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Ask a liberal who drives an SUV if they feel guilty about their emissions and fuel consumption, and more often than not they’ll fall all over themselves explaining just how badly they feel about it. They may still try to excuse their need for a mini-monster on the road, but few will deny its harms.

Does that make owning the vehicle a morally defensible choice? Not at all. But at least they aren’t kidding themselves about the damage it’s doing.

Ask a conservative who drives an SUV if they feel guilty about their emissions and fuel consumption, and more often than not they’ll either deny that any damage is being done or argue that other people are committing far greater sins than driving one little SUV.

Where a conservative will usually argue any position that minimizes individual accountability for anything bad, many liberals have made peace with the interpersonal reality of “do as I say, not as I do.” After all, it’s nearly impossible to live a hypocrisy-free existence in the modern world. Certainly there are degrees of awfulness, and we have a duty to minimize our selfishness. If you live in a city, though, odds are you purchase/borrow/benefit from environmental ugliness, and we know this.

But it doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to take up the cause of environmentalism. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons we favor legislation to deal with such sweeping problems — it forces all of us onto a level playing field and blocks the individual temptation to screw the future for the sake of the present. We acknowledge personal weakness and understand its power.

Unfortunately, to many conservatives, the above paragraphs probably sound nonsensical. Take Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford. His editorial in today’s Chicago Tribune takes liberals to task for giving to green companies as “penance” for personal consumption:

Take the idea of “carbon offsets” made popular by Al Gore. If well-meaning environmentalist activists and celebrities either cannot or will not give up their private jets or huge energy-hungry houses, they can still find a way to excuse their illiberal consumption.

Instead of the local parish priest, green companies exist to take confession and tabulate environmental sins. Then they offer the offenders a way out of feeling bad while continuing their conspicuous consumption.

You can give money to an exchange service that does environmental good in equal measure to your bad. Or, in do-it-yourself fashion, you can calibrate how much energy you hog, and then do penance by planting trees or setting up a wind generator.

Either way, your own high life stays uninterrupted.

What an absurd reason to chastise someone. In the midst of an American culture destroying itself via its excesses, that some individuals choose to mitigate their personal damage by doing equal amounts of good should be cause for celebration. Instead, all this conservative can see is people who commit the same sins they’re trying to fight, and that hypocrisy simply doesn’t compute.

If you think about it, this kind of self-denial helps explain why so many conservatives continue to refute the existence and consequences of global warming. If all of it were true, then they’d be personally guilty of crimes against humanity, and they simply can’t own such a thing.

This also explains the blind allegiance to the moral correctness of the US debacle in Iraq. It’s simply unfathomable that the country they support would be anything other than the good guy each and every time it takes up arms. Again, anything else would make them partially culpable for its evils.

Hanson’s article ridicules liberals purchasing carbon offsets for acting like “medieval sinners” trying to buy off their sins. Of course, what’s ridiculous is asserting that trying to offset one’s harm is the same as trying to buy away its existence. However, Hanson’s analogy may provide one of the keys to assuaging the conservative fears that inhibit social progress.

I’m pretty sure that somewhere in Christian mythology it reminds us that we’re all sinners. Each of us makes terrible mistakes for selfish reasons, but that doesn’t mean we should excuse them or pretend they aren’t harmful. Rather, we should work to minimize our collective evil while acknowledging its individual existence.

In this case, it’s not okay to sin against the environment, but it’s understandable to be an environmental sinner. We’re all one at some level or another. So now that we all share in the blame, howzabout we share in the solution?

[And yes, I promise your kids and their lacrosse sticks will fit just fine in one of these.]