From Climate Week NY°C: Pachauri talks ethics, morals and climate

By María Noel Álvarez, cross-posted from our friends at Global Observatory. -- Luis

This morning [Wednesday, Sept. 23] I had the chance to participate in a breakfast with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and one of the Global Observatory’s Ambassadors. Pachauri is the global warming benchmark that received the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC in December 2007.
He was invited by the Bahá’í International Community to the launch of their Appeal to world leaders to take into account the ethical and moral dimensions of climate change [PDF].

The suite 120 of the United Nations Plaza gathered journalists, bloggers such as Richard Littlemore, co-author of Climate cover-up), NGOs members and representatives of the public sector such as Javier Arias from the Environment Agency of Panamá). Pachauri engaged n an informal discussion with the participants of the event. These are some of the highlights of this morning:

“It seems to me that it’s essential if we want to maintain political and social stability, to raise the level of the debate of climate change to its ethical and moral dimensions. We need some degree of doing the right thing“.

“I don’t rely much on leaders or Nation-states, I rely on grassroots action. Then, the leaders will follow. Even in totalitarian countries, actions in the grassroots levels cannot be ignored”.

About COP15 agreement: “I hope it’s conclusive in the sense that leads to action and the world starts moving in the right direction at the right time. The value of the process is as important as the outcome“.

“Bjorn Stigson once said: ‘Business cannot succeed in a society that fails; and that’s what is at stake now. We are all stakeholders. Business schools should teach more ethics because much of it involves personal behaviour”.

“How we defend ethical arguments in the face of economical ones? Well, we need to join ethics with facts. Employment will be much larger if we adopt greener options. We will need hundred of engineers, architects, manufacturing and a whole new industry”, Pachauri concluded.