Another season of the crown: the coronation of Charles III

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Ora Ogunbiyi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The American government is trying to encourage clean energy projects with lots of money and a bunch of new laws. If everything goes according to plan, these kinds of incentives could really transform the economy. Our correspondent tells us how.

And our obituaries editor reflects on the life of Carolyn Bryant, whose testimony doomed 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, setting America's civil rights movement alight. First up though, In Britain, there's nothing that so brings out a sense of deep history, tradition, maybe anachronism, than a ceremony involving its royal family. And tomorrow, it's going to be a big one: the coronation of King Charles III. It's been almost exactly 70 years since the last crowning of a new monarch. And to put it mildly, things have changed a lot since then. When Queen Elizabeth II started her reign, the nation seemed to have nothing but adoration for its figurehead. But that enthusiasm has long been on the wane, particularly among the young, majority of whom would do away with the monarchy altogether. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of the fascinated and the faithful, some of whom will have camped out for days near Buckingham Palace to secure a good view tomorrow.

It's like an extended family in a way to me, and I write to the royals sometimes, and some of them actually respond. I just think it's something that this little country has got, and big countries haven't got that, and so we should really cherish it and be thankful for all that pageantry and all that nonsense that people might think, but it's our nonsense.

This Saturday in London, an oldish man will get newish hat.

Catherine Nixie is a Britain correspondent for The Economist.

King Charles III has never seemed too keen on the crown that he has to wear, which is something that he shares in fact with many of the British public. But despite the general apathy about the coronation, naturally everyone's been talking about it for the past few weeks.

So tell me how the actual coronation ceremony will unfold.

Well, lengthily is the first thing. There will be a service in Westminster Abbey, and everyone involved in it is very keen to point out that this is a solemn religious ceremony. Westminster Abbey has been the setting for almost every coronation since 1066. This is the time when all the royal correspondents bring out words like pomp and ceremony, and it is quite an extraordinary ceremony. For it to happen properly, it needs a Stone of Destiny, a Sword of Spiritual Justice, a Sword of Temporal Justice. It's going to involve oil made from olives which have been harvested from the Monastery of Mary Magdalene in Jerusalem. There will be plenty of bowing and scraping. There will be lashings of chanting. There will be anointing with chrism. There will be a special coronation spoon, which is 7 centuries old. There will be way too many men in tights. And after the service, there will be the famous coronation procession.

[Speaker:GHION.AI] It all sounds complicated, presumably needs to be rehearsed.

[Speaker:JESSICA] So the way that the royal family rehearses these things, or rather the way that their soldiers do, I think the royals are all tucked up in bed, is that they shut central London in the middle in the middle of the night. They did this for the Queen's funeral as well. And the soldiers all head out between kind of midnight and 6 AM to go and practice their steps in the deserted streets of early morning London. So this Tuesday night, I headed out to watch them rehearse. I went out a bit before midnight. It was a cold May night. And then a little bit after midnight, you could hear this shout in the distance, and no one was quite sure if it was a drunk or a soldier. And then you started to hear the bands, and then the streets started to fill. It was kind of wonderful that in the middle of the night you've got the kind of scene that you really need the vocabulary of a Horatio Hornblower novel to describe. You have to imagine the grand processions that you've seen on television, but just in the middle of the night and with not many people there at all watching. There were bayonets and britches and epaulettes and rapiers and lots of people in pith helmets. There was a gentleman who was wearing an entire tiger skin, which seemed like a bold thing to wear in 2023. And the overall effect was less as if an army had marched by than as if the 18th century had Long live the King!

How will this coronation procession differ from past ones?

Charles has long been rumored to want to slim down the monarchy, and the coronation procession reflects these kind of more slimline ideals. It's much shorter than his mother Elizabeth II's was. Hers was over 5 miles long. His will be just a little over 1. And perhaps the other big difference is not in what it will be like, but how it will be received. So whereas the general mood was very positive towards Elizabeth's coronation, which came not long after the end of the war, and she was this picture book fairy tale princess, Britons seem slightly more nonplussed about Charles's. Almost half Britons say, according to some polls, that they're unlikely to watch the coronation or hold any celebrations for it.

