HRH Prince of Carbon Neutral

There’s been a lot of fuss made this week about HRH Prince Charles. It all relates to the apparent absurdity of him booking empty seats on a plane to collect an environmental award. I’m sorry, but that’s not a hypocritical image. President Bush rolling up in a few years time to collect his Nobel Peace Prize astride the smoking gun of a Challenger Tank, that’s a hypocritical image.

He/We apparently paid for 60 seats to accomodate just 20 staff on a chartered flight to get him to Harvard. The Prince claims this was the most environmentally friendly way of getting there – being on a scheduled flight meant that he could leave his private/chartered plane at home. The press had a field day, as did Sian Berry in her New Statesman blog. Most people focussed on the waste of the 40 empty seats, and the fact that we could have put 40 members of the public on that plane too and made better use of the fuel and carbon emissions. Yes, but would Prince Charles really want to sit between two upper-class students on an Oxbridge exchange to Harvard, or be surrounded by 40 men on a stag-do from Doncaster?

Why is this an evil on the environment? Berry claims that in order to offset the carbon footprint from such frivolous seat-booking, the entire staff would have to cycle to work for a year. Fair enough, in my current cycle-frenzy that’s probably something to encourage. Maybe Charles should get a nice mauve helmet and spokey-dokeys for his wheels.

The thing is, haven’t we just had a hike in air tax to cover carbon emissions? Didn’t the government put £40 on a long-haul flight to discourage us from excess flying and to pay for daffodils to be planted alongside runways, or whatever else it is they’re going to do to make Easyjet planes emit butterflies rather than CO2? In which case, Prince Charles should be applauded. He payed 40 extra lots of air tax. Those seats weren’t wasted. Those 40 displaced people will have then paid their green plane tax on a different flight. He’s technically made a donation of money to the environment. With 40 less passengers, complete with luggage, that flight will have paid more fuel surcharges and airport tax than it used. Bravo Prince Charles for your small, but yet worthwhile donation to the government green tax fund. Expect a thank-you letter in the post from Chi Chi the Panda in Patagonia.

That is assuming our ‘green taxes’ are actually going to be used to decrease carbon emissions. As we know, very little of our road tax goes on making our roads safer or more environmentally friendly, so we have to have high fuel duty to tax those who emit more CO2. Except, all of this tax doesn’t go on public transport, so now cities want a congestion charge/tax to help pay for better public transport. I daresay 15 years down the line and if, by some miracle we ressurect Isambard Kingdom Brunel and he manages to make the buses and trains work, we’ll have to have a public transport tax, or bus seat congestion charge, to pay for more bus lanes and little green bus shelters for squirrels to hide under.

But I’ll give the benefit of the doubt to the government’s air tax, and to HRH. I’ll pay my extra £40 in tax on a ticket to Iceland, but I jolly well expect to see at least a civil servant if not a junior minister planting leylandi and buttercups alongside Gatwick’s runway. I’ll also applaud Prince Charles on this one. Berry suggests he should have used a video link to accept the award, but how much extra electricity would that need, not to mention the amount of pollution and space-junk needed to launch and maintain the satellite. It’s nice to see some commonsense approaches to environmental issues instead of standing on top of the BT tower shouting, “This will be where I’ll have to live when global warming floods London in 100 years time!”.