Totally Fly

It's an argument that Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, makes fairly regularly -- I'll believe that something is a crisis when the people proclaiming the crisis change their behavior to fit their prophecies. It's always amused/galled me when global warming climate change types issue jeremiads about the evils of carbon footprints after they've jetted over to Rio, or Kyoto, or Copenhagen, or Durban.

Mother Jones makes the relevant point with this nifty graphic (h/t Althouse)

Think globally, act locally, but don't miss your flight

And in a totally non-surprising development MJ writer Christie Aschwanden notes the following:

 A recent study by Stewart Barr, a geographer at the UK's University of Exeter, found that people who identified as committed environmentalists actually flew more than those who didn't. Some of these "bleeding-heart jet setters" insisted they'd earned their flights through green behavior at home. "People tell themselves they can justify a flight of 5,000 miles because they've recycled all year," Barr told me.

Carbon credits are indulgences. If the IPCC starts conducting their business via Skype, maybe you can believe them.