Rajendra Pachauri heads TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi. An engineer of the railways in his early career, Pachauri went to the United States to earn a PhD in industrial engineering and another in economics, after which he returned to India in 1981 to work with TERI. In 1995, he joined the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a lead author; in 2002, he was elected the chair of the IPCC. Its work and his leadership (along with that of former US Vice-President Al Gore) were recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Pachauri is currently the head of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, part of Yale University in the US. He spoke with Himal Southasian contributing editor Vijay Prashad in mid-September.
The Nobel Prize that you won was awarded not only for the "greater knowledge" that the IPCC had produced on man-made climate change, but also and more significantly for the IPCC's attempt to "lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". How would you characterise these foundations?
Quite clearly, what the impacts of climate change would be if we don't take any action. In other words, if we keep greenhouse-gas emissions unmitigated, then temperature increase, changes in the climate of various kinds and the impacts are going to get far more severe. So that lays the foundations of why action is necessary. But we've also brought out very clearly that the costs and attractiveness of taking action to reduce emissions is really very, very different from what people had believed. In other words, it's much cheaper to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases than had been thought of earlier, and there are also enormous co-benefits. You have reduced air pollution at the local level, and as a benefit you'll have higher levels of energy security, much more employment, stable agricultural production. So all this makes mitigation an extremely attractive and compelling set of measures, and I think that lays the foundations for taking action. We've also been very proactive in spreading the message, unlike previous IPCC reports. This time around I've been extremely particular that we should spread the message and carry out extensive outreach of the results of the report.
The IPCC's target for atmospheric carbon concentrations is 450 parts per million (ppm). You recently went on the record saying that the goal should be 350 ppm. NASA's James Hansen has said that the target should be 300 ppm or lower if we wish to restore previous levels of Arctic sea ice. Since you had made this statement outside your IPCC obligations, why not go to the Hansen target, which seems closer to the scientific consensus?
One can have differences of perception and priorities. I just feel that you definitely need to go far below 450 ppm, and we really need to carry out a detailed assessment of what would happen with 300 versus 350. I've stuck to 350 only because I believe that that might give us an even chance of being able to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. If I have better knowledge, it is entirely possible that I would support what Jim Hansen is saying; but at the moment my feeling is that with 350 we might be able to save the most vulnerable regions of the world.
The Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests released a White Paper in mid-August 2009 that stated, "in most cases glaciers have stopped retreating." Minister Jairam Ramesh said of this paper, "The Himalayan glaciers are in trouble. The paper finds that some are retreating, but others seem to be advancing. However, there is no robust scientific evidence to suggest that climate change is causing the retreat." What is your sense of this data and the implications being drawn from it?
I disagree with this conclusion, because I'm afraid the paper from which most of these conclusions have been derived is academically quite unsound. It does not have adequate information, it does not even have proper reference to some of the recent research that has been produced and published. I think there is ample evidence to show that the glaciers are retreating. Now, it may be that in some isolated areas that's not the case, but that is to be expected – one is looking at the overall aggregate effect, not at every single glacier. But in aggregate terms, there is clearly a decline, and some are declining at a very rapid rate. If climate change is not causing this, then what is?