You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
How a reactionary worldview infuses the environmentalism of the ‘Green King’
What is it with royals and gurus? Russia’s Nicholas II, of course, had his Grigori Rasputin; Catherine de’ Medici of France, her Nostradamus. Recently, Princess Märtha Louise of Norway announced she plans to step down from royal duties in order to marry “Shaman Durek,” formerly Gwyneth Paltrow’s guru. (Though the royal wedding is currently postponed due to Durek’s health, the happy couple still posed for the cover of — I can’t believe this is actually real — Gurus Magazine).
The reigning monarch of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth realms, King Charles III, is no different from his royal colleagues in this respect. Following the death of his mentor, Lord Mountbatten, in 1979, the young Prince of Wales gravitated toward Sir Laurens van der Post, an author, Jungian mystic, and “seer” who had “a particular following among right-wingers,” including Margaret Thatcher. Up until van der Post’s death in 1996, he was “reported to have more influence over Charles than any other person,” The Washington Post writes.
Revered as a “modern-day saint” during his lifetime, van der Post, like many a guru, was posthumously exposed as a fraud and a charlatan. Critics also rightly pointed out his penchant for espousing racialist primitivism, especially regarding the San people, the Indigenous community in southern Africa; it further came to light that van der Post had sexually abused a 14-year-old girl entrusted to his care in 1952, when he was nearly 50, resulting in the birth of a daughter he never publicly acknowledged. But by the time of these revelations in the early 2000s, the damage was already done: Charles had named van der Post as his firstborn son’s godfather; had sought van der Post’s counsel with Princess Diana during the dissolution of their marriage; and wholly absorbed van der Post’s traditionalist worldview — the same one, in fact, that admirers now mistake for Charles’ progressive stance on climate change.
In the lead-up to Coronation Day, many have speculated whether Charles will be as green a king as he was a prince or if assuming the throne will require of him a constitutionally mandated self-muzzling. Liberals have their fingers crossed that he’ll subtly continue campaigning for sustainable living, organic farming, and twice-a-week vegetarianism; conservatives, meanwhile, have hand-wrung about the king’s apparent “woke pandering,” as Petronella Wyatt bemoans in The Telegraph. “It is particularly disturbing that the Earl of Derby has not been asked to provide falcons [for the coronation], as his family have done since the 16th Century,” she went on. “These little things deprive people of their purpose in life.”
Wyatt can rest assured, though, that Charles is far more of a traditionalist than meets the eye. Sure, the king’s Aston Martin might have been modified to run on bioethanol fuel made from surplus wine and leftover whey from cheese-making, but his real creed, The Spectator cannily observes, is that “there is divine wisdom in all human traditions until modernity comes along and rips us away from any semblance of harmony with nature.”
In practice, this driving philosophy of Charles’ has often clashed with the greater climate agenda: He has resisted and blocked onshore wind energy on aesthetic grounds; he refuses to let his model village install energy-efficient windows, insisting they be made of traditional wood; and while he’s a conservationist most of the time, he once pressured the prime minister against enacting a ban on foxhunting, defending it as “completely natural … in that it relies entirely on man’s ancient and, indeed, romantic relationship with dogs and horses.”
The king also hates, hates, modern architecture, which once led him to suggest — in what, it must be acknowledged, was an absolute banger of a galaxy-brain moment — that you’ve sorta gotta hand it to the Luftwaffe. And while his work toward recognizing the colonialist violence of the empire against the First Nations people of Canada has been meaningful (though he’s stopped short of an actual apology), Charles’ interest can at times contain traces of the exotified difference his guru expressed toward the San as “children of nature” and “mystical ecologists”: Recently the king urged working with “indigenous knowledge-keepers” in Canada to “restore harmony with nature.”
Taken into consideration with his obsession with Britain’s “forgotten” farmers and his comments blaming population growth in Africa for overtaxing nature’s “bounty,” Charles begins to seem less like a progressive environmentalist than a traditionalist yearning for an imagined, idyllic, pastoral past.
