Right message, wrong messenger

4 November 2017, 20:36 | Updated: 4 November 2017, 20:48

royal

Prince William has warned that the future of wildlife is under threat.

He said, 'In my lifetime, we have seen global wildlife populations decline by over half, many of which were personally shot by members of my family.'

I made that last part up.

He said that the root of the problem is rapid population growth.

People are having too many children and he wanted to explain that to us before he has to take some time off to help choose a nanny for his 3rd child.

The Having Kids organisation campaigns for smaller families for the benefit of the children and the Earth.

They wrote to the royal couple urging them to forgo having a third child. Two is a more sustainable number, they argued.

But when you have a guaranteed income of unimaginable wealth without having to do anything for it, and pretty much anything you want is provided free, any number of children is sustainable, so they went ahead and planned for a third one anyway.

He is following the typical 'don't do as I do, do as I say' routine.

Wills said, 'We are going to have to work much harder and think much deeper, if we are to ensure that human beings and the other species of animal with which we share this planet can continue to co-exist.'

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news your worship, but we can’t coexist.

Humans will eat anything they like the taste of and kill off anything they don't like the look of.

Members of the animal kingdom had better be tasty or cute, because that's all we'll have room for after we do as we have done in London and concrete over the planet to build high rise executive flatlets for the international criminal super-rich to launder all the money they nicked.

In the future, maybe we will create android animals to remind ourselves of the good old days when David Attenborough had something to point a camera at.

The prince said 'Africa's rapidly growing human population is predicted to more than double by 2050, a staggering increase of three and a half million people per month.'

If the current sex scandals can do anything to arrest that rate of multiplication by making flirting unacceptable, then at least there will have been something positive come out of it.

Wills said, 'Urbanisation, infrastructure development, cultivation—all good things in themselves, but they will have a terrible impact unless we begin to plan and to take measures now.'

Again, sorry about this but here is the bad news: we won't plan or take measures until after the point at which it’s too late.

Planning and taking measures in good time is not what we do.

At best, humans employ the just-in-time principle.

Politicians almost always work on the basis that doing something now for the long term will cost them in the short term, so they cross their fingers, do nothing and hope it doesn't all go belly up while they are in office.

The prince was right about much of what he said. It just seems a bit rich coming from a member of one of the most profligate and wasteful families on earth.

His grandmother has eight vast homes to choose from, three of which are castles and all of which are permanently cleaned and heated and maintained to her exact specifications.

His father has five homes and travels about on his own personal train.

If they want to go to lunch, the family members take a helicopter.

There is nothing sustainable about them.

If the whole world lived the life of the royal family, we'd run out of resources on this planet pretty soon and I'm not sure there would be enough planets in the solar system to provide for us.

We would have to go searching for land in the next galaxy.

And that's far, far away.

In the meantime, it is probably better to be satisfied with a simpler life and just two kids for the benefit of the one planet that we don't have to commute a billion miles to get to.