So before we get to what kind of king Charles III will be, what kind of man is he?

An awful lot has changed in Charles's life. Meanwhile, at Westminster, The Abbey bells were sounding a joyful peal. He was born on the 14th of November, 1948, in Buckingham Palace, and then his christening happened shortly afterwards in a music room.

A little later, Prince Charles, just 4 weeks old, slept soundly in the arms of the Queen.

He had a really awful time at school. His parents, Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, chose to send him to the infamously grim Gordonstoun School in Scotland to toughen him up, because the young Charles, like the old Charles, is a kind of sensitive, arty soul. There was a lot of running around in muddy, cold places at Gordonstoun. Apparently, on the inside of their lockers, they had their day divided into these columns for teeth brushed and rope climbed and skipping and press-ups, and of course a column for having had a cold shower. And Charles was just bullied absolutely mercilessly while he was there. And he wrote these really painful letters about it, saying how much he hates it. It's hell here. People throw things at him all night. He wishes he could come home. His son Prince Harry, in his book Spare, remembers his father saying to him, I nearly didn't survive. And Harry wonders how he did, and he points to his teddy bear Charles still apparently has that teddy bear around to this day and takes it with him. One thing that might have helped Charles to cope was his incredibly close relationship with his great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten. Charles's parents were pretty austere, but Mountbatten was much softer, and he kind of knew what boys wanted. So he bought Charles great presents. He bought him a bicycle, which he loved. He brought him a subscription to Eagle magazine, which he wrote him a letter saying, "It's so exciting. The stories are wonderful." He also lavished him with advice, not all of which was followed. Mountbatten slightly cruelly once told Philip and Elizabeth that they should have Charles's ears fixed because, he said, "You can't possibly be king with ears like that." At Mullaghmore, a mile from Lord Mountbatten's home, more of the wreckage has been brought ashore by Garda divers. But then Charles lost him. So in August 1979, the IRA blew up Mountbatten's fishing boat as he was taking his daughter and her twin sons on a family outing. Outing in the sea near his holiday home in Northwest Ireland.

The blast was so powerful that the footwear was not only blown from the victims, but the rubber soles were torn away from the canvas uppers of the shoes.

Another thing that really shaped Charles was, of course, his marriage to Princess Diana, and then his affair and then subsequent marriage to Camilla. Diana and Charles first met on a plowed field when she was 16 years old, and as she put it, fat, podgy, no makeup, and wearing Wellington boots. And he was 30 and had a Labrador and what she remembered as a gloomy air to him. And her first impression was, "God, what a sad man." From these inauspicious beginnings, they got together. There were more meetings. To her surprise, Charles, as she put it, pounced on him after a funeral. And then when she was 19, Charles proposed to her. Their relationship was always overshadowed by Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Charles has always said that nothing happened between the two of them until it was clear that the marriage had irretrievably broken down. That didn't stop speculation, and it didn't stop Diana being kind of fascinated by Camilla from the moment that their marriage had begun. A phone call was recorded between the two of them. They have this long conversation. They're basically saying, "I miss you. I want to be with you all the time." And then it kind of turns into, I suppose, what you would call upper-class phone sex. Charles says that he wishes he could just come and live in her trousers. Camilla says, "What are you going to be? Are you going to be a pair of knickers?" And then Charles says this line which will never leave him. He says, "Oh, or God forbid, a Tampax.

Just my luck." [Speaker:GHION.AI] And so given that, let's call it eventful life, what sort of ruler do you think Charles will be?

[Speaker:JULIA ROBINSON] There are aspects of Charles that have caused people worry over the years. He has a reputation for meddling. He wrote these famous Black Spider Memos, where he would write to politicians to complain about various things. But he said he won't do this. He has promised not to meddle when he's king. As he said in an interview a few years ago, "I'm not that stupid." Really, there's only room for one monarch, and only the monarch has to be this perfectly impartial black box where you just don't know what they're thinking. I mean, that's never going to happen with Charles. We know what he thinks. We know what he thinks about the environment. We know what he thinks about architecture. We know what he thinks about homeopathy, alas. But he is likely to keep it more under wraps as king than he did as Prince of Wales. So he's a reluctant monarch, but the signs so far are that he's probably going to be all right at it.

