Corporate Power at the IPCC: Are vested interests creating bias?
Saturday,26 December 2009 by JamieGibson
It may come as a shock, but the IPCC – the body set up by the UN to “review and assess” scientific data on climate change – is not in any way free of the sort of corporate bias that weighs down on the US congress and the UK parliament.
Before I launch into a tirade, I have a confession: I read the Daily Telegraph. Sorry. Besides its ‘slight’ right-wing bias, there is one redeeming factor, by the name of Christopher Booker. He is a master of ignoring the prevailing scientific view, putting his head firmly in the sand with regards to climate change especially, so I usually browse past anything he writes. But his article last Sunday (20/12/09) struck a chord.
The title was “Climate change guru and a question over business deals.” To summarise the argument, Booker and his co-writer Richard North believe that Dr R K Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, is introducing bias into its reports because he “has established a worldwide portfolio of business interests…in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations”. Whether he is or not is not the subject of this blog. The point is, should corporate power be allowed the potential to influence the work of intergovernmental bodies, such as the IPCC, by sponsoring or employing the directors and chair people of these committees?
Quite clearly the answer is no, they shouldn’t. Dr Pachauri, to his credit, only associates with bodies or divisions concerned with environmental protection and climate change mitigation, but is this really good enough? Is it right that, what should be a completely impartial body is run by a man who ultimately pulls a salary – and perhaps larger ones at that – from bodies whose vested interest is profit first and the planet second?
In his defence, this bias would have been picked up by now. There are thousands of scientists who “voluntarily” give their time to further the IPCC: if the man at the top was reaping the benefits disproportionately, as the article suggests, there surely would have been an outcry by now. And surely the process can work in reverse; having the director of the IPCC as an advisor on the environment at a number of major corporations can help spread the prevailing scientific mood – emissions need to be cut drastically to stop CO2 concentrations getting too high – across bodies that would otherwise refuse to listen.
But back to my original question: is corporate power taking over science? People and Planet’s Reclaim Education campaign is a spin-off from the answer to this question. At Cambridge there’s sponsorship from BAE systems and Rolls Royce for computing and engineering, an unending stream of drivel from financial organisations asking us to work for them and a careers guide that caters almost exclusively to major financial firms. While the university benefits from the inflow of money, the same firms are heavily involved in the proliferation of warfare and fossil-fuel use across the world; in the long term, the university can be seen to be supporting climate change and the postponement of peace. With Gordon Brown’s imminent cuts to university funding, this sort of multi-million pound sponsorship is going to be more and more necessary
Isn’t it time that Universities broke out of the mould? Isn’t it time to invest ethically? Isn’t it time for those who hold the keys to knowledge and innovation to say “No thank you, we want a better world.” The problem is that if one says no, it’s easy for another to say yes and we’ll be at a disadvantage. This is why now is the time for all of us to force the issue on those who make the decisions; we need consensus from all universities that money will only be accepted from those firms that are genuinely trying to create that better world we all look forward to. Otherwise, it could well get to the point, a year from now, where it’s too late to make any difference at all.
Tags: IPCC, Reclaim Education