At the least, Dr Rajendra Pachauri’s IPCC position as the world’s “top climate official” has been earning a substantial income for Teri, the institute he runs.
by Christopher Booker
Telegraph [UK]
26 December 2009
It was not just in Britain last week that we all shivered through pre-Christmas snow, ice and cold. Blizzards sweeping across Europe, from the Channel Tunnel to Moscow, killed more than 100 people. Even the beaches of Nice and the gondolas of Venice lay under a blanket of white.
Across the Atlantic, as the northern hemisphere was plunged into its third freezing winter in succession, violent snowstorms left more than two thirds of the US and almost the whole of Canada under December snow for the first time in decades. In the wake of that acrimonious shambles in Copenhagen, ever more questions are now being asked not only over the validity of the science behind the belief that man-made CO2 is causing runaway global warming but about the methods being used to meet that supposed threat.
In last week’s Sunday Telegraph Richard North and I wrote an article revealing the worldwide business interests of who, as chairman since 2002 of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the world’s “top climate official”. Our report was picked up by newspapers and blogs across the world, and was even the basis for a question put to Ban Ki-moon, the UN’s Secretary General, at a New York press conference. But nowhere did it provoke a greater storm than in India, where Dr Pachauri is director-general of The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), based in New Delhi, the country’s most influential private body involved in climate-change issues and renewable energy. In addition, as we reported, Dr Pachauri also holds more than a score of positions with banks, universities and other institutions that benefit from the vast worldwide industry now based on measures to halt climate change.
In a series of press and television interviews, Dr Pachauri described our report as “a pack of lies”. He accused us of being part of that same “powerful vested interest” responsible for “Climategate”, the emails and other documents leaked from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, which revealed the methods used by the small group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC to manipulate temperature data to show that the earth has been warming further than is justified by the evidence.
When asked whether he intended to take legal action over our article, Dr Pachauri replied that he hadn’t yet made up his mind. But Teri issued a press release listing its main complaints against the article.
A first point to emerge from these responses is how much of what we wrote they do not contradict. Dr Pachauri does not deny that he holds all the positions referred to in our article, such as giving advice on climate change to bodies ranging from major banks such as Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank to the Chicago Climate Change, the worlds’s largest dealer in buying and selling the right to emit CO2.
He and Teri insist, however, that all the money he receives for his services, such as 100,000 euros from Deutsche Bank and $80,000 from Toyota Motors are paid not to him personally but to his institute (and that he receives
no fee from the Chicago Climate Exchange). Teri denies that it
does not publish its accounts simply by stating that its accounts are supplied to the relevant tax authorities.
Dr Pachauri repeatedly denied that Teri still has any links with the Tata Group, India’s largest privately-owned business empire, with interests ranging from coal and steel to renewable energy, and which set up Teri as the Tata Energy Research Institute in 1974. He now claims that Teri has had no “direct links” with Tata since 1999 (or, in another interview, 2001). But it was not until 2003 that the name changed to The Energy and Resources Institute, and then a Teri spokesman explained that “we have not severed our links with the Tatas” and that the change of name was “only for convenience”.
Indeed one of the Tata group of companies is still listed among Teri’s corporate sponsors, several directors of Tata serve on Teri’s Business Council for Sustainable Development, and one senior director serves on Teri’s Advisory Board. Other links include the fact that Dr Pachauri and Ratan Tata, the head of the group, both serve on the Indian Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, advising on all aspects of national climate policy.
In short, these initial responses to our article leave many questions unanswered. At the least it seems that Dr Pachauri’s position as the world’s “top climate official” has been earning a very substantial income for the institute of which he is director-general; and the only way to avoid further questioning must now be for both Dr Pachauri and Teri to come out into the open over all those issues that remain obscure.
For a start, we should be allowed to know what Dr Pachauri is paid by us all as chairman of the IPCC, a figure that remains confidential…
The article continues at the Telegraph.
