In probably the most princely transfer of maybe all prince strikes, one in every of Prince Charles’ costly automobiles makes use of wine and cheese byproducts as gasoline. Classy!

Ahead of a main local weather assembly in Glasgow subsequent month, Charles gave a wide-ranging interview to the BBC the place he talked about local weather change—a favourite matter of his. During the dialog about his personal private carbon footprint, Charles talked about his 1970 Aston Martin, which now runs on the great stuff you’d put out on your mother and father after they come to go to your house.

Charles is a notorious car lover. His style runs considerably counter to other rich car aficionados, although. While Charles instructed the BBC that almost all automobiles on his estates are electrical, he’s needed to get artistic for a few of his older fashions. The Aston Martin is a degree in case. The blue DB6 Mk2 Volante that was a present to Chuck on his twenty first birthday from his mom, Queen Elizabeth II. He had the Volante retrofitted in 2008 to run on a kind of bioethanol gasoline, which he mentioned is constructed from the “surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process.”

This automobile isn’t a latest improve to show the UK is, uh, severe about coping with local weather change; Charles has been driving this cocktail-chic trip for many years. In a truly zany interview with the Telegraph from 2018, he described how he principally compelled the Aston Martin designers to determine a technique to get his automobile to run on the fanciest mixture of meals they might discover:

“They discovered they could run it on surplus English white wine, but also I hadn’t realized that they had mixed whey into it too,” he says.

“The engineers at Aston said, ‘Oh, it’ll ruin the whole thing’.

“I said, ‘Well I won’t drive it then’, so they got on with it and now they admit that it runs better and is more powerful on that fuel than it is on petrol.

“And also, it smells delicious as you’re driving along.”

Wonder if any of that cheese is Wensleydale.

In that 2018 interview, Charles additionally revealed that he’d gone to “battle” with the operators of the Royal Train, a special line used a handful of times a year to get the Royal Family across the nation, to get the prepare to run on used cooking oil. (“They say it clogs up the engine or something,” he added.)

Technically, Charles isn’t shoving wedges of brie and pouring bottles of Cabernet into his trip. The gasoline Charles’s automobile runs on is known as E85, a versatile gasoline that blends ethanol with some share of gasoline. Ethanol will be constructed from a bunch of various plant byproducts, most notably corn and sugar, however sure leftovers from the wine and cheesemaking processes may also be used.

Look, this is all very good for Charles and his get together on wheels. But it’s additionally a fairly deeply inefficient and, dare we are saying, bougie means of getting round. Normal folks most likely don’t have a classic luxurious automobile simply hanging round within the storage nor the flexibility to get its makers to only present up and retrofit it to run on bottles of Trader Joe’s chardonnay. The greater difficulty is that using biofuels in automobiles—even cheaper sorts like corn—is a questionable technique to scale back carbon emissions reductions.

Biofuel critics say that utilizing crops like corn as gasoline might result in a rise in land use, which might assist improve greenhouse gasoline emissions in flip. In the U.S., a lot of the analysis about how clear or soiled biofuels are is funded or requested by warring agriculture and oil industries. Surplus wine and whey could also be barely higher, however it’s most likely finest to stick to the electrical automobile revolution and clear up the ability grid within the grand scheme of not frying the planet.

“Prince Charles’s quaint solution to decarbonize his Aston Martin using a high blend of bioethanol made from cheese and wine wastes should not be mistaken for a serious solution to decarbonize vehicles,” Greg Archer, UK director of T&E, a European clear transport marketing campaign group, told the Guardian. “On a large scale biofuels do more harm than good, driving deforestation and land use change that worsens the climate crisis.”

As for the remainder of his carbon footprint, it’s not simply his bachelorette-party-wine-tour-weekend automobile. Charles instructed the BBC that he’s put in a spread of various power sources, from hydroelectric generators to photo voltaic panels to biomass woodchip burners, at his houses throughout the UK. (Burning wooden for biomass, by the way in which, is one other fairly questionable type of “renewable” power.) He additionally limits his meat, fish, and dairy consumption, he mentioned.

It’s additionally most likely vital to notice that each one this effort is sort of actually offset by Charles’s frequent personal jet journeys. All the wine-and-cheese-powered drives on the earth can’t make up for the truth that personal jet flights, mansion existence, and different habits of the ultra-rich are doing a disproportionate quantity of injury to the planet—and the options they could dream up for themselves aren’t useful for these of us with out the producers of Aston Martin on our pace dial.