"We have had seven years of President Bush trying to mislead the country about the science of global warming and the urgency of taking action," Dan Lashof, climate center director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told a news conference.

"Now he's trying to mislead the country about the economics of taking action," Lashof told reporters listening in to the tele-conference, called to mark the publication of a report on how building a green economy in the United States would create jobs.

Bush warned Monday that the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill, which calls for a "cap and trade" system to try to cut emissions in the United States, "would impose roughly six trillion dollars of new costs on the American economy," and threatened to veto it.

"Nay-sayers for taking action now on solving global warming keep pointing to solutions as being a cost to the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth," Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think-tank, told Tuesday's news conference.

"It's critical that all of us question the assumption that global warming is a cost when in fact it represents the future of the US economy," Hendricks said.

The "cap and trade" system suggested in the climate change bill proposes that companies trade permits, giving them the right to emit a certain amount of pollution, "capped" below current emission levels.

During the Bush presidency, the United States walked away from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) Kyoto Protocol, saying its caps on emissions by industrial countries were too costly for the US economy and unfair, as similar constraints were not imposed on big developing countries.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Monday that the climate change bill would have "a devastating impact on the US economy... and result in massive job losses."

The non-profit Institute for Energy Research (IER) argued in an advertisement that the bill could have a catastrophic impact on American jobs.

But the report released Tuesday pointed in the opposite direction.

"What is clear from this report is that millions of US workers will benefit from the project of defeating global warming and transforming the United States into a green economy," it said.

"New job activites will certainly be created in building the green economy and implementing global warming solutions," the report said.

The report highlights a "chance to revitalize this economy with green energy growth," one of its authors, Bob Pollin, said.

Ignoring the economic opportunities inherent in building a green economy has cost the United States its competitive edge and leadership role in developing technology, Hendricks said.

"We've seen solar manufacturing and markets taken up by Japan and Germany ... because the United States, which invented solar photovoltaic technology, has had a complete abdication of leadership in building this as a strategic industry," Hendricks said.

The Senate debate on the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill began Monday and is expected to run for most of this week.

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