Fact check: GOP's phantom job losses

— -- Ooops!

Republicans — eager to show that President Obama's oil and gas drilling policies "cost jobs" — have been using a number they now admit was more than three times too high. Even after they corrected their error (after we pointed it out), they started using a figure that is based on industry-sponsored studies, uses dubious assumptions and doesn't apply to any jobs that currently exist.

It's just the latest example of how both sides tend to use grossly exaggerated claims about jobs when debating their pet policies. Back in 2009, the Obama administration claimed that cap-and-trade legislation would create jobs, when its own energy experts estimated hundreds of thousands would be lost.

This time it's the Senate Republican Policy Committee's staff doing the exaggerating. In a "policy paper" posted on its website, the RPC claimed Obama's policies could cost 934,000 "potential" jobs in the oil and gas industry. After we pointed out some bloopers committed by the staff, the RPC admitted making mistakes and revised the estimate down to 256,000.

But even that is too high. It is actually a prediction that oil-industry employment will remain unchanged, and that 256,000 "potential" new jobs will fail to materialize. It's important to understand that the report is attempting to predict effects on future job growth, not possible decreases from present levels of employment. The bloated 934,000-job figure represented current and future jobs. And we found that the GOP's dire warning could only materialize if Obama's policies wiped out the entire oil and gas industry.

The RPC's projections of offshore and onshore job losses were part of a larger set of claims about the effect on employment of what Republicans called the president's "flawed energy policies." (Actually, the regulations cited are not so much "energy" policies as they are anti-pollution policies. And they include one that President Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw — a proposal that would have tightened regulations on smog-forming ozone.) The list of claims was originally posted on the committee's website Aug. 2. All but one relied on various industry-sponsored studies.

We will focus here on the onshore and offshore oil and gas jobs, where the biggest mistakes were made.

Western states drilling jobs

The RPC originally claimed that onshore oil and gas delays will cost 504,000 jobs, citing a study commissioned by the Western Energy Alliance — a trade association representing oil and natural gas interests in the West (North Dakota, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico.) But that's the total number of jobs predicted to exist by 2020, including all existing jobs.

The Blueprint for Western Energy Prosperity, July 8: The number of direct, indirect and induced jobs in the oil and natural gas sector is projected to increase by 16% to 504,120 by 2020.

So, in effect, the RPC was claiming that all current and future onshore oil and gas jobs would be destroyed or "at risk" as a result of Obama's policies: 434,373 current jobs, as well as the 69,747 future jobs predicted in the report.

Jon Haubert, a spokesman for the Western Energy Alliance, agreed that the group's report did not provide support for the RPC's claim.

Haubert, Nov. 2: Saying the whole onshore western oil and gas industry would be wiped out would be a misrepresentation of our study.