Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! That last bit is from Ghostbusters, of course, but it fits with the President's vision of the climate-regulated future.The rhetoric is kind of funny except that it isn't funny:
That's the grim future that President Trump said he was trying to avoid when he announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate change deal.
NERA is a well known economic research firm that is part of Marsh & McLennan, an insurance brokerage and risk management firm.
The study was done on behalf of a conservative public interest group, the the American Council for Capital Formation.
But the author of the study says the conclusions of the report are its own, and were not dictated by the sponsor.
"We never rely on [sponsors] to say what the results will be," said Sugandha Tuladhar, the study's primary author.
NERA's study looked at a variety of scenarios. Trump cited what the report calls the most likely outcome, which was the one that would hurt the economy the most.
For example, according to the report's best-case scenario, the Paris Treaty would wipe out 12,000 manufacturing jobs by 2025 along with 2.3 million jobs overall. Trump had cited the worst outlook -- a loss of 440,000 and 2.7 million overall.
The NERA study doesn't say anything about widespread blackouts and brownouts that would shut down factories. ...
Environmental experts also say the NERA study overestimates how much it will cost to cut carbon emissions.
The problem, these critics argue, is that the study assumes that efforts to cut emissions would fall almost exclusively on heavy industry, such as autos, chemicals, iron and steel and petroleum.
"Those are expensive sectors to get the emissions reductions." said Marc Hafstead, a fellow at Resources for the Future, a think tank that concentrates on energy issues. "There are costs to reducing emissions. And there will be winners and losers. But when those costs are distributed equally, there's a lot less job losses."
Hafstead conducted his own study, which found that the Paris deal wouldn't cause much of a net change in jobs, since losses in sectors such as coal would be balanced by job gains in alternative energy.
"The NERA study grossly overstates the changes in output and jobs in heavy industry," he said.
via money.cnn.com
The problem with sponsor bias is that, even if the sponsor doesn't tell you explicitly the results that they want, they tell you implicitly or you learn from experience. A consulting firm that doesn't deliver on those results doesn't get the next job. Full-time consultants who work for industry or other special interest groups tend to get captured along the way. Even when one does a credible job, the sponsors might cherry pick the results that they like best.
