Today, America Leads Alliance issued the following statement regarding a key UN climate panel’s decision to exclude the RCP 8.5 climate model from future IPCC assessments.
For more than a decade, the doomsday projections of the RCP 8.5 climate model were presented as the “business as usual” scenario. This baseline was used to justify sweeping legal and policy actions with major consequences for affordability, energy reliability, and long-term investment in the American economy.
RCP 8.5 has now been excluded from IPCC’s future assessments altogether, with the UN committee charged with designing these scenarios declaring the model’s findings “implausible.”
Despite this, its scenarios are central to the coordinated lawfare efforts against American energy producers. Today, more than three dozen lawsuits remain pending in state and municipal courts using damage models based on the same discredited projections.
This statistical sleight of hand demonstrates why Congress needs to pass the Cruz-Hageman bill to provide the energy security and affordability this litigation threatens. US energy policy belongs with our federal officials, not in state courts and certainly not in UN committee rooms.