But Charles did not arrive here all on his own. Van der Post was a primitivist who styled himself, misleadingly, as an experienced anthropologist — “a believer in the higher wisdom of tribal culture ... and in the need for civilized people to re-connect with this wisdom,” The Spectator writes. It was van der Post, further, who “fired Charles’ interest in multiculturalism and gave him a philosophical framework for his ideas, ranging from organic farming to the need for modern Britain to embrace religions other than Christianity,” The Washington Post says (at his coronation, Charles will be declared the defender of Faiths, rather than the Faith).
Charles’ interest in homeopathy and natural medicine, including what Gawker once described as a “decades-long failed quest to get the NHS to consider implementing Gerson therapy for cancer patients, a diet in which a sick person drinks 13 glasses of juice a day and takes regular self-administered coffee enemas,” can also be traced back to van der Post. Most significantly, it was also the guru who reportedly urged the young prince to use his platform to “restore the human being to a lost natural aspect of his own spirit; to restore his relevance for life and his love of nature, and to draw closer to the original blueprint and plan of life.”
Charles has been a good disciple. In 2010, he published Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, a book that echos van der Post’s theory of oneness (itself a derivative of the Jungian concept of “collective unconscious”). Harmony continues to be heralded as an environmentalist manifesto with its calls for a “Sustainability Revolution,” although its chief target is the rise of modernism since the Enlightenment. This nostalgia for the pre-industrial past is a common reactionary response that can be traced through the global right; pesky modernism, of course, also brought about the political agency of the working class, greater living standards, and liberation movements. “[King Charles] is fond of saying that we have an obsession with economic growth, which he says is bad,” Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, added to The American Conservative. “I would say another way of putting it is that you would like people to be poorer.”
Or, put another way: The “harmony” King Charles raves about is just another word for “order,” as Jonathan Healey, the author of “The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689,” proposed to The New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead. “It hinges on everyone knowing their place,” he elaborated. “The peasants don’t question who is in charge, and they are happy.”
It’s understandable why a king of a dwindling empire might have his focus on the halcyon days. This also makes him especially inclined toward existing right-wing schools of thought. When pouting over the Foreign Office denying his trip to the Kalahari with van der Post in the mid-1970s, for example, Charles reportedly recognized in a letter to a friend that Britain’s government was “still operating, and thinking, as if we were a major world power ... That is palpably not the case at the moment.” Here, though, he ends up sounding like a Little Englander, a member of a nationalist movement that has embraced Britain’s diminished imperial standing by pivoting to “sentimental ideas about preservation of the English rural establishment and English nature” (in addition to anti-immigrant stances, natch). Sure enough, a recent op-ed in Unherd applauded King Charles while making the case for a modern “Little England” movement.
Or how about Charles as an adherent of “reactionary radicalism,” what author Paul Kingsnorth defines as “a defense of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics”? Others have certainly made the connection: “The affinity between Charles and [the writer Wendell Berry] is instructive,” The American Conservative writes, calling the pair “traditionalists, though not exactly conservatives … what my friend Bill Kauffman would call ‘reactionary radicals.’” What unites them is a criticism of “industrialism, consumer capitalism, and scientism,” and their belief that “family farms [...] are the only basis for a stable and happy society.”
Charles’ defenders might make the case that surely a green king is better than a king of a different color, however woo-woo the origins of his interest might be. But as Mead notes, the sum of his philosophy, while perhaps not quite “feudalism-curious,” ultimately “does appear to incorporate an implicit defense of his monarchical position.” Writer Sam Circle, in a review of Mead’s piece, reaches for a sharper characterization: “He’s Ecofascism-curious,” Circle writes. “There are some obvious things which go along with the return to an earlier, unsullied time that Charles wishes for, and you don’t have to look much further than his reaction to his son’s interracial marriage to see them reflected in Charles.”
