In response to my earlier post about Barack Obama’s failure to adopt the lifestyle choices he’d like to force on the rest of us, I received the following excerpt from Chattanooga Times Free Press columnist Steve Barrett (subscription required).

Does President Obama believe that man’s burning of fossil fuels is causing catastrophic global warming? It’s impossible to know.
The president has long warned of the manifold terrors of global warming. He seems ideologically fused with climate change potentate Al Gore, and only with supreme effort can he utter the nouns “economy” or “energy” apart from the adjective “green.”
On the other hand, he enjoyed the service of a Chrysler 300C Hemi from 2004 until late 2007, when he switched to a hybrid. The switch occurred during the presidential campaign, but only a cynic would see any connection.
For the record, I do not fault the president in the slightest for having driven the 2005 300C, which is for sale on eBay. Whatever Chrysler’s troubles, that is one fine piece of machinery: powerful, smooth, roomy, luxurious.
But the U.S. Department of Energy points out some truths that are inconvenient indeed for 300C drivers who lecture others on global warming:
The car is rarely mentioned in sentences containing the term “gas sipper”–unless preceded by the phrase “is not a. . . .” It registers a less-than-whopping 15 miles per gallon in the city and 22 on the highway.
It emits more than 10 tons of supposed “greenhouse gases” per year, namely such goodies as nitrous oxide and methane.
It gets (drum roll, please) a THREE on the EPA’s air pollution scorecard–zero being the worst and 10 the best.
These figures apply to the meeker versions of the 300C. President Obama’s souped-up eight-cylinder presumably was even less fuel-efficient.
Again, none of this keeps me up nights. I do not while away the hours wondering when an irritable polar bear, his last iceberg having melted, will wash up on my deck demanding a few pounds of blubber. (Not that I don’t have it to spare.)
But the president does buy into climate change panic–hook, line and thermometer. Or at least his words, if not his car choice, would make you think so.
So I see only two possibilities:
Mr. Obama believes the global warming prophecies but thinks, a la Al Gore, that he can head them off with harsh energy-use regulations that hurt only the little people, or …
He doesn’t believe the hype but finds climate change hysteria politically useful in a culture conditioned by celebrities to fret that somewhere in the Andes a chinchilla is having a heat stroke.

[UPDATE: Barrett’s column is available online, but only to Times Free Press subscribers.]