Descriptions of the impressively varied commercial and other roles of the IPCC Chair Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri are going viral very fast.

James Delingpole politely wonders whether Dr Pachauri may have some, er, conflicts of interest.

Questions for HM Government’s busy delegation at Copenhagen:

  • what are you doing to make sure that the Conclusions reached at Copenhagen do not involve or lead to personal gain for any of the most prominent (or indeed least prominent) participants at the conference?
  • Have any publicly funded grants or contracts been awarded in the past five years to organisations or corporations with which Dr Pachauri has a formal connection?

Mark Steyn asks the Question of the Century: 

To return to what’s-his-name, the Belgian bloke, van Rumpoy, just because he’s a nonentity doesn’t mean he’s not effective. In his acceptance speech the other week, he declared: "2009 is the first year of global governance."

Did you get that memo?

Me, neither. But he has a point.

The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown’s plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of "global governance."

Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire.

Where do you move to if you don’t like "global governance"? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?

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Update: Reader Norman Fraser is just never happy and says that this is moving from ‘alarmism to smearing’.

Call me old fashioned, but it seems to me that powerful people paid for by public funds have to be scrupulously careful about distancing themselves from any possible financial benefit arising from the policies they advocate. All the more so in a policy area where in effect ‘international’ public funding is available and democratic controls over it are all the more diluted.  

As the sheriff says (to stop bandits and global global warming alike), freeze.