Whatever progressivism does creep through Charles’ otherwise traditionalist brand of environmentalism is rickety and undermined by his nostalgia. It’s too simple, though, to dismiss him as just wanting the good ol’ days when being king really meant something. Charles’ crisis is an existential one: an irrelevant king clinging desperately to the ideas of the person who once gave him meaning. “The battle for our renewal can be most naturally led by what is still one of the few great living symbols accessible to us – the symbol of the crown,” van der Post had written long ago to Charles.
Rather than a champion of the planet, Great Britain is gaining a champion of a very specific vision of the U.K., one where mending your tartan tweed and supporting your local farmers is of equal importance to uniformly painted homes and an absence of visible satellite dishes. How attainable, much less desirable, a return to Britain’s pastoral roots actually is might be beside the point. The power of a monarch, much like the power of a guru, comes from convincing others to believe in him. Once formally anointed Sovereign by the coronation spoon on Saturday, it will then become Charles’ turn to whisper into the ear of the nation, to instill grandeur into his vision of how things could be.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On the looming climate summit, clean energy stocks, and Hurricane Rafael
Current conditions: A winter storm could bring up to 4 feet of snow to parts of Colorado and New Mexico • At least 89 people are still missing from extreme flooding in Spain • The Mountain Fire in Southern California has consumed 14,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
The world is still reeling from the results of this week’s U.S. presidential election, and everyone is trying to get some idea of what a second Trump term means for policy – both at home and abroad. Perhaps most immediately, Trump’s election is “set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week,” said the Financial Times. Already many world leaders and business executives have said they will not attend the climate talks in Azerbaijan, where countries will aim to set a new goal for climate finance. “The U.S., as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal,” the FT added.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, vowed to once again remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and promised to stop U.S. climate finance contributions. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Yesterday President Biden put new environmental limitations on an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The lease sale was originally required by law in 2017 by Trump himself, and Biden is trying to “narrow” the lease sale without breaking that law, according to The Washington Post. “The election results have made the threat to America's Arctic clear,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, toldReuters. “The fight to save the Arctic Refuge is back, and we are ready for the next four years.”
Another early effect of the decisive election result is that clean energy stocks are down. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange traded fund, whose biggest holdings are the solar panel company First Solar and the Spanish utility and renewables developer Iberdola, is down about 6%. The iShares U.S. Energy ETF, meanwhile, whose largest holdings are Exxon and Chevron, is up over 3%. Some specific publicly traded clean energy stocks have sunk, especially residential solar companies like Sunrun, which is down about 30% compared to Tuesday. “That renewables companies are falling more than fossil energy companies are rising, however, indicates that the market is not expecting a Trump White House to do much to improve oil and gas profitability or production, which has actually increased in the Biden years thanks to the spikes in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued exploitation of America’s oil and gas resources through hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Hurricane Rafael swept through Cuba yesterday as a Category 3 storm, knocking out the power grid and leaving 10 million people without electricity. Widespread flooding is reported. The island was still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Oscar, which left at least six people dead. The electrical grid – run by oil-fired power plants – has collapsed several times over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said yesterday that about 17% of crude oil production and 7% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of Rafael.
It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. In October, the global average surface air temperature was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages for that month. This year is also on track to be the first entire calendar year in which temperatures are more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Copernicus deputy director Dr. Samantha Burgess.
C3S
The world is falling short of its goal to double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in its new Energy Efficiency 2024 report. Global primary energy intensity – which the IEA explained is a measure of efficiency – will improve by 1% this year, the same as last year. It needs to be increasing by 4% by the end of the decade to meet a goal set at last year’s COP. “Boosting energy efficiency is about getting more from everyday technologies and industrial processes for the same amount of energy input, and means more jobs, healthier cities and a range of other benefits,” the IEA said. “Improving the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, as well as in other areas, is central to clean energy transitions, since it simultaneously improves energy security, lowers energy bills for consumers and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.” The group called for more government action as well as investment in energy efficient technologies.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 30.6% in the 12 months leading up to July, compared to a year earlier. It is now at the lowest levels since 2015.
