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Breanna Robinson
Oct 12, 2021
Prince Charles’ of Wales antique Aston Martin sports car is partly powered by two interesting food and drink items—cheese waste and surplus English white wine, according to a BBC interview on Monday.
The interview, which was filmed in a garden at Balmoral that he said is named after his first grandson, Prince George, he told BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, about the viable ways he was including his devotion for the environment in his daily life.
And one of those ways, he noted was converting the fuel used for his car, which Queen Elizabeth II gifted him on his 21st birthday.
“My old Aston Martin, which I’ve had for a 51 years, that runs on—can you believe this— surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process,” Prince Charles told Rowlatt.
Last year, Prince Charles told The Telegraph that he had insisted that Aston Martin engineers find another source of fuel for his car and was met with some pushback from the engineers who told him, “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,” he told the outlet about his exchange.
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Prince Charles’ Aston Martin wasn’t the only royal transportation that he successfully converted. He also told The Telegraph that he battled to change the royal train to operate on used cooking oil.
Rowlatt, who noted that the prince first addressed environmental issues present in 1970, said in the most recent interview that he found it fascinating that after experiencing ridicule “for so long,” he was being asked to talk about the current climate crisis.
“I was accused of being anti-science... it wasn’t much fun, as you can imagine,” Prince Charles added.
He further said that he believes the world has taken a very long time to address the climate concerns on a mainstream scale and said that world leaders need to take more action.
He described himself as a realist who thinks it’s taken the world “far too long” to make climate concerns mainstream. It’s time for world leaders to stop talking and “get action on the ground.”
Prince Charles also mentioned his worry about the world left behind for his grandchildren to experience.
“Why do you think I’ve done this for all these years?... I’ve been doing this really to make sure my children, your grandchildren, and everybody else’s have some future.”
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