The Life Cycle of Liberal Issues

This story on how believers in climate change use more electricity then skeptics is getting a lot of play on certain blogs.  The story helps to highlight the modern day life cycle of liberals on political issues.

1. Create a problem
2. Be unwilling to do anything yourself to solve the problem
3. Use your unwillingness to do anything to solve the problem as a reason for why government has to enforce coercive measures in order to solve the problem.
4. Undertake coercive measures.
5. Find a way to either exempt yourself from the above coercive measures, or find a way to have government alleviate the suffering it might cause you.

One interesting point about the linked study is it only looked at home electricity use.  It would be interesting to see how the carbon footprints from travel compare between believers and skeptics of climate change. Here, the liberal believers might look better as more liberals live in cities where there is ample public transportation.  Although, if this is true, it doesn't say a lot about their willingness to make conscious sacrifices.

Of course, what really interests climate change skeptics isn't how much the carbon footprints vary between believers and skeptics in the general population, but how the carbon footprint of the liberal elite compares to everyone else and even those in the same socioeconomic class who are skeptical of climate change. Although, here we don't need a study to tell us that many of the people who believe climate change will be the apocalypse  have enormous carbon footprints.