world's leading 'climate official' can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC's recommendations.

Dr Pachauri's TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India's insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI's Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to "sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries' concerns about energy and the environment".

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world's largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international 'carbon market', between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in 'carbon trading', the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their 'carbon limits' by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up 'carbon credits' for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own 'carbon emissions'.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week's Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in 'carbon credits' (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world 'carbon' market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India's own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world's top 'climate-change official'.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in 'sustainable technologies', where he was expected to provide the Fund with 'access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level',

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe's largest electricity firms, to promote 'bio-energy'. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a 'strategic adviser', and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.

The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University's Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France's state-owned railway company.

Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.

Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.

It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make 'concrete commitments' to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India's 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.