The first thing Rajendra Pachauri does is open his coat lapel and reveal the label. It says, `Chhadha and Company', a shop in South Delhi's middle-class Khanna Market.
That's in response to a now oft-repeated claim, first made by the UK's Daily Telegraph, that the chairperson of the Intergovenmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), and Nobel Prize winner with his organisation, has a lifestyle that includes wearing thousand-dollar Armani suits.
"I paid Rs 2,200 for my suits, after bargaining my tailor down from Rs 2,500," said Pachauri, 69, who spoke to Hindustan Times in the course of his first wide-ranging interview to the Indian media after a controversy over the IPCC's scientific errors, allegations of his conflicts of interest as chief of New Delhi's The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), and his lifestyle. Pachauri attributed the attacks on him and the IPCC to the work of global lobbies, with "millions, maybe billions" of dollars in funding, who do not accept global warming. He singled out two British papers for "running campaigns" against him.
Pachauri quoted the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington DC-based think tank as saying 2,300 lobbyists and 700 companies in the US alone were arrayed against the acceptance of global warming.
"All of this is clearly part of the strategy to demolish the science of climate change and thereby continue to earn their huge profits," said Pachauri.
"They really don't want to pay for negative externalities that they are putting on the world through growing consumption and production of fossil fuels."
"I've gone to the point of saying people should eat less meat and that bothers them because they feel I'm questioning their lifestyles, and they feel it is bringing huge cost on them."
"They feel threatened by the scientific assessments of the IPCC and hold me responsible for what I am saying on the basis of what science has brought out. They went to the extent of referring to me as a Hindu vegetarian. This is slander."
As he has before, Pachauri acknowledged mistakes -- primarily to a wrong deadline, 2035, for the melting of Himalayan glaciers -- in the IPCC's fourth assessment report, 2007, a 3,000-page document accepted by 130 countries that now forms the basis for global policy-making on climate change.
"Their sole objective is to damage the credibility of IPCC," he said. "We're not going to answer these spurious, individual complaints in the media.
They are coming from only two sources, The Times, London, and The Telegraph."
Asked how much the IPCC paid him, Pachauri said "not a single member of the IPCC gets money". He is only reimbursed for travel expenses, he said. MORE ON WEB For full text of the interview, go to www.hindustantimes.com/rkpachauri
Pachauri said he saw no conflict of interest in being chair of the IPCC and being paid by governments or corporations for advice on climate change, particularly those that profit from fossil fuels, for consultancy work on behalf of TERI."You know I had relationships with these (oil) organisations all my life," said Pachauri.
"Whatever we have in the IPCC reports are in the public domain. I'm not concealing any trade secrets or intellectual property that somebody else wants. It is the public's intellectual prop erty. It is on this basis that I advice companies or individu als... where is the conflict of , interest? I don't see that."
Referring to his house in Delhi's costliest address, Golf Links, Pachuri said: "I have an inherited house in Golf Links.
If you think I should not be liv. ing in Golf Links, please get me a nice house, and I can think of moving from there. I find it very convenient (it's half a km from his office in TERI)."
Source: HT
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