Just 96 Months Left to Save World and Avoid Living Hell, says Prince Charles

See video: news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8141490.stm

“To avoid such an outcome, which will comprehensively destroy our children’s future, we must urgently confront and then make choices which carry monumental implications.”

Capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse, the Prince of Wales warned in a speech, which set out his concerns for the future of the planet.

In the speech, Charles set out his vision for tackling the pressing problems of the environmental crisis. A new system was needed to combat the issue – more "balanced and integrated with nature’s complexity", he said.

The heir to the UK throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. "If only because, surely, we all want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren something other than the living hell of the nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon," “We can no longer afford consumerism and the age of convenience is over” he said in a searing indictment of capitalism.

"We are standing at a moment of substantial transition where we face the dual challenges of a world view and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis – including that of climate change – which threatens to engulf us all."
The Prince said that if the world failed to heed these warnings then we all faced the "nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon".

Charles’s speech was described as his first attempt to present a coherent philosophy in which he placed the threat to the environment in the context of a failing economic system.

The Prince, who is advised by the leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, said that even the economist Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, had been aware of the shortcomings of unfettered materialism.

Delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, Charles said that without "coherent financial incentives and disincentives" we have just 96 months to avert "irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it."

The Prince said: "But for all its achievements, our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the Earth and we must face up to the fact that the Earth cannot afford to support it. Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts – and paradoxically also facing calls for a return to so-called ‘old-fashioned’, traditional banking – so Nature’s life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too.

"If we don’t face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it."

The Prince fears that current policies are not good enough to save the planet
He called for a rethinking of society’s perception of the world and a new Age of Sustainability rather than our current "Age of Convenience" where the goal of unlimited economic growth is depleting finite Natural resources to dangerously low levels.

He said mankind needed to reassess the relationship with the natural world and recognise that "we are not separate from Nature – like everything else, we are Nature."

He called for greater "financial incentives and disincentives" to move innovative business ideas from the economic fringes to the mainstream.

In addition to greater corporate social and environmental responsibility, the Prince urged the Government to make greater use of "community capital – the networks of people and organisations, the post offices and pubs, the churches and village halls, the mosques, temples and bazaars".

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