statism watch

So – the carbon credit trading scheme is revealed as little more than a massive international wealth redistribution scam. Scratch those involved and they bleed conflict of interest, lies, and corruption. There’s been an embarrasment of riches to expose the crisis response to anthropogenic global warming as a fraud since Climategate broke. (Embarrasing partly because it would be nice to cover some real environmental issues for a change). Yet what has the Canadian media’s response been? To delay and minimize its coverage of Climategate and, with the notable exception of Terence Corcoran, to cover its editorial pages in glowing paeans to Copenhagen. It’s time our domestic climate cultists were held accountable.

Flashback: Climategate: Al Gore lies | Climategate: A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism – Part 1 | If Climategate Is No Big Deal, Why Are Questions About It Met With An Armed Response? | Climategate: Investigations into climate fraud fixed | ‘Independent’ United Nations panel to examine Climategate evidence | Bombshell UN Climate Documents Reveal Planned “End Run” Around National Sovereignty | Climategate: Global Warming scientists placed under investigation | Latest Climategate revelation: Climate change data dumped | Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation | Obama’s ‘Science Czar’ John Holdren Friend of Climate Deception Lab | “Climategate”: Peer-Review System Was Hijacked By Warming Alarmists | Top Climatology Lab Hacked, E-Mails Reveal Biased Science | Al Gore Set To Become First “Carbon Billionaire” | IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity, 91-0 | IPCC case for global warming melts on multiple fronts | Obama Science Advisor Called For “Planetary Regime” To Enforce Totalitarian Population Control Measures | IPCC caught with false figures, doubt cast on accuracy of global temperature record

Christopher Booker, Richard North, The Telegraph
December 20, 2009

The head of the UN’s climate change panel – Dr Rajendra Pachauri – is accused of making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies, Christopher Booker and Richard North write

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.

The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.

Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.

The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.

The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).

Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.

In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.

Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop — or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata — and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.

Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.

Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.

It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology — while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts — the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.

But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.

TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.

Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.

But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.

Source | See also under Environment: Climate summit showcases new world order | Copenhagen Accord Establishes Global Government Framework | Climategate: Al Gore lies | Climategate: A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism – Part 1 | Canada part of Copenhagen climate deal | Final Copenhagen Text Includes Global Transaction Tax | World leaders push for climate deal | UN Chief: We Will Impose Global Governance | Copenhagen: the sound of silence | UN Goons Silence Journalist Who Questions Gore On Climategate | If Climategate Is No Big Deal, Why Are Questions About It Met With An Armed Response? | Copenhagen climate summit releases draft final text | Copenhagen: Global Population Control Program Suggested To Stop Climate Change | IMF could fund climate adaptation: Soros | US Environmental Protection Agency Threatens “Command-and-Control” Economy to Push Climate Change Agenda | Diane Francis: We need a global one-child policy | Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after ‘Danish text’ leak | Copenhagen climate summit: past decade warmest on record, claims Met Office | Alberta disputes study exposing carcinogens downstream, downwind of oilsands | Climategate: Investigations into climate fraud fixed | ‘Independent’ United Nations panel to examine Climategate evidence | Australia’s Parliament defeats global warming bill | UK energy smart meter roll-out is outlined | Bombshell UN Climate Documents Reveal Planned “End Run” Around National Sovereignty | Climategate: Global Warming scientists placed under investigation | Latest Climategate revelation: Climate change data dumped | Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation | Canada agrees to contribute to $10-billion climate change fund | UK: Brown proposes global fund to kick-start Copenhagen climate change process | Jim Prentice: Implement A ‘North American Climate Change Regime’ | Obama vows greenhouse gas emissions cuts | Obama’s ‘Science Czar’ John Holdren Friend of Climate Deception Lab | “Climategate”: Peer-Review System Was Hijacked By Warming Alarmists | Top Climatology Lab Hacked, E-Mails Reveal Biased Science | Copenhagen climate talks: No deal, we’re out of time, Obama warns | Leaked G20 Documents Shed Light on Global Carbon Tax | Plant experts unveil DNA barcode | UK University student fined £80 for dropping matchstick on Oxford pavement | Everyone in Britain could be given a personal ‘carbon allowance’ | Big Oil makes case for carbon-capture subsidies | Canada commits to continental wilderness deal | UK: Two-year-olds at risk from ‘gender-bending’ chemicals, report says | Czech President: Copenhagen to be ‘Largest tax increase in world history’ | Friends of the Earth attacks carbon trading as banker scam | Court upholds aboriginal fishing rights on Vancouver Island | Can we manipulate the weather? | Oil Companies Support Global Warming Alarmists, Not Skeptics | US puts climate debate on hold for five weeks despite plea by Merkel | Al Gore Set To Become First “Carbon Billionaire” | Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate, downgrades CO2 threat | Chinese media claims Beijing snow ‘artificially induced’ | Final round for UN climate talks open in Barcelona | EU agrees to pay developing countries ‘climate aid’ to pass Copenhagen | Exaggerated claims undermine drive to cut emissions, scientists warn | Canada sets aside its boreal forest as giant carbon vault | Copenhagen’s Plans for a New ‘Government’ are Scary | Canada’s flax crop mysteriously contaminated by GM seeds | Protesters disrupting question period detained and bloodied by hill security | Copenhagen, carbon, and the global corporate agenda | UK: A bedtime story about drowning kittens and puppies… Labour’s £6m campaign to highlight the dangers of climate change | Pass climate bill before UN summit, Layton says | Britain will starve without GM crops, says major report | Lord Nicholas Stern: The world’s future is being decided this weekend | IPCC Crushes Scientific Objectivity, 91-0 | Thatcher science adviser: Copenhagen goal is world government | It is too late to shut the door on GM foods | Water demand puts Canadian rivers at risk | What happened to global warming? | IPCC case for global warming melts on multiple fronts | More defects, exclusions in key climate warming data are uncovered | UK: Garbage spies alarm neighbourhood | Ont. gives green energy price guarantee | Climate change complacency `global suicide pact,’ UN told | UN plans ’shock therapy’ for world leaders at Copenhagen summit | Washington Post Meteorologist: A Skeptical Take on Global Warming | Sarkozy launches carbon tax to help ’save the human race’ | UN chief warns of climate-related disaster | German Scientists Call for ‘World Climate Bank’ | Baby emissions fuel global warming | Global warming is the new religion of First World urban elites | Aging Shanghai pushes for more babies | Warming oceans mean less cloud cover | Global Warming or Global Cooling? 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