So with an attitude like that and a more general public apathy about it, what does all this say about the monarchy more generally, do you think?

It's hard to come to logical conclusions about the monarchy because, as even monarchs themselves tend to point out, monarchy really doesn't belong in the modern world. I mean, Edward VIII, he was no fan of the monarchy. Obviously, he left it. Said that the time for kings and princes and all that has passed. And the 20th century, it has to be said, has tended to go along with Edward VIII. The century opened in 1900 with King Umberto I of Italy being assassinated by being shot in the chest 3 times. And for lots of royal families, things didn't get much better from there. There was a lovely quote from King Farouk of Egypt, who himself was hoofed out a bit later, said that by the end of the century there would only be 5 kings left: the King of Hearts, the King of Spades, the King of Diamonds, the King of Clubs, and the King of England. These days, the threat that modern monarchies face is not so much assassinations as just PR disasters. And the current royal family has had so many of them. There has been meddling from Charles, there has been money in suitcases, there obviously has been Prince Andrew, there has been the ongoing dramarama of Harry and Meghan. You know, the public is definitely less deferential than it used to be. When the Queen came to the throne, one-third of Britons felt that she'd been put there by God. Today, the number of those who consider the monarchy to be important or very important important, has fallen a lot. So according to a poll by the National Centre for Social Research, it's fallen from 86% of people thought they were very important or important in 1983, it's just 56% today. Some will grumble, one or two, not many, will protest, but on the whole, it's a bank holiday, everyone's going to just eat scones and probably enjoy the day off. Royal family events are like most family events. Everyone feels a bit grumpy about them beforehand and annoyed that they're going to get in the way of things, and then once they start, everyone has a glass of wine and decides that it's all right after all.

Catherine, thanks very much for your time, and enjoy the festivities, this time in daylight.

Thank you.

Driving across the very southern edge of Georgia to visit what will soon be one of the world's biggest hydrogen production factories in the world.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran is The Economist's global energy and climate innovation editor.

I'm here to see how the new infrastructure and climate laws passed by the American Congress are influencing companies like Plug Power, the developer of this particular green hydrogen project, to invest billions of dollars into the fuels of the future that could help tackle climate change. This company that's behind this plant, Plug Power, is a pioneer in this area. The significance of this plant isn't that it's going to change the entire world at once, but rather it's a stepping stone to a much bigger vision. I wanted to gauge the potential for America becoming an energy superpower of the clean energy sort.

Okay, but this plant is only one stepping stone on America's journey to becoming a clean energy superpower. What does the bigger picture look like?

The country that for a couple of decades has done very little seriously about climate change even walked out of the UN climate talks twice, is now making a huge bet that it can help solve the climate problem for the world. And that vision is something that's come through in a triple whammy of laws that America has recently passed, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA. It's a law that passed last August. Officially, it has some $369 billion in subsidies, tax credits, and other forms of government funding for clean energy infrastructure and projects. The catalytic impact of the government money could very well unleash a $1.6 trillion investment in decarbonization here in the next decade. Renewables are going to get a huge amount of money, not just wind and solar, but energy storage, geothermal. It's sort of an all-of-the-above approach. Even the oil and gas industry may have an opportunity to participate in this if they can decarbonize, that is to clean up their offerings through carbon capture and sequestration or hydrogen technologies. And so they're quite interested and supportive of this as well.

I mean, policy matters, and that's why we feel at the Department of Energy that we've got this central role in ensuring both the technology and the deployment meet the moment.

I put the idea now making the rounds that America could become a clean energy superpower to Jennifer Granholm, America's energy secretary, and she responded in quite a surprising way.

I think we are a global energy superpower now. We've come to the aid of our allies, certainly because of the war in Ukraine, and we're seeing the whole world realign globally as a result of energy security. And now we have made these incredible investments that really put us at the front of the pack.

