Dear President Trump,

We’re so looking forward to your state visit to the UK next week: it will annoy all the right people and delight all the right people — a win/win, and I know you like winning.

Before you arrive, I’d like to give you some friendly advice on how to win some more. It pertains to what could be a very sticky meeting you’re going to have on Monday with our future king, the Prince of Wales.

Prince Charles will no doubt insist on lecturing you about climate change and your supposed failure to take it seriously.

Your inclination may be to ignore him because though you’re no scientist — nor by the way is he — your perfectly-formed bullshit antennae enabled you to see the truth of the matter long ago: “climate change” is a scam being pushed by the radical left to make their mission to destroy Western industrial civilisation look like it’s caring and scientifically justified and inevitable.

But wait a second. You can do better than make this meeting an uneasy draw between two implacable opponents. Play this one right and you can come away with another victory.

There’s nothing eco-loons like Prince Charles love more than taking the moral high ground. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to demonstrate convincingly that in fact you are the one with rightness, truth and justice on his side.

Here is how:

You’re Rescuing the World from the Biggest Bill in History

More than $1.5 trillion every year is currently being spent on the global warming industry. Not a cent of this expenditure will be necessary if you can prove that the man-made climate change scare is #fakenews. And that’s just what you’re doing step by step: withdrawing from the UN Paris climate accord; restoring rigour to the science at the U.S. Geographical Survey and the National Climate Assessment; appointing world-class physicist William Happer to head a new Climate Review Panel.

Imagine if, instead of lining the pockets of junk scientists and crony capitalists, those trillions could be spent on problems that really exist: eradicating disease and malnutrition; enacting Bjorn Lomborg’s scheme to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean drinking water.

Saving the Children

As a victim of the world’s second-biggest #fakenews story — Russiagate — you’re just the man to tackle the world’s biggest #fakenews story: environmental catastrophism. Unlike the lying, legacy media, you’re not afraid to take on the real bad guys and call them out for the dangerous charlatans they are. Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old autistic kid (and tool of green lobbyists) who can literally see ‘carbon’ — or so she claims — and who has bewitched politicians and influencers across the world into imagining that yet more taxpayers’ money should be chucked at a non-existent problem. Sir David Attenborough, whispery-voiced gorilla-hugging Malthusian, slayer of walruses. The fact that they come across well on telly and appeal straight to people’s emotions is what makes them so dangerous. Global policy should not be based on muh feelings. Still less should it be based on “facts” which, on closer examination, turn out to be derived not from evidence or data but Ice Age 2. We owe it to the world’s children to tell them the truth about global warming — and related #fakenews scares like ‘ocean acidification’ and mass species extinction. Too many of them have been brainwashed into thinking they have no future; they are resentful and pessimistic where they should be positive and informed.

Conservatives Don’t Kill the Planet — Environmentalists Do

Yes, there have been terrible man-made environmental disasters but most of them happened either in developing nations — Bhopal etc — or behind the Iron Curtain — Chernobyl, the Aral Sea, etc. In the West, much of the damage to the planet is being done by environmentalists trying to save it: wind turbines slicing and dicing birds and bats; rainforests being chopped down to grow palm oil; American hardwood forests being chopped to make wood chips to fuel Britain’s Drax power station. The problem with so much environmental legislation is that it’s designed by green ideologues who are more interested in wrecking Western industrial civilisation than they are in saving the planet. The more quickly you roll back this counterproductive legislation — together with the subsidies paid to the destructive, inefficient renewables industry — the more prosperous the world will become; and consequently, the more money the world’s poorer nations will have available to live — as the cant green term has it — ‘sustainably.’

Trees

This is your jujitsu moment: where you unbalance your opponent by using his own apparent strength against him. Does Prince Charles care about the trees? Of course he does. He probably talks to them and hugs them every day before breakfast. But what you can show is that you care more — and that you are taking more practical steps to care for them.

I asked Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace about this: what causes can we true conservationists support to do our bit for the planet. He says that better tree management — silviculture — would be maybe the most important step. Trees and forests comprise over 90 per cent of the world’s biomass. Before we start lecturing countries like Brazil on how to use their natural resources sustainably, we first need to take care of the problems on our own doorstep. In the U.S., for example, forests on federal land have been badly mismanaged as a result of wrongheaded green policies. This needs to change: forests need to be managed, not preserved in aspic. They need to be thinned and occasionally they need controlled burning. Only this way will we have healthy trees and avoid the fires like the ones which devastated parts of California last year.

Among the practical measures that could be taken, making you, Mr President, the greenest since Teddy Roosevelt:

An aggressive programme of fighting tree diseases and insect pests to stem the onslaught of deciduous tree deaths.

Major research funding to find new environmentally friendly fungicide, biocides, and insecticides that won’t harm pollinating insects. I know a guy working on this: can put you in touch.

Additional support of colleges focused on forest management, forest ecology, plant pathology, scholarships — all designed to circumvent the pernicious influence of ideology-driven environmental degree courses and turn out practically-minded conservationists who actually know useful stuff.

Triple federal support for preventing and controlling wildfires and forest fires with more staff, equipment, customised fire fighting planes, and helicopters.

Greenies love to portray themselves as the only people who care about the environment, those Truffula trees. Don’t concede them territory they don’t deserve.

Plastics in the oceans

Sure you care about plastic pollution. Doesn’t everyone? The difference is that you understand that the latest moral panic about plastics — with cynical or naive politicians flailing around to see who can ban them most quickly — is just a proxy for the green movement’s war on fossil fuels. Plastic is actually extremely versatile, useful, and a boon to mankind. The vast majority of plastic pollution comes from the third world and the developing world — mainly Africa and especially Asia. If you want to stop plastic waste, put a price on it. Help incentivise polluting countries to dispose of their waste effectively and profitably. According to Patrick Moore — who really knows his stuff: you should meet up — by far the best way to do this is waste-to-energy. The U.S. can provide the technological advice and the loans or funding. Job done; whales and turtles saved.

I hope these tips prove useful, Mr President, not just for your meeting with the Prince of Wales but for your conflicts with those Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are determinedly trying to reposition green issues as the key ideological battleground of our age. We cannot allow them to take the moral high ground. These people are anti-science, anti-human, anti-prosperity, anti-freedom, and — ironically — anti-environment. If they win the planet loses. So let us never let them get away with it.

Your English friend,

James Delingpole