Political Position and Carbon Footprint

So I stumbled across this link on reddit to a list of U.S. states CO2 emissions per capita and for reasons I'm not clear about, I immediately was reminded of this list.

And so I made the following chart.



Yes...there seems to be a relationship between political position and CO2 emissions. The exponential regression between those two variables is apparently statistically significant and has an R2 of 0.37 (the equation is 21.37-1.02^Conservativism = Per capita output). I say apparently because I'm only assuming I haven't screwed up the stats. [Editors note: Although apparently I did switch the axis labels...damnit!]

I would assume this is part of what drives the political polarization of how to respond to climate change.