Today the Wall Street Journal has a story about how U.S. lawmakers are striving to avoid the pitfalls of the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The story does provide the dots for the reader to connect — overallocation and free allocation of the ration coupons, reducing the intended incentives — but it dances around the principal reason that the ETS did not reduce emissions: ETS increased energy prices somewhat, but not nearly the hefty hike required to reduce emissions. That sole point should be the crux of the Lieberman-Warner debate beginning Monday.

Meanwhile, green pressure groups like Pew are striving to avert widespread understanding of the colossal failure that was the ETS. Toward that end they produced a paper written by two MIT researchers, which I previously addressed very briefly, here.

I have prepared a more in-depth if fairly hurried walk-through of some of the rhetorical ruses employed by the Pew authors, here. Pew labors to apologize for the ETS’s “trial period” — which no one actually called a “trial period” until its failure became inescapable. The authors casually argue that no one expected ETS to actually reduce emissions, despite the fact that that was the whole point of the failed exercise. And they make the laughable assertion that ETS was surprisingly effective — considering how rushed it was — and “a definite success” despite the CO2-emissions increases. Good grief.

That portrait is risible. Also, the Pew paper gives short shrift to actual emissions performance, which hardly receives a mention. For good reason. Cap-and-trade is no more than the option for policymakers desperate to preen about how they “did something,” through the least transparent path of least resistance, and it will accomplish nothing more than increasing energy prices and chasing jobs offshore. It will most decidedly not reduce emissions, let alone with the certainty of quantity that its defenders argue is the reason for choosing a non-transparent scheme over a more efficient if transparent tax.

A careful reading of Pew’s very biased paper, far more an apologia than an assessment, reveals this. They’re counting on members of Congress not engaging in a careful reading, but mining it for deceptive euphemisms for use in the floor debate.