State-level policies and “unstoppable” momentum for clean energy.
As the realities of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a Republican trifecta in Washington began to set in on Wednesday morning, climate and clean energy advocates mostly did not sugarcoat the result or look for a silver lining. But in press releases and interviews, reactions to the news coalesced around two key ways to think about what happens next.
Like last time Trump was elected, the onus will now fall on state and local leaders to make progress on climate change in spite of — and likely in direct conflict with — shifting federal priorities. Working to their advantage, though, much more so than last time, is global political and economic momentum behind the growth of clean energy.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable,” former White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already underway.”
“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”
Reached by phone on Wednesday, the climate policy strategist Sam Ricketts offered a blunt assessment of where things stand. “First things first, this outcome sucks,” he said. He worried aloud about what another four years of Trump would mean for his kids and the planet they inherit. But Ricketts has also been here before. During Trump’s first term, he worked for the “climate governor,” Washington’s Jay Inslee, and helped further state and local climate policy around the country for the Democratic Governors Association. “For me, it is a familiar song,” he said.
Ricketts believes the transition to clean energy has become inevitable. But he offered other reasons states may be in a better position to make progress over the next four years than they were last time. There are now 23 states with Democratic governors and at least 15 with Democratic trifectas — compare that to 2017, when there were just 16 Democratic governors and seven trifectas. Additionally, Democrats won key seats in the state houses of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will break up previous Republican supermajorities and give the Democratic governors in those states more opportunity to make progress.
Spears also highlighted these victories during the Climate Cabinet press call, adding that they help illustrate that the election was not a referendum on climate policy. “We have examples of candidates who ran forward on climate, they ran forward on clean energy, and they still won last night in some tough toss-up districts,” she said.
Ricketts also pointed to signs that climate policy itself is popular. In Washington, a ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s emissions cap-and-invest policy failed. “The vote returns aren’t all in, but that initiative has been obliterated at the ballot box by voters in Washington State who want to continue that state’s climate progress,” he said.
But the enduring popularity of climate policy in Democratic states is not a given. Though the measure to overturn Washington’s cap-and-invest law was defeated, another measure that would revoke the state’s nation-leading policies to regulate the use of natural gas in buildings hangs in the balance. If it passes, it will not only undo existing policies but also hamstring state and local policymakers from discouraging natural gas in the future. In Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the movement to ban gas in buildings, a last-ditch effort to preserve that policy through a tax on natural gas was rejected by voters.
Meanwhile, two counties in Oregon overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot measure opposing offshore wind development. And while 2024 brought many examples of climate policy progress at the state level, there were also some signs of states pulling back due to concerns about cost, exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s major reversal on congestion pricing in New York City.
The oft-repeated hypothesis that Republican governors and legislators might defend President Biden’s climate policies because of the investments flowing to red states is also about to be put to the test. “I think that's going to be a huge issue and question,” Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “You know, not only can Democrats close ranks to oppose any changes, but is there any kind of cross-party Republican base of support?”
Josh Freed, the senior vice president for the climate and clean energy program at Third Way, warned that the climate community has a lot of work to do to build more public support for clean energy. He pointed to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, driven in part by the perception that the transition away from fossil fuels is hurting real people at the expense of corporate and political interests.
“We’ve seen, in many places, a backlash against adopting electric vehicles,” he told me. “We’ve seen, at the local county level, opposition to siting of renewables. People perceive a push for eliminating natural gas from cooking or from home heating as an infringement on their choice and as something that’s going to raise costs, and we have to take that seriously.”
One place Freed sees potential for continued progress is in corporate action. A lot of the momentum on clean energy is coming from the private sector, he said, naming companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have invested considerable funds in decarbonization. He doesn’t see that changing.
