‘Pachauri would be a fool to resign’

“If Toyota recalls some cars because of a faulty foot pedal, does that mean all their cars are faulty?”

Updated on: Feb 4, 2010, 23:00:35 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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“If Toyota recalls some cars because of a faulty foot pedal, does that mean all their cars are faulty?”

With that analogy, the United Nations’ top climate-change official on Thursday firmly backed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, now under fire for erroneously claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

“Asking him (Pachauri) to take responsibility for a single mistake, which he has, and resign is sensless,” said Yvo de Boer, a Dutch diplomat who has been in charge of global climate-change negotiations since 2007. “I hope he doesn’t resign, he would be a fool (to do so).”

Stressing that the glacier mistake was the only one in the 3,000-page report, de Boer said climate science, given its uncertainties and complexities, needs to be constantly questioned to make it more robust.

De Boer, executive secretary of the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty that 193 nations adopted 18 years ago to tackle climate change, pointed out that the IPCC, set up to evolve a consensus on global warming, does no research, which is done by 2,400-odd scientists.

Though he was not as explicit as Pachauri in accusing companies and countries denying climate change of running a campaign against the IPCC, de Boer said companies “are becoming more concerned” as “the stakes get higher”.

“I don’t know if there is a campaign, but there is serious action being taken by companies threatened by climate change,” he said.

Under attack since the Copenhagen conference in December 2009, particularly from some western media, Pachauri in an interview to HT earlier this week had blamed allegations against him, the IPCC and his lifestyle on global lobbies “threatened” by the costs of climate change.

De Boer described Pachauri as a “tall tree that can collect lot of wind (of criticism)”. “He has led the IPCC in a very dedicated sort of way,” he said.

The global answers to climate skeptics, said de Boer, were the commitments to reduce greenhouse gases submitted after Copenhagen by 56 countries that contribute to 78 per cent of global warming. He was happy that India and China had submitted their mitigation action by December 31.

“After (these) commitments, we have to build the architecture of a climate agreement,” he said. The UNFCCC will organise a series of international meetings this year to prepare the grounds for a possible treaty in Mexico in December 2010.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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