A Fitting Use for English Wine

Prince Charles, in a stunning display of sacrifice for the environment, has converted his Aston Martin to run on biofuel. The car only gets 10 miles to the gallon but he only drives it about 300 miles per year. Of course, the rest of the time he's producing tons of CO2 by running off at the mouth and doing whatever useless things an old Prince with no chance of ever becoming King does, but I guess we should be glad he's doing the right thing:

Converting the Aston Martin played a small but symbolic role. The Prince's chief aide Sir Michael Peat said: 'Charles only travelled two or three hundred miles a year in the Aston but he wanted it to be environmentally friendly. It just happened that our bioethanol supplier makes the fuel from surplus English wine.'

Yeah, very small and very symbolic. At least he's doing us all a favor by ridding the world's dinner tables of British wine.

The grapes used for Charles's fuel have already been fermented into wine on an English vineyard near Swindon, Wiltshire.

Its owners bottle all they can, but cannot produce more than their EU quota. Rather than destroy the excess, the vineyard now sells it to the Gloucestershire biofuels supplier Green Fuels, where it is distilled.

Finally, something good can be said about EU quotas.

The green prince has also introduced a raft of environmentally-friendly measures at his homes, such as reed bed sewage systems and wood-chip boilers at Highgrove and Birkhall, his Scottish residence.

He even tries to have his cows fed on grass rather than grain - to cut their flatulence and minimise their emission of the greenhouse gas methane.

When you're a Prince of course you have someone to shovel those wood chips and change the reeds in the sewage system. I wonder how he "tries to have his cows fed on grass"? When I lived on a farm as a boy, all the cows ate grass except the one we were milking and we didn't have to even try. For some reason, the just ate it like it was natural or something. I guess royal cows need coaxing. Geez, somebody find this guy a job.

On a more serious note, does the green prince (which sounds like something out of a comic book) really think that we shoud go back to burning wood chips? I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that if the whole world takes to burning wood chips, it is not going to help the environment.