Bureaucrats vs. Taxpayers, Part II

It is horribly unjust that politicians do things to destabilize the economy, but it is workers in the productive sector of the economy who pay the price by losing their jobs and foregoing wage increases. To add insult to injury, government bureaucrats are living the high life, getting more pay – even though they already get (“earn” would be the wrong word) for more than their private-sector counterpart. A column posted at realclearmarkets.com has some of the depressing details:

There’s a recession going on, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at public employee earnings. If you work for the government, you’re far less likely than your private-sector counterparts to have been laid off in the recession, and you probably also saw relatively fast wage growth. …During the recession, public employees have done better than private ones on two measures: total employment and hourly compensation. Over the last two years, private payrolls shed 7.3 million jobs, but public sector civilian employment actually grew very slightly, adding 98,000 jobs. …public sector compensation (as measured by the Department of Labor) rose 42% faster than private sector compensation over the last three years. Since the end of 2006, hourly total compensation (wages plus benefits) has risen 6.5% for private sector workers, essentially keeping pace with inflation. But state and local government workers saw their hourly compensation rise 9.2%. Federal civilian workers (about 10% of the public sector civilian workforce) are excluded from the above measure, but they did even better, receiving Congressionally-approved wage rises totaling 9.9% over the same period. …If states and localities had kept pace with private sector wage growth over the last three years, state budget gaps would be approximately $36 billion less than they are today.

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The Global Warming Shakedown

When people ask me about global warming, or climate change, or whatever they’re calling it now, I freely admit that I’m not a climatologist and thus have no informed opinion on whether the planet is warming due to human activity (or whether this, on net, would be a bad thing). But I am somewhat familiar with how special interests like to obtain power and unearned wealth using the coercive power of government. So when I see people who have always favored statism suddenly say we need big government to fight global warming, I am inherently skeptical. My doubts become even larger when I see that some of the same people were playing Chicken Little a few decades ago saying we faced a coming ice age. And I get downright suspicious when these people (did someone say Al Gore?) directly line their own pockets as a result of the policies they promote. So I was not surprised when the climate-gate scandal broke. After all, these supposed scientists had every reason to behave dishonestly and unethically to keep the gravy train of government grants rolling. The latest scandal comes from a high-level con artist with the so-called Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. First, we have a stunning confession that a major claim of the IPCC is fake, as noted by the Wall Street Journal:

…when it comes to unsubstantiated research it’s hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers—which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia—were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. “The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers,” it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, “can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.” It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was “misquoted.” Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in 2006 by leading glaciologist Georg Kaser that the 2035 forecast was baseless. …Mr. Kaser told the Agence France-Presse. “It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.”

Then we have the revelation that the Chairman of the IPCC used (and almost certainly was aware that he was using) totally dishonest assertions to fleece donors – including gullible American foundations and oppressed European taxpayers. Chairman Pachauri already has been appropriate mocked for his giant “carbon footprint” due to his globe trotting (in first class, of course). Now he’s catching some much-deserved flak for lining his pockets while pimping for the IPCC hucksters. Here’s what the UK-based Times reported:

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. …In one presentation at last May’s launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission’s Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers’ money into the project. …questions remain. One of the most important is in connection with Pachauri’s earnings. In an interview with The Sunday Times he said his only income came from his salary at TERI. However TERI does not publish his salary and he refused to divulge it. In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri’s links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.

But you have to give the guy credit for cojones. An article in the Times of India reports that, “…while his credibility and that of the IPCC has taken a battering, Pachauri maintains his chutzpah in the face of growing skepticism, arguing that his acceptance that the research on glaciers had been dodgy had actually somehow enhanced the credibility of the body.”

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