America appears ready, at least in the minds of the Biden administration, to lead a clean energy and innovation revolution that they argue will actually spark a race to the top, a global race to accelerate climate innovation.

Traditionally, most of the world's energy giants have thrived off of their oil and gas reserves. What makes you think that America can also become an energy giant, but with green energy?

That's a really good question. America actually is one of the world's big oil producers thanks to its shale patch. And it must be remembered that American gas came to Europe's rescue during the crisis of the last 2 years. And that's not going to change. America is going to continue to have that resource. Space for many decades. There's 100 years' worth of natural gas left in America. What's new and different is that America is finally harnessing its largely untapped potential, and much of the money actually goes for implementation of existing technologies like wind, like storage, like solar, with significant but lesser amounts that are actually earmarked for the new innovations, the next-generation nuclear power, for example. They're going to get a kickstart but it's actually about rolling out and scaling up existing technologies to turn America into that green energy superpower. But the administration wants to do this in a way that is also mindful of environmental justice concerns, for example, and the needs of Native peoples. They have a huge amount in there about domestic content to support labor unions and ensure that jobs are in America. There's a strong anti-China element to a lot of what passed, which is Part of the reason why Republicans and Democrats, broadly speaking, came together to support it as a national security set of measures.

And so what does that mean for oil and gas projects?

The incoming Biden administration was very green. President Biden came in promising no new drilling on federal lands. What we've seen, I think, in large part because of energy security rising to the top of the agenda, it has actually given a new lease on life for oil and gas. And we're seeing that with a more pragmatic approach taken by the Biden administration, including approving a major oil project in Alaska that many environmentalists wanted to see shut down called Willow, which is the first big new project for drilling in Alaska approved in a long time. I talked to Senator Lisa Murkowski, a powerful Republican from Alaska who has been very supportive of oil and gas in the past.

I think it is important that we can be the energy superpower. Of all energy sources. And I say that about Alaska. People look at us and think we're oil and gas. Well, we're oil and gas, but we are every renewable. We are truly all of the above.

And I'd like to think that we can be that superpower.

So you can see that even a powerful Republican is now warming up to clean energy. I think that's part of the reason to think that the way that America is doing an all-of-the-above kind of energy policy might actually be sustainable because we're seeing much more of a bipartisan embrace of this.

But surely this isn't going to be all smooth sailing.

You're absolutely right that there are potential snags. One of them is simply the bureaucracy. It's a massive amount of money that has to get through where fiddly things like the Treasury Department has to write the rules on how tax credits will work. And it'll be tax bureaucrats who really don't know much about energy who are going to write the final code that could make or break entire business models. So that's one challenge. The second is America can't build anything. It just, like in Europe, it's very hard to get over the NIMBY problem. Even though Secretary Granholm and the White House are looking for executive tools that they can use to try to make it a little bit better, it's going to require an act of Congress in a bipartisan fashion to fix the permitting and transmission problems that bedevil America.

But despite all of this, these bureaucratic challenges and financing questions, Are you still optimistic?

I think America's energy system is at an inflection point. Last year, the power generated from renewable energy passed the total generated from coal for the first time in history. And that trend is surely going to accelerate, if only because of market forces. It's a lot cheaper to build new solar and wind in America than even to continue operating your coal plants, never mind building new ones. So I think that the direction of change is clear. What's in question is the pace of change. The money that comes from the IRA is time-limited. It has to be spent within the next decade. So far, what I've seen from the Biden administration is there has been a pragmatism, a welcome pragmatism in how the rules are being implemented. And that does give me hope that we might well see America on its way to becoming an energy superpower of the clean kind.

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see. Vijay, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been a great pleasure.

It was on a warm August night in 1955 that Carolyn Bryant saw a Black teenager walk into her store.

Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor.

