I would never admit to posting about an inconsequential topic. Except this time.

A right wing group called EnergyCitizens.org (FreedomWorks is among the sponsors) paid for a full page ad in the Wednesday Post-Dispatch. It showed a photo of a factory worker with “2 MILLION JOBS LOST” emblazoned across his chest. The caption read “Another UNFORTUNATE TRUTH about Congress’s climate bill” and the text said:

As Congress considers new climate legislation, Americans aren’t getting the whole truth. A recent study found the recent House-passed bill could cost two million American jobs.

America is in the middle of a harsh recession. Think about the impact of two million jobs lost. Yet another unfortunate truth about Congress’s climate bill.

Learn more at EnergyCitizens.org.

The ad is a little lean on the proof for that claim, to say the least, and it directly contradicts the Waxman and Markey assertion that green energy changes in our economy will create 1.7 million jobs. You’re probably inclined to trust the Democratic congressmen rather than Dick Armey et.al. But not so fast. PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org, relying on analysis from two unbiased government agencies, have investigated these contradictory claims and arrived at basically the same conclusion.

It’s true that limiting carbon emissions would create some jobs – building wind turbines or insulating homes and businesses, for example. But it’s equally true that raising the cost of burning coal and oil would act as a drag on the entire economy, slowing down job creation in other industries.

According to projections by the Energy Information Administration and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the net effect of the House cap-and-trade bill will likely be to slow future job growth. Using 11 different possible future scenarios, EIA projects that future job growth might be constrained by something between 388,000 (under the most optimistic assumptions) and 2.3 million (assuming everything goes badly) 20 years from now. CBO also says employment would likely be lower than it would without the legislation – but only “a little.”

In other words, the EIA analysis contradicts Waxman and Markey’s claim that “[t]his landmark bill will revitalize our economy by creating millions of new jobs.” The two agency reports are none too flattering for the Democrats, but neither agency heaped praise on the conservatives either.

The EIA figures that there might be 2.3 million fewer jobs in 2030 if the Waxman-Markey bill went into effect, but things went badly wrong; that amounts to 1.4 percent fewer jobs than under the no-change-in-law-or-policy baseline. Specifically, this worst-case scenario assumes that government officials would be “severely limited” in implementing a key cost-saving feature of the bill known as “international offsets.” These are supposed to allow U.S. companies to avoid having to reduce their own carbon emissions by paying others to plant trees or avoid deforestation in developing countries, for example. This worst-case future also assumes that nuclear power and “clean coal” technologies don’t advance any faster than currently projected.

But this everything-goes-wrong analysis was only one of 11 different possibilities. And EIA said that while it cannot say how probable any of them are, “both theory and common sense suggest that cases that reflect an unbroken chain of either failures or successes in a series of independent factors are inherently less likely than cases that do not assume that everything goes either wrong or right.”

Basically then, nobody knows whose prediction will turn out to be most accurate.

You may be wondering why I began by saying that this topic is inconsequential. The answer is that, since there’s no way to know who’s right about this issue, it makes little sense to even bring it up. But the reason to do so is precisely that it doesn’t matter who’s right.

Because if human beings don’t get carbon emissions under control, changing weather patterns will wreak such havoc on the global economy that any jobs lost from cap and trade will be … inconsequential.

Earlier today I headed down to the “Energy Citizens’ Rally” that Sean mentioned yesterday. The American Petroleum Institute has put together multistate campaign against climate change legislation and a new clean energy policy.  API has also hired local oil industry lobbyists to organize rallies by bussing in employees from local oil and gas companies and their contractors. St. Louis’ rally was no different – organizer Ryan Rowden is a registered lobbyist for the Missouri Petroleum Council.

I arrived at approximately 11:45 – doors were supposed to open at 11:30. Although I imagined that meant the program wouldn’t start until sometime after noon, FreedomWorks promised free hamburgers and hot dogs to attendees, and I wasn’t about to pass that up. But when I walked into the hotel (yes, the “grassroots” rally was held in a hotel ballroom) I didn’t see anyone at all. A quick walk through the main floor of the hotel revealed nothing, but then I noticed a herd of people in matching yellow shirts pouring through a side door, where helpful staffers were directing them up a set of stairs. I pushed past them outside, and sure enough, two busloads of employees with yellow “I’m an Energy Citizen” T-shirts in their hands or worn over their work clothes were emptying onto the street.

I took this video clip, attempting to look like a tourist trying to get past the buses to film the Arch and the Old Courthouse. Notice the yellow shirts in hand, the staffers directing people to go in and take the escalator.

Unfortunately, one of the staffers noticed me filming and notified me that he had told security what I was doing and that I would not be allowed into the building because I seemed like I wanted to disrupt the rally. I protested that I was just curious about what was going on, but he repeated that I would not be allowed in. I suppose the only images they want coming out of these rallies are tightly controlled interviews with oil and coal industry workers after a captive propaganda session.

Thus ended my foray into the bizarre world of hotel ballroom astroturf rallies with energy employees and their bosses. And I didn’t even get a hamburger.