Rajendra Pacharui has been chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002. Any confidence any reasonable person might have had in his leadership has long evaporated.
Last September I blogged about how an inquiry that examined IPCC policies and procedures blew “smoking holes through just about everything” this man has told us about his organization and the way it produces its reports.
Six weeks later I wrote about the fact that, if you catch him in the right mood, Pachauri will bizarrely attempt to deny that the IPCC is a United Nations organization.
I’ve mentioned that his idea of statesmanship is to declare that climate skeptics should rub asbestos on their faces.
I’ve observed that, when IPCC insiders were given a chance to comment on Pachauri’s performance via an anonymous online questionnaire last year, they used words such as inexcusable,dysfunctional, and ill-advised.
I’ve written about the fact, given all the calls for his resignation that have been studiously ignored, there’s no escaping the conclusion that the IPCC is “a screeching, flashing, billboard-sized example of influence without accountability.”
A few days ago I pointed out that Pachauri speaks incessantly about ‘the cause’ – and has admitted that he sees fighting climate change as merely a means to an end. His real goal, he says, is transforming the global economy.
(Like everyone else, Pachauri is entitled to pursue whatever goals make sense to him. But people who want to restructure the global economy should argue that case on its own merits. It’s sneaky and dishonest to accomplish this via the back door – under the guise of responding to an environmental crisis.)
In my view the IPCC no longer has the slightest shred of credibility. Ordinary people would have to be out of their minds to trust anything it says.
But there’s one Pachauri utterance in particular that reduces me to giggles. In 2007 he told the US Public Broadcasting System that companies should care more about the environment. In the long term, he said, people would judge them accordingly and their bottom line would be adversely effected.
So here they are, Pachauri’s pearls of wisdom:
We’re living in a world where reputation and public opinion are extremely important.
If that were true Pachauri would have been shown the door years ago.
