California tree huggers want to take away your television
Thirty years from now, when we’re all heating up our tofu dinners over low-energy warming bars as decreed by the fascist, tree-glorifying global warming fanatics that are running this country, we’ll all realize that most of our problems started in California. It should be no shock to anyone that the state that gave the world Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer is also the state that’s at the leading edge of the effort to take away your big, flat screen TV.
Why would they want to do that? Well, to save the planet, of course.
According to a report in the Orange County Register, the California Energy Commission (CEC) is considering banning any big-screen TV sets that don’t meet new – and amazingly arbitrary and draconian – energy efficiency standards.
The CEC’s goal is to mandate that TV manufacturers create TVs that use a third less power than the current standard by 2011. Two years later, TVs would then be mandated to use 49 percent less power! Sets that don’t comply with these standards would be illegal.
Of course, it’s all for a good cause … the myopic tree-huggers of the CEC are claiming that these new standards would “reduce global warming” (ever notice they never tell you exactly how?). Oh, and it would also save consumers money! Big money, too! They estimate that the savings could be as substantial as a whopping $18 to $30 – a year!
But don’t worry – the government will dream up some other tax to take those savings away.
If they CEC’s laws were to be put into effect right now, one in four TV sets in American homes would be illegal. That’s most of the TVs with screens bigger than 40 inches.
But like typical Stalinists, the CEC denies that they’re out to ban big screen TVs. Instead, they claim that it’s all about pushing for more energy efficiency. But think about it: two years from now, will TV makers really be able to churn out a sellable product that’s as much as 33 percent more energy efficient? Isn’t dictating that TVs must consume HALF the amount of energy in just four years time more or less a de facto ban?
The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the looming nationwide ban on incandescent light bulbs that’s slated for 2012. And it’s no wonder – the California State Legislature was among the first state governmental bodies to try this measure. Lucky for them, all the politicians in this country are just as crazy as those at the state level in California, and the effort soon became national.
According to Steven Titch, a policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, a public policy think tank, “Here comes the state’s nanny to tell taxpayers how they should be using electricity and to tell us we are using too much of it watching big screen TVs.” And he’s right.
Of course, the TV-loving people of California will just be able to drive across the state line to obtain bootleg sets. So like most wrong-headed, do-gooder government ideas, this one will have unintended consequences. It will hurt the businesses in California that sell big screen TVs, and the workers at California-based companies who manufacture these sets.
But while the compact fluorescent light bulb ban passed with hardly any fanfare, I’m sure the same would not be true of a ban – or even a limit – on big screen TVs. It’s ironic that our state and federal lawmakers get away with a lot of chicanery because most Americans are too busy watching TV to pay much attention.
