The Prince of Wales has demanded a “Magna Carta for the Earth” in order to save the planet from global warming – thus calling into severe question the abilities of those hapless dons who were charged with teaching him history when he scraped into Cambridge back in the early Seventies.

Had those history professors done their job, Prince Charles would surely be aware that Magna Carta was – at least insofar as it matters to us most today – a charter which protected the rights of the many against the tyranny of unaccountable power. But the kind of sweeping, pan-global, UN-enforced climate treaty the Prince is proposing represents the precise opposite.

Prince Charles, who made his speech to an invited audience at his International Sustainability Unit’s meeting on Forests, Climate Change and Development in London yesterday, is the latest of a number of international celebrities, ranging from rapper Pharrell Williams and President Obama to the Pope, who have spoken of the urgent need for a new global climate agreement.

Nor will he be the last. The purpose of all these high-level declarations of intent is to pave the way for the UN’s next round of climate talks in Paris this December which, campaigners hope, will result in the most significant treaty of concerted international action since the Marshall Plan.

This is what Mary Robinson – former president of Ireland, now the UN’s special envoy on climate change – meant when she told the Guardian that “this is the most important year since 1945.”

What she failed to add is that 1945 (more specifically, Berlin after the Soviets had arrived) is exactly what the global economy will start to resemble if the UN green technocrats get their way. Despite mounting evidence that there is no connection between rising CO2 levels and catastrophic global warming, the UN’s climate “experts” remain resolutely wedded to the idea that “carbon” (aka the natural by-product of almost every industrial process) must be regulated out of existence.

Such an international treaty – were it ever to come to pass: extremely unlikely given that there has been no global warming since 1998, much though people in New York right now might wish it otherwise – would undoubtedly lead to lower standards of living, less personal freedom, higher energy bills and more needless deaths, especially among those elderly people forced into “fuel poverty.”

Bad King John hated putted his seal on Magna Carta. This proposed UN treaty, on the other hand, would have been much more his style.