By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter, Sunday Telegraph
Theirs is an unlikely alliance: the heir to the throne, the leader of the Church of England and the man who so nearly got the most powerful job in the world.
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But the Prince of Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Al Gore will this week launch a new project to encourage big business to become more "green".
Prince Charles is said by aides to be "totally committed" to the scheme in which companies will be urged to assess – and reverse – the damage they are doing to the environment.
The Sunday Telegraph can also reveal that Prince Charles recently held a private meeting at Highgrove, his country home, with Mr Gore, the former presidential candidate, to discuss their shared passion for saving the environment.
Now Mr Gore has agreed to provide a video message, which will be screened to nearly 200 politicians, businessmen and other guests at St James's Palace on Wednesday night. The former vice-president was in Britain in September to promote his film, An Inconvenient Truth, which warns that the world has just 10 years to save itself.
Prince Charles will be one of three speakers at the launch of his Accounting for Sustainability project. The others are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Lord Browne of Madingley, the chief executive of BP, the petroleum giant.
It is understood that companies will be encouraged to follow Prince Charles's example by "offsetting" their carbon emissions. This is a service that allows individuals and companies to repair some of the damage caused by harmful emissions by channelling funds into projects that reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A senior aide to the prince said yesterday: "The aim of the new project is to help develop systems that will enable organisations to measure more effectively the environmental and social costs of their actions.
"This is for two reasons. It will enable organisations to take such factors into account when taking decisions about their future. It will also enable them to make more information available to help consumers make more informed decisions."
Prince Charles regards Lord Browne as a powerful ally. Over the past decade, the peer has challenged the oil industry's past rejection of global warming and sought to cast BP as a "green" energy company. He has promised that BP will significantly cut its emission of greenhouse gases.
The Sunday Telegraph disclosed in July that Prince Charles had introduced a series of "green measures" at Highgrove, his Gloucestershire home, in order to save water and energy.
Royal sources say that Prince Charles is determined to lead by example because he believes that climate change is "the greatest challenge to face mankind" and should be tackled with greater urgency.
New measures introduced at Highgrove include using rainwater to flush lavatories and irrigate land, a reed-bed sewage system to process waste, and eco-friendly insulation and double glazing to increase heating efficiency. At Home Farm, the prince's 900-acre organic farm near Highgrove, there are plans to produce and sell bio-diesel, an environmentally-friendly motor fuel made from rape-seed oil and vegetable fats.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/12/03/ngore03.xml
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