I ponder this ocassionally.
My best guess is that the Dem biggies in DC are all in on the con, and most of the Hollywood show people are usefully ignorant.
This is just information warfare designed to get people to willingly give up their wealth.
“My best guess is that the Dem biggies in DC are all in on the con, and most of the Hollywood show people are usefully ignorant.”
The problem is more fundamental. As in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, there is a fundamental belief that they are different from us. It never occurs to them that the rules apply to them as they apply to us, except in a purely symbolic way. They are different and what they do is important. So dachas and luxurious autos for the political class in the soviet union never presented any cognitive dissonance.
I think it’s mostly a class thing, a conspicuous consumption thing. All of the stuff they want to withhold from the middle class (autos, nice lawns, air conditioning, sumptuous food, and — going back far enough — the right to carry weapons) are all things that used to distinguish the upper class from the lower and middle classes. Then capitalism came along and made the middle class “wealthy” too and we got those things. Conspicuous class distinguishers went away and it’s easy to view the puritanism-for-thee attitude of our upper classes as an attempt to restore the things that used to make them special.
When viewed that way, the erroneous belief of the ruling class is that they are super special and super-important and that it would be wrong for them to be constrained by the rules they believe in for everyone else. Their belief in global warming is, I believe, for the most part, sincere.