Why is it that many government agency names are oxymoronic?  How much new water has the California Department of Water Resources delivered in the past couple of decades?  How much energy has the federal Department of Energy or the California Energy Commission produced or encouraged?

        It should come as no surprise that in 2009, an era when the Los Angeles basin air quality bureaucracy, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, thinks about banning dark paint on cars because the sun-absorbing colors would require more air conditioning in the summer, that the California Energy Commissariat is drafting an order to outlaw certain TVs.  (Perhaps if our TVs had one state-approved channel they would relent.)

        Why does the California Energy Commission, a Gov. Jerry Brown-era creation, want to ban television sets?  Well, it seems that a honking 48-inch plasma screen, that bright symbol of the bygone days of conspicuous consumption and purveyor of drooling vacuity, uses too much electricity, and electricity production makes too much greenhouse gas emissions (at least in America, where half of our electricity comes from coal.  In France, a plasma screen would require nary a CO2 molecule as the TVs there are, in effect, nuclear-powered).

        The CEC plan, contained in a dry-sounding reported entitled, “December 2008 Draft Efficiency Standards for Televisions,” proposes to ban about 200 television models.  This regulatory diktat would conservatively result in 4,600 more lost jobs in the California retail sector as consumers switch to smuggling 50-inch plasmas into the state via the Internet, resulting in another $50 million in lost tax revenue.

        Of course, television sets, just as with dishwashers and refrigerators, are getting more efficient all the time, a process that the free market excels at--or at least it used to, before the age of AIG, bailouts, and caps on executive compensation.  TV manufacturers pour millions of dollars into innovation yearly and are making sets that automatically use less energy in a darkened room and switch to standby mode after a period of disuse.

        But, rather than let nature and consumer choice take its course, the CEC must be seen as acting.  For bureaucracies that don’t act are soon acted upon, by politicians.

        Greens grumble that old TVs only produce 220 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year.  Larger plasma screens, for example, produce 880 pounds per year.  Hence, they must be banned.

        Unsaid is the fact that, if anything decent were being produced for television, emissions would skyrocket.  On this basis NBC should make out like a bandit with a carbon cap-and-trade program since its sole show in the prime-time top-20 Nielsen ratings is rated an energy-saving No. 20, transforming weak viewership into an Earth-friendly virtue.

        Another sure way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from plasma TVs would be to produce less electricity from coal or natural gas, which powers 60 percent of California’s grid, and instead use nuclear power, which creates 55 times less emissions than coal and 30 times less than natural gas.

        Few know that California is the most electrically efficient state in America.  The CEC would be proud to tell us that.  What