Inconvenient truth - by Richard... Saturday, January 23, 2010

Inconvenient truth - by Richard... Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Indian Mail Today again takes up the Pachauri story, under the heading: "Inconvenient truth about Pachauri".

Ajmer Singh, who wrote the earlier piece on "conflict of interest", this time covers some more of Pachauri's commercial interests – his involvement in the Houston oil technology firm GloriOil and the proposed India Climate Exchange (ICX).

With GloriOil, the irony, writes Ajmer, is that the head of an outfit devoted to climate change is promoting the enhanced recovery of a fossil fuel the use of which has, according to IPCC, led to global warming. Equally remarkable, he adds, is the fact that the chair of IPCC, which is advocating emissions trading along with other mitigation strategies, is himself involved in a commercial trading exchange involving carbon credits.

In other words, Pachauri as the climate czar first recommends certain policies for mitigating global warming. He then gets involved with a commercial entity — a climate exchange (akin to a stock exchange) — which benefits from the adoption of those policies by governments.

Some of the murky tale of GloriOil is told here but Ajmer adds to the details, noting that the company — of which Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor —provides enhanced oil recovery technology to more than 100 oil wells in Texas. 

Dr Pachaur's Indian commercial venture, TERI Biotech, often claims that it was the pioneer in this field but here we are told that the technology was originally developed by India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). 

This comes from R V Marathe, director of the Institute of Reservoir Studies (IRS), an ONGC research laboratory at Ahmedabad. He confirms that MEOR technology was ONGC's concept, stating: "The technology was developed by using ONGC's own infrastructure. Later on, we had collaborated with TERI."

However, Dr Lal, director of TERI's Environmental and Industrial Biotechnology Division, claims that the technology used in the US reservoirs has been "customised" but, bizarrely, when asked about TERI's commercial ambitions and ventures, his response was: "I don't know, ask the government."

Here, though, the story gets even murkier as Ajmer reveals that the technology, which GloriOil was licensed to use, was given to it at what amounted to the knockdown price of £50,000 while the charge for implementation and field trials had only been just over £100,000. Given that TERI have been paid just over £4 million by ONGC for what amounted to extended field trials of the technology, GloriOil seems to have benefitted from an extremely generous deal.

Much more has yet to come out about Dr Pachauri's raft of commercial ventures and hisrelationship with Big Oil, but today we have seen another corner of the carpet lifted, and had a quick peek inside. The full story of GloriOil, however, has yet to be told.

Nevertheless, Ajmer turns to what "also appears to be a conflict of interest", as he highlights Pachauri's role as as chairman of IPCC, and his role as an adviser to the Chicago Climate Exchange ( CCX) and the proposed ICX, the first pilot greenhouse gas emissions trading programme in India.

Pachauri's involvement is clear from the CCX website: "To further this goal, an ICX technical design committee and advisory board is being formed. Dr R K. Pachauri has agreed to serve as the advisory board’s honorary chairman." 

The global market for carbon trading is estimated to be of the order of £75 billion and, given the potentially huge profits, it is not surprising that the participants who have committed to be part of the ICX technical design committee include leading corporations such as Ford India, Tata Motors, ITC, Reliance Industries, Reliance Power, Tata Power, Indowind Power Suzlon/ Senergy Global, IBM India and Motorola India.

Pachauri, writes Ajmer, has claimed that TERI is not a profit-making organisation, but works for the larger good of the society. However, the fact that he is the head of a key UN panel and has links with a number of commercial organisations and entities, casts a doubt on his claims.

Amjer thus concludes that his critics argue that TERI ought to make public its balance sheet, viz. the money it has earned from various sources, and the details of the manner in which it has been spent. However, the organisation currently publishes its accounts for public consumption only in percentage terms.

Surprisingly – or perhaps not - Pachauri did not respond to repeated queries from newspaper, either by telephone or e-mail. He may find, though, that ducking the hard questions does not make them go away – as he will see in The Sunday Telegraph tomorrow.

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Contradicting themselves - by Richard...

"Rajendra Pachauri ... is, at best, one more blunder away from having to resign its (the IPCC's) chairmanship." That comes from the man we like to describe as the doyen of the warmists, Geoffrey Lean, writing in The Daily Telegraph.

