King Charles Ditches Tradition in Climate Change Talks with Biden

KEVIN LAMARQUE / Reuters

President Joe Biden met King Charles III for the first time since his coronation Monday, giving the president a lavish welcome to Windsor Castle where Biden was saluted by the scarlet tunic and bearskin clad brass band of the Welsh Guards.

In a significant break with tradition, the palace briefed that their meeting would be dominated by discussions of the environment and climate change.

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The decision to brief on the environmental content of their meeting in advance signalled again Charles’ apparent unwillingness to abandon his lifelong causes, despite a vow to do so at his accession. The king is supposed to sit above politics—Charles’ supporters argue that the climate crisis is too.

The king met Biden most recently at the late Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, and while the two men are believed to have a cordial and friendly relationship, some eyebrows were raised at Biden’s decision not to accept an invitation to the king’s coronation earlier this year. He sent his wife in his place and constitutional experts noted that serving U.S. presidents had never previously attended a British monarch’s coronation.

The president arrived on board Marine One, which thundered through sunny skies to land on the Castle’s golf course shortly before 1PM local time. Biden was then driven to the quadrangle of the castle where the king was waiting for him on a tented dais before the Band of the Welsh Guards played the Star Spangled Banner. The President and the king then strolled among the ceremonial troops as they undertook the traditional inspection of the Guard of Honor.

The two men then retired to Charles’ private quarters for tea—and their well flagged conversation about the environment.

Biden and the king were then due to join participants of the Climate Finance Mobilisation Forum hosted by John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, in the castle’s Green Drawing Room.

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Charles first met a U.S. president when President Eisenhower visited his mother at Balmoral in 1959, when he was 11.

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