Dr Rajendra Pachauri getting filthy rich off of climate change

Why am I not surprised to read that the U.N.s top climate change guru is,

1) Not trained in climate science (normally I wouldn’t bring this up as sufficient reason to discredit someone, but isn’t the “he’s not a climatologist” epithet the first thing true believers spit out a reason for skeptics being denied the opportunity to comment? Interesting that their top guy is guilty of the same sin.)
2) Making bucketloads of money from his involvement in setting world wide climate policy

From the Telegraph,

No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

With this sort of thing going on in more than one place (can you say Al Gore) and the East Anglia CRU fraud, it’s no wonder that reasonable people are starting to get angry at the growing level of control these people have over our lives.

It would be interesting to see some attempt to estimate the total direct cost to the world’s taxpayers of all the scare-mongering since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first started appearing in The New Yorker magazine in June 1962.

Each scare, in turn, is packaged and marketed with more skill than the previous; each enjoys its run in the world’s headlines, and the frenetic political attention we have been watching in Copenhagen in its most advanced form. Each in turn is gradually forgotten as more facts come to light, as the apocalyptic predictions fail, as the storyline bores through repetition. And then a new scare needs to be invented.

This is perhaps one of the best descriptions of the costs of this type of over-the-top environmental hysteria and fraud I have read in a few years. Would that more people would pay close attention to the suggestions this author makes on dealing with these so-called leading lights.

For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the “global warming” scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those “hacked” documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseurs in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting “the right results.” This is, by its nature, an issue for the criminal courts.

My reasoning here is that “environmentalism” at large has — like all other “progressive” movements — exploited public gullibility about motivations.

The leading lights have accumulated wealth and power, while presenting themselves as men of goodwill. They have projected themselves through sympathetic media as unselfish and pure and have demonized their opponents as selfish and impure while themselves being on the take.

Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity, for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of “settled science” when there is no such thing.