She kept the general store in Money, Mississippi, which was a tiny little place. He came up to her and asked for something—candy, bubble gum, she didn't remember—but he had a Northern accent. And he proceeded to behave in a rather Northern or out-of-town way. He touched her hand somehow, and he made remarks to her, or so her story ran. He turned and said, "Bye, baby," which really outraged her, and then he whistled at her. She was quite angry by this time and raced out of the store to get the pistol out of the car, but by then the black teenagers had already gone. And she thought to herself, well, maybe least said soonest mended, that she and also her sister-in-law who was in the back babysitting the children would not tell their husbands what had happened. She'd run the store in money for some years, and she and her husband Roy were pretty used to Black customers. In fact, the whole store was geared to them. So she was very well used to dealing with Black people, but the trouble with this one was that he had infringed the local laws of the place, and in fact, the laws of the state of Mississippi. He was meant to be extremely courteous when he came into the the shop, to keep his gaze lowered, never to crowd a white customer, to say, "Yes, ma'am," "No, ma'am," or "No, sir." In general, to behave like a subordinate being, as the white folks of Mississippi in those days thought he was. And she knew if her husband Roy found out, he would be pretty fierce because he was an ex-soldier. She'd fallen in love with him very young, and he was an unsuitable kind of man who drank too much. <LYRICS>The Mississippi River blue—</LYRICS> And somehow, too, he seemed to find out what had gone on. It's possible, because she didn't really tell much of the story straight, that she did tell him herself. In the end, Roy, her husband, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, went to find out where the boy was staying. They'd also found out his name, and that was Emmett Till. It was a name that was to become enormously potent and powerful in the history of the civil rights movement because of what followed. So they made Emmett get out of bed, put his clothes on, and then they abducted him. Pauline Lee. And they took him to one of Milam's sheds, and there they tortured him, pistol-whipped him, beat him so savagely that his face was already unrecognizable. But then they also took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River and shot him through the head. They then dumped him in the river, but just to be sure that he wouldn't be found, They made sure he would sink by tying around his neck with barbed wire a 75-pound cotton gin fan, and then they drove away. They were very soon arrested because the body was found in the river. It was found in a terrible state, and the identity could be proved because Emmett had been wearing his father's ring. And that was the one identifying mark left on the body. <LYRICS>At the river rising, Lord is mighty bad.</LYRICS> Eventually, a funeral was held for him. And at the funeral, his mother insisted that the coffin should be open so that everyone could see the horribly disfigured, bloated, and decomposing face of her son. And this photograph, which ran in a couple of national magazines, did more than pretty much anything to tweak America's conscience, to make it realize what the state of civil rights was in the country, especially in the South. Let all be of sound mind. But then a trial unfolded of the two men for abduction and for murder. Carolyn gave evidence at this. It was not in front of the jury because the judge, who was actually a very fair judge, decided that it really didn't matter what had happened in the store. What mattered was that she hadn't been harmed and nothing had possibly been done that had justified the treatment of Emmett. The two men, her husband and Milam, were acquitted in hardly any more than an hour, and she celebrated along with everybody else. As various new evidence came to light over the ensuing decades, as the case was reopened, it was reopened both by the Justice Department and the FBI. She gave evidence, and the evidence each time seemed to get harder. And in 2008, she gave an interview to a historian called Dr. Timothy Tyson, who was writing a book about the case. He said that she said she had recanted and that all the sexual parts of the incident in the store had not been true, or that part had been made up. But then she changed her mind again, and after that said she hadn't recanted at all. [MUSIC] Now she had turned the whole thing into the classic confrontation that had been in the minds of the racist South for a long time, which was the Black man was a monster and that white women were victims who were potentially under threat from any Black man. And it seemed that the more she embroidered the story, the more she rewrote it, the less true it was, the less it corresponded to anything any other witness remembered. In fact, when it boiled down to it, the only thing everyone agreed on was that as Emmett Till left the store, he wolf-whistled at her. And that wolf whistle in the still Mississippi night was actually the spark from which the entire civil rights movement ignited and grew.

Anne Rowe on Carolyn Bryant, who's died at the age of 88. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jet Gill. Our deputy editor is John-Joe Devlin, and our sound engineer is Will Roe. Our senior producers are Sam Westrin and Rory Galloway. Our creative producer is William William Warren. Our producers are Alizée Jean-Baptiste, Kevin Kainers, Barkley Bram, and Sarah Larniuk, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Elna Schutz. We'll all see you back here on Monday.

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