No doubt, we can help Dr R K on his way to a peaceful retirement as, with reckless abandon, he told The Hindu yesterday that the chances of the IPCC having made more errors in its benchmark 2007 report were "minimal if not non-existent", even while admitting the "regrettable error" on the melting glaciers that has raised questions about its credibility.

Although retailed by the newspaper, the actual text comes from a press release, issued by TERI, offering in Q&A form the observations of R K Pachauri on the affair. This is helpfully reproduced, in full, on this website.

Not used by The Hindu are his comments on the funding obtained by TERI for its glaciology work, where this section is volunteered by Pachauri:

Q8) There have been views that your institute has gained from the alarmist situation created to rope in projects worth billions of dollars?

Research on Climate Change in TERI goes as far as back as 1987 – before the IPCC had been formed. Our work on glaciers started two years ago recognising the need for greater field based data generation and modelling. The IPCC report has also pointed out the need for more research in these areas.

Q9) What is TERI’s research on Glaciers?

The project on Himalayan glacier quoted by the media (Hi Noon) is an EU funded project under the FP7 programme. TERI participated in this competitive bid as one partner in a consortium of institutions led by a European institution and involves several other Indian institutions including IIT Delhi and Kharagpur. Each institute has a well defined role and TERI is addressing the issue of socio-economic impact assessment

Q10) What work is TERI doing with Government of Iceland?

The Global Centre, Iceland received support from Carnegie Foundation for glacier related work. Our collaboration with this Centre is for the purpose of training and teaching in glaciology.

The "billions of dollars" assertion is, of course, an invention, but we see an acknowledgement that TERI is receiving "support" both from the EU and (implied) from the Carnegie Corporation. Here the answer in Q10 is particularly interesting as it claims that the collaboration is "for the purpose of" – i.e., limited to "training and teaching in glaciology."

This makes quite a dramatic contrast with the statements made in a press release, again by TERI, on 15 January 2009 on the Global Centre collaboration, where it states that:

Under this collaboration, senior scientists from the respective countries will carry expeditions in the Himalayas. The collaboration, which is its early stage, will be funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The press release goes on to say that:

TERI has initiated the establishment of Glacier Monitoring Observatories at Kolahoi Glacier, Jammu and Kashmir and another at East Rathong Glacier, Sikkim. These two glaciers are being monitored with the state-of-art scientific instruments on a regular basis for various parameters like Energy Balance, Mass Balance and Hydrological Balance for the glacierized region.

A certain Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain is also quoted freely in the press release, which records his presence at a meeting between Dr R K Pachauri and Iceland president, Dr Ólafur Grímsson, to celebrate the start of collaboration.

Yet, it will be recalled that Hasnain, in his TV debate with me claimed that all the funding for his glaciology work came from TERI and that there was no "outside funding". He rejected as a "wild allegation" my assertions that funding came from the EU and the Carnegie Corporation.

It seems to me that both Hasnain and RK Pachauri need to get their acts together and read their own press releases. At the moment, they are contradicting themselves – this is the blunder that could bring them both down.

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Those embassies - by Richard... Friday, January 22, 2010

The 13th Spitfire blog is chiding us very gently for not writing on the scandal of the FCO closing down embassies – ostensibly on cost-saving grounds – while at the time, the EU is opening up a whole raft of new embassies.

However, this is hardly news. We wrote about it on 12 April 2009, then noting that we had first written about what was happening on 8 June 2005. We also wrote pretty strident pieces inJanuary 2008 and May 2008.

The EU has not been at all secretive in its intentions – even if the British government has been – and this was one of the reasons why we should have opposed the constitutional Lisbon treaty. We (our government) didn't, and Cameron's Conservatives have also pulled out of the fight.

Thus, progressively, British embassies are going to be replaced by EU embassies, with a few British officials renting desks in a common building. The writing has been on the wall for years, we warned it was going to happen and now it is happening. It is a bit late complaining about it now.

The only answer, of course, is to leave the EU – and until the British nation (and their politicians) wake up to that reality, we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. But then, come the next election, an awful lot of people are going to vote for the three main parties, all of whom support this sort of thing.

They deserve what they get. As for us - we have got past the point where we want to write about the EU, or analyse developments. We just want to destroy it, before it destroys us.

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