Prince William’s Earthshot prize won’t save the planet

I hate to pour cold water on the Prince of Wales’ big night out in Boston on Friday, where he hosted the Earthshot Prize for climate change solutions. William needs all the help he can get to distract attention from his brother and sister-in-law as they continue their crazed attack on the royal family. And there is nothing wrong with the Earthshot Prize in itself, as a means of recognising and rewarding entrepreneurs who are developing environmentally-friendly innovations. Good luck to them. 

But sorry, the heir to the throne’s big idea does not even nearly live up to its lofty, climate-transforming ambitions. All it succeeds in doing is reminding the world how laughably far we are from achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, or some date close to that, without throwing the world’s masses into poverty.

The stated aim of Earthshot – which takes its name from President Kennedy’s Moonshot speech, which sought to find ways of putting an American on the Moon by the end of the 1960s – is to ‘find and grow the solutions that will repair our planet this decade’.