“To get the best results, you must talk to your vegetables”

Prince Charles expressed this sentiment quite some time ago, and he manifestly practises what he preaches. After all, if one talks to vegetables, one must expect that at some point they will talk back.

In that spirit, HRH had a long conversation with Greta Thunberg, for whom and for whose cause he feels unbridled admiration.

Perhaps it’s unkind to refer to Greta as a vegetable, but she might not mind. After all, she feels such close affinity to all things biological that she’d probably be proud to be described in such botanical terms.

On a more metaphorical level, Greta merits that taxonomic tag thanks to her impressive array of mental disorders, including Asperger’s, bipolar depression and, by the sound of her, perseveration (the urge to repeat the same thing over and over again), along with her inability to cope with the intellectual demands of secondary school.

Yet the poor thing beamed from ear to ear when listening to HRH talk about the vital need for a “paradigm shift” to sustainability and planetary concerns.

If pushed to its logical extreme, that of reverting to a world both pre-industrial and largely pre-agricultural, said shift would make us all march to the soup kitchens, singing in chorus “Brother, can you paradigm?” (If you don’t get the pun, you’re too young for your own good.)

However, neither Greta nor, regrettably, her grownup interlocutor gave much thought to the likely consequences of the desired paradigm shift. Their shared sense of impending doom overshadowed all else.

Greta’s subsequent opinion of Uncle Charlie has gone unrecorded. But HRH was effusive: “Well, she’s remarkable, she represents one of the main reasons why I’ve been trying to make all this effort all of these years, because, as I said, I didn’t want my grandchildren to accuse me of not doing something about this in time.”

All these years? The time element doesn’t seem to be working out, unless of course some star, invisible to others, guided Charles to Greta when she was still a babe in arms. But it’s true that he has been preoccupied with that climate thingie for a while.

In common with all partakers in that particular Damascene experience, Charles could never understand why some others were blind to the light shining so brightly into his eyes. Once, for example, he said: “It is baffling, I must say, that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we accept what science tells us about everything – until, that is, it comes to climate science.”

This lament sounds as if it had indeed come from a babe in arms. For few people have ‘blind trust’ in science, certainly not in every hypothesis science concocts.

Thus physicists argue passionately about such thingies as the string theory, the existence of parallel universes or schizophrenics being able to predict the future because they are actually envoys from those other universes.

When a chap I know was waxing ecstatic about that last possibility, I wondered why in that case schizophrenics never won the lottery. Such facetious remarks aside, arguments about recondite scientific theories are best left to the experts.

Most people do just that, unless the theory has far-reaching political implications. Darwinism is one such hypothesis, for it overturns – on flimsy to nonexistent evidence – the intellectual, spiritual and religious certitudes Darwinists detest.

Climate science is indeed another such politicised area, where the reliability of evidence isn’t even an issue. That’s where blind trust is mandated by anomic activists who detest just about the only arguably good thing modernity has produced: scientific and technological progress.

Notice that Greta and her ilk don’t just protest against carbon emissions per se. They rail against the profits energy companies derive from fuelling our comfortable lives. If that weren’t the case they wouldn’t be opposed just as hysterically to nuclear energy, which leaves next to no carbon footprint.

(The zealots’ usual argument is that nuclear power stations are too expensive to build. That may be so, but it doesn’t explain why they force European governments to shut down the stations that already exist.)

Climate change to them is what the Judaeo-masonic conspiracy is to another batch of fanatics, and fanaticism is mostly the lot of immature, often deranged, youngsters with minds more gonadic than cerebral.

To see our future king talking earnestly to one such prepubescent zealot is most disconcerting. I realise that he is constitutionally prevented from taking political sides, which is why HRH only ever pronounces on things like architecture and organic produce.

I only wish he were bright enough to realise that the issue he has now inscribed on his banners is as political as they come. And he has chosen the wrong side.