In addition to the Pew Center/MIT paper issued to misrepresent Europe’s experience with cap-and-trade — noted briefly below and in greater detail here — another report produced by pressure groups has been issued to influence next week’s debate on the Lieberman-Warner CO2-rationing legislation.

This one, put out by the Natural Resources Defense Council, is risible on its face. The argument is that not adopting Lieberman-Warner is more costly than adopting it. There is a facially obvious disconnect, given that even accepting their assumptions, Lieberman-Warner wouldn’t change the supposed nightmare scenario they are purporting to address.

As I find myself saying to audiences, I’m willing to accept arguendo your alarmist scenario, in fact the more alarmist the better, because you’re only painting yourself into a corner: What do you do about it? It’s a moral issue, you say — in response to which you propose . . . nothing. Once one understands this, it becomes tempting to see that this debate isn’t really about the climate, after all, but about enforcing the lifestyle agenda which the greens offer in response to every issue.

It also appears that they’re putting a specific “climate cost” savings on the legislation. The reasoning is that the damage or cost from climate change will be X without Lieberman-Warner, and it will be X minus Y if we sagely adopt its strictures. Y, of course, is greater than the economic impact of the bill. To date, such claims have proven unsupportable, and it appears they still are, according to an email I have received from Heritage’s David Kreutzer after he spent a few hours poring over it (Heritage has written about the NRDC report here):

1. Their costs are the total (extremely exaggerated) costs through 2100 of all expected warming. They don’t even seem to allow for legislation already enacted (e.g., EISA, state RF mandates). It is not the savings L-W might mitigate. 2. Lieberman-Warner, with its 4.8 trillion dollar economic hit by 2030, will do essentially zero to stop the costs they outline because L-W will have a negligible impact on global CO2 levels over the century. 3. They grossly misrepresent “likely.” This is a dreadful misrepresentation. They say they use the most pessimistic “likely” scenario from the IPCC report. They then say it has a 2/3 chance of occurring. They confuse “confidence interval” with “probability.” In reality it should be described as a 1/6 chance. Even at that, I couldn’t find the projection they were using. Of the IPCC’s six “marker scenarios,” the highest sea level rise by 2100 (with a 5% chance of occurring in just one model) was less than 24 inches. The average of these models was less than 14 inches. NRDC claims 45 inches. (They use a Science article instead of IPCC). All of this is by 2100. 4. Of the six marker scenarios the average world temperature rises between 3.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. The NRDC assumes 13 degrees for the US—nearly double the average of the highest marker scenario from IPCC. 5. They assume a warmer world leads to more hurricane damage. Only in the text (not in the bullet points) do they acknowledge that there will not be an increase in hurricanes due to global warming. Their increased damage figures come from more coastal development (which has nothing to do with CO2 or world temp), increasing storm intensity and the higher sea level. They give no indication as to how much each of these factors contributes to the total. 6. Losses from sea-level increases assume nobody does anything to protect their property from the exaggerated rise. For example, no sea walls, no building up of sand dunes, no elevating beach houses. It is almost as if the development that takes place is done at the water line during low tide. 7. Their 3.6% of GDP is not a summation of the impacts they analyze in economic chapters of the report. 3.6% is from an implementation of the Stern Report methodology where they arbitrarily modify critical parameters. a. Take the case for the exponent on the damage function from temperature increases (N). They say: “For the Stern Review, it had a minimum of 1, most likely value of 1.3, and maximum of 3. There is essentially no evidence bearing directly on the value of this exponent, but the “most likely” value of 1.3 seems almost timid: It implies that 4 degrees is only about 2.5 times as bad as 2 degrees. In our variation, we set the minimum at 1.5, most likely value at 2.25, and maximum at 3.” After saying there is no basis for any of this, they nearly double the “most likely” figure. b. In short they significantly increased the damage factor due to temperature on top of using a temperature that is way above that projected by IPCC. c. This magnifies the damage from their 13-degree increase from a factor of 28 to 320 (roughly). This arbitrary assumption leads to a 10-fold increase in damage estimates. (It’s actually a little more complicated).