LONDON - Charles, the Prince of Wales, has warned that humanity has just 96 months left to save the world.

According to a report in The Independent, the heir to the British throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace that capitalism and consumerism have brought the world to the brink of economic and environmental collapse.

In a grandstand speech, which set out his concerns for the future of the planet, Charles said he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.

In a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said that we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.

The Prince, who has spoken passionately about the environment before, said that if the world failed to heed his warnings, then we all faced the “nightmare that for so many of us now looms on the horizon”.

Charles’s speech was described as his first attempt to present a coherent philosophy in which he placed the threat to the environment in the context of a failing economic system.

The Prince, who is advised by the leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, said that even the economist Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism, had been aware of the shortcomings of unfettered materialism.

Delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, Charles said that without “coherent financial incentives and disincentives”, we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

According to Charles, the next generation will face a “living hell” unless governments urgently tackle climate change and stop plundering the Earth’s natural resources.

“In failing the Earth, we are failing Humanity,” the Prince said, drawing parallels with the global financial crisis.

“But for all its achievements, our consumerist society comes at an enormous cost to the Earth and we must face up to the fact that the Earth cannot afford to support it,” he added.

“Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts; so Nature’s life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too. If we don’t face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust. And no amount of quantitative easing will revive it,” he explained.

He highlighted that the dual challenge of an economic system with “enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis of climate change” threatened to “engulf us all”. (ANI)