A counterpoint, raised by Rabe, is those companies’ contribution to increasing demand for electricity — which has simultaneously raised interest in financing clean energy projects and expanding natural gas plants.
As I was wrapping up my call with Ricketts, he acknowledged that state and local action was no substitute for federal leadership in tackling climate change. But he also emphasized that these are the levers we have right now. Before signing off, he paraphrased something the writer Rebecca Solnit posted on social media in the wee hours of the morning after the electoral college was called. It’s a motto that I imagine will become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the next four years. “We can’t save everything, but we can save some things, and those things are worth saving,” Ricketts said.
Rob and Jesse talk about what comes next in the shift to clean energy.
Last night, Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House. He campaigned on an aggressively pro-fossil -fuel agenda, promising to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law, and roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules governing power plant and car and truck pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob pick through the results of the election and try to figure out where climate advocates go from here. What will Trump 2.0 mean for the federal government’s climate policy? Did climate policies notch any wins at the state level on Tuesday night? And where should decarbonization advocates focus their energy in the months and years to come? Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: You know the real question, I guess — and I just, I don’t have a ton of optimism here — is if there can be some kind of bipartisan support for the idea that changing the way we permit transmission lines is good for economic growth. It’s good for resilience. It’s good for meeting demand from data centers and factories and other things that we need going forward. Whether that case can be made in a different, entirely different political context is to be seen, but it certainly will not move forward in the same context as the [Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024] negotiations.
Robinson Meyer: And I think there’s a broad question here about what the Trump administration looks like in terms of its energy agenda. We know the environmental agenda will be highly deregulatory and interested in recarbonizing the economy, so to speak, or at least slowing down decarbonization — very oil- and gas-friendly.
I think on the energy agenda, we can expect oil and gas friendliness as well, obviously. But I do think, in terms of who will be appointed to lead or nominated to lead the Department of Energy, I think there’s a range of whether you would see a nominee who is aggressively focused on only doing things to support oil and gas, or a nominee who takes a more Catholic approach and is interested in all forms of energy development.
And I don’t, I don’t mean to be … I don’t think that’s obvious. I just think that’s like a … you kind of can see threads of that across the Republican Party. You can see some politicians who are interested only, really, in helping fossil fuels. You can see some politicians who are very excited, say, about geothermal, who are excited about shoring up the grid, right? Who are excited about carbon capture.
And I think the question of who winds up taking control of the energy portfolio in a future Trump administration means … One thing that was true of the first Trump administration that I don’t expect to go away this time is that the Trump policymaking process is extremely chaotic, right? He’s surrounded by different actors. There’s a lot of informal delegation. Things happen, and he’s kind of involved in it, but sometimes he’s not involved in it. He likes having this team of rivals who are constantly jockeying for position. In some ways it’s a very imperial-type system, and I think that will continue.
One topic I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, for instance, is nuclear. The first Trump administration said a lot of nice things about nuclear, and they passed some affirmatively supportive policy for the advanced nuclear industry, and they did some nice things for small modular reactors. I think if you look at this administration, it’s actually a little bit more of a mixed bag for nuclear.
RFK, who we know is going to be an important figure in the administration, at least at the beginning, is one of the biggest anti nuclear advocates there is. And his big, crowning achievement, one of his big crowning achievements was helping to shut down Indian Point, the large nuclear reactor in New York state. JD Vance, Vice President-elect JD Vance, has said that shutting down nuclear reactors is one of the dumbest things that we can do and seems to be quite pro, we should be producing more nuclear.
Jenkins: On the other hand, Tucker Carlson was on, uh …
Meyer: … suggested it was demonic, yeah.
Jenkins: Exactly, and no one understands how nuclear technology works or where it came from.
Meyer: And Donald Trump has kind of said both things. It’s just super uncertain and … it’s super uncertain.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Intersolar & Energy Storage North America is the premier U.S.-based conference and trade show focused on solar, energy storage, and EV charging infrastructure. To learn more, visit intersolar.us.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.