By Ian Tuttle
Thursday, October 01, 2015
It would seem to go without saying, but: Before accusing
myriad individuals and organizations of defrauding the American people, it’s
advisable to make sure you are not currently doing the same.
With that in mind, meet Jagadish Shukla, professor of
climate dynamics at George Mason University. On September 1, Dr. Shukla and 19 other
climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta
Lynch, and White House Office of Science and Technology policy director John
Holdren calling for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other
organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks
of climate change,” a (criminally irresponsible) tactic initially proposed by
Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse in a Washington Post op-ed in May. The
letter could be found on the website of the Institute of Global Environment and
Society (IGES) — the “non-profit, tax-exempt research institute” founded and
headed by Dr. Shukla.
And then it couldn’t. In late September, the “RICO20”
letter vanished from the IGES website; in its place is a message explaining
that “the letter was inadvertently posted on this web site [and] has been
removed.” (It is still visible here.)
The curious disappearance set several people inquiring.
It turns out that heading up IGES is nice work if you can get it. The Washington
Free Beacon reports that since 2001 the organization has received more than $63
million — 98 percent of its total revenue — from taxpayers, mainly in the form
of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. And an astonishing amount of that money has ended up in Dr.
Shukla’s pocket.
That’s largely because the IGES has a tight-knit staff —
very tight. The “business manager” is Jagadish Shukla’s wife, Anastasia, and
the “assistant business manager”/”assistant to the president” is their
daughter, Sonia. According to the Shuklas’ tax filings, they have pocketed $5.6
million in compensation from IGES since 2001 (not including Sonia’s earnings,
which have gone unreported). That is on top of Jagadish’s salary from George
Mason — a public university, by the way — which paid him $314,000 in 2014.
This “double-dipping” — receiving compensation from a
research organization on top of academic compensation — is prohibited by the
federal agencies from which IGES receives money, as well as by George Mason
University, as detailed by Climate Audit’s Steve McIntyre. Yet IGES officially
joined the university, as part of the College of Science, in 2013.
Unsurprisingly, the only other member of the IGES staff
is a longtime associate of Shukla: George Mason University professor James
Kinter, who runs the Institute’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies
(COLA). The pair have worked together since 1984. Kinter, too, appears to have
double-dipped, adding $180,038 from IGES to his $171,320 salary in 2014.
(Kinter did not sign the RICO20 letter.)
And such episodes hardly exhaust IGES’s questionable
financial activities. According to McIntyre, Shukla also shifted $100,000 in
IGES grant money to his “Institute for Global Education, Equality of
Opportunity, and Prosperity,” which then funneled $100,000 to an educational
charity in Shukla’s hometown in India. (To be fair, that was probably a more
productive use of those funds.)
One month ago, Jagadish Shukla was encouraging the
federal government to treat skeptics of anthropogenic climate change like the
Gambinos. Now it turns out that the biggest crime syndicate in this affair is
the Shukla family.
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