On February 18, Yvo de Boer announced that come July, he will vacate his post as the United Nations’s top man on climate change in favor of a consultancy at the accounting firm KPMG. He will leave behind a U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change that is beleaguered and besieged — the convention is reeling from its failure to reach a consensus on emissions policy in Copenhagen last December and witnessing the crackup of the scientific “consensus” on global warming.
But even as the pressure appears to have gotten to de Boer — who once left a Bali climate-conference work session in tears — a kind of blithe defiance seems to have set in with his most (in)famous deputy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri.
The barbate and bespoke-suited Pachauri has become the locus of criticism of the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report, which has been found to contain some tenuous science along with a few outright falsehoods — the most prominent among the latter being the assertion that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. As the report’s overseer, Pachauri appears to have known about the glacier error well before Copenhagen. But facing a conference already troubled by a rash of leaked e-mails that showed a spirit of suppression, obfuscation, and slipshod methodology among some of the global-warming movement’s most prominent scientists, he delayed issuing a correction or an apology until well after the conference, once “Glaciergate” began making headlines across the globe.
And when some (including the head of Greenpeace U.K.) said the scandal had cost the IPCC its “credibility” and publicly called on Pachauri to resign, the doctor stood firm, vowing to stay on at IPCC clear through the release of its next assessment report in 2013–14 and blaming the global-warming backlash on greedy corporations looking to protect their profits.
“Having found a phenomenal increase in awareness on the subject around the world, they have decided to target me in my position as chairman of the IPCC and have sunk extremely low in trying to attack me personally with lies and falsehoods,” Pachauri told an Australian newspaper.
Pachauri’s résumé reveals the impressive breadth of an able dabbler. Educated in his native India and at North Carolina State University, Pachauri holds Ph.D.s in economics and mechanical engineering (but not, you will note, in climate science). He spent his early career in academia and worked as a consultant for a number of corporations while making the rounds on the boards of sundry think tanks and nonprofits. For nearly 30 years, he has served as director of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and in 1998, he became chancellor of a university chartered under the same name. He has even made forays in the world of letters, publishing a book of poetry and, most recently, a rather lurid romance novel.
Along the way, of course, Pachauri has become a green proselytizer of world renown; his reputation among the climate-change enthusiasts is second only to that of Al Gore, alongside whom he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC in 2007.
But it is easy to forget that at the time of his ascension to the IPCC chairmanship in 2002, Pachauri was favored by the Bush administration as a moderate alternative to his predecessor, Prof. Bob Watson, whom the Bush administration considered too alarmist to support for a second term. Back then, even Gore denounced Pachauri in speeches as the “let’s drag our feet” candidate and warned that Pachauri’s “virulent anti-American statements” would undercut his authority in the U.S.
That last bit refers principally to an editorial Pachauri wrote in 2001 advocating “a worldwide movement which boycotts American goods as a source of global pollution” as “the only means to bringing the US administration to a position of minimal fairness.” Of course, the same editorial shames the “disastrous climate change policy” of George W. Bush. The novel if somewhat paranoid theory among some liberals at the time was that Bush backed Pachauri precisely because this sort of rhetoric would set developing and developed nations at each others’ throats, and thus slow momentum toward consensus on global climate-change policy.
If that was the plan, it half succeeded. While the eight years of Pachauri’s tenure have not seen the first and third worlds resolve their fundamental differences on the modalities of regulating greenhouse-gas emissions, his regime has until recently proven remarkably effective at convincing most of the world’s powers that worldwide regulation is necessary.
In that sense, Gore’s worries about Pachauri have proven rather ill-founded (and in fact, the two reportedly buried the hatchet in Stockholm). Indeed, the doctor has pursued the warming agenda with a fervor that is religious in character — at times explicitly, as when he told a meeting of environmentalists that he hoped to create an “evangelic fervor” about climate change. The metaphor is apt. Pachauri’s insistence on the sacrosanctity of anthropogenic global warming has elevated the IPCC’s fourth assessment to the level of revealed scripture. And the unambiguousness of its conclusions, combined with the diluvian scale of the consequences we are told we’ll meet should we fail to heed them, have emboldened Pachauri and his colleagues to call for massively engineered remedies whose impact on global GDP could make the recent financial crisis look like a mere hiccup.
Also, Pachauri isn’t content to let stand the distinction between what is his and what is Caesar’s. His belief in the righteousness of his cause has led him at times to advocate no less than the circumvention of the entire Westphalian order:
I’m reaching the stage where you really cannot rely on leaders. You really cannot rely on the nation-state. You really need a groundswell of grassroots action and grassroots consciousness on what needs to be done.
If that starts happening, then leaders will follow. Let’s face it, whether it’s a democracy or even a totalitarian system, action at the grassroots level is something that cannot be ignored.
Pachauri doesn’t have much time for the quaintness of some national institutions, such as America’s lingering small-government impulse, either. “In some countries,” he has said, “taxation is acceptable.” But in America, “politicians get elected by saying ‘read my lips, no new taxes,’ as though taxes are some form of an evil.”
“After all you need taxation for maintaining an army; you need taxation for invading Iraq,” he added. “Why not taxation for ensuring energy security? Why not taxation for creating better railroad systems? There has to be a change in philosophy in some of these areas.”
This sort of talk makes it easy to understand why climate skeptics, especially those on the right, have long seen global warming as a Trojan horse for a redistributive internationalism. But the string of controversies that have shaken the climate-science world in recent months is leading even sympathetic parties to wonder whether Pachauri’s IPCC is inexorably biased. To wit, Professor Watson, whom the Bush administration rejected as a climate alarmist, has urged the U.N. to investigate why the mistakes in the 2007 assessment have all “gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating [its] impact,” and has called for the creation of a new body whose research would be “challenged by sceptics” and include dissenting views.
By contrast, Pachauri’s stubborn refusal to admit culpability for the Glaciergate error and its aftermath, characterization of dissenting views as “voodoo science,” and reduction of legitimate criticism to personal slanders, raise the question: Is this the alacrity of a true believer or the guile of a charlatan?
Why might it be the latter? One answer is profit. Like Gore’s, Pachauri’s green gospel has proven quite lucrative. Pachauri owns a mansion on the most exclusive strip of real estate in New Delhi, but he claims the millions he receives in consulting fees go toward funding research at his multinational TERI empire. As a charitable organization headquartered in India, TERI’s annual reports do not include detailed accounts or salary disbursements. And because Pachauri’s work for the IPCC is unpaid, he is not required to disclose outside interests.
But a number of investigative reports, mostly in the Telegraph, have pointed to accounting “anomalies” in the publicly disclosed accounts of TERI’s U.K. arm — itself the recipient of at least £10 million in taxpayer funding — that suggest revenues could be much higher than advertised. And others have questioned how Pachauri’s paid advisory positions at the corporations that stand to benefit or suffer most should the IPCC’s recommendations go into effect can be anything other than a massive conflict of interest.
During his Nobel-acceptance speech, Pachauri called for “continued trust and cooperation from policymakers and society at large to support the work needed for scientific progress” on climate change. But Dr. Pachauri’s coyness about the effect on his IPCC work of his growing enmeshment in the “climate industry” and his refusal to yield ground to reasoned scientific critiques of the so-called climate consensus call for scrutiny rather than trust.
– Daniel Foster is news editor of National Review Online.