June 29th 2009
Crazifornia – Regulators Want To Ban Big TVs
H
ere’s a simple proposition: If you want to watch a big TV that uses more electricity, you simply exert your right to pay a bigger electric bill in return for a bigger picture. That is unless you live in Crazifornia where know-it-all bureaucrats stand ready to strip Californians of their ability – or right – to watch big-screen TVs.
You know Crazifornia – the state where this book is a bestseller.
The effort by the California Energy Commissars … er, Commission … won the bureaucrats a Golden Trashcan from conservative California news aggregator FlashReport. The award is given sparingly to particularly “onerous” – in FashReport publisher Jon Fleischman’s word; I’d use “fascist” – legislation or regulation.
Last March libertarian OC Register columnist Steve Greenhut wrote about the plan:
In their continuing quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, state regulators have uncovered a new villain in the war on global warming : your big screen TV
Couch potatoes, beware.
The California Energy Commission is considering a proposal that would ban California retailers from selling all but the most energy-efficient televisions. Critics say the news standards could take 25 percent of televisions off the market — most of them 40 inches or larger.
I read it back then, but haven’t heard anything else since, and figured maybe the bureaucrats had been slapped back into place. Not so. Here’s Fleischman:
I figured that this proposal, like that California Air Resources Board Report [CARB] that talked about banning black cars, would be rolled up and put into a file cabinet somewhere – a bad idea conceived by some government eco-bureaucrat that would never fly in the real world…
But I was wrong – and the CEC is actually DEAD SERIOUS about punching a huge whole in the California economy, and severely limiting consumer choice in big screen televisions, implementing a ban on many of them starting in 2011, with even more being banned starting in 2013.
The CEC is looking to move forward with proposed language for the ban in the coming weeks – under the guise of “adopting energy efficiency standards for televisions.”
You may have heard sporatic chatter that California is once again leading the nation – this time in unemployment, high taxes and barriers to business. But don’t bother CARB with such trivialities. Jobs, schmobs. And who needs state revenues, even if we are bleeding out to the tune of $23 billion? The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has published a study that shows by banning big-screen TVs, the state could lose as much as $50 million a year in tax revenue and lose 4,600 jobs in TV sales, distribution and installation. That’s 4,600 tax-paying jobs that would no longer be contributing to the state’s ailing economy.
The worst of it is the dishonesty CARB uses when talking to us about their plan. The bureaucrats must think we are so dumb. This is from the CARB Web site’s FAQ:
Q: Is California considering banning plasma, large screen or HD televisions?
A: No, the state is not banning any type of TV. Consumers have the freedom to choose any type and size of television that meets the efficiency standard.
Never mind that TVs that don’t meet the standard would be, you know, banned. It’s no different from Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs proclaiming that there’s freedom in Iran – it’s the same insolent betrayal of truth by the forces in power.
You can walk into any consumer electronics store and buy an Energy Star-rated big-screen TV, with assurance that it is the most energy efficient brand available. Don’t bother the CARB bureaucrats with such niceties; it’s power of the political sort they’re concerned with, much more than power of the energy sort. And Fleischman reports that CARB itself isn’t too hot on Energy Star:
The CEC, of course, derides the EnergyStar program in their FAQ document, emphasizing that, in essence, because it is a voluntary program, EnergyStar doesn’t go far enough.
I did note that the CEC touts as supporters of this program California’s three heavily state-regulating power utilities – Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. So I dropped a call into a longtime [FlashReport] friend who is a prominent executive with one of these companies – this person made it clear to me — after confirming that I would leave their name out of it – that the utilities are in a bind. These regulations are being proposed and advocated by their regulators. So they don’t have a choice but to support them. He said it is now commonplace for the utilities to have to publicly feign support for “social engineering programs” because they simply cannot afford to alienate their regulators.
Quick question: Does what I’ve just described to you sound like the workings of a democratic government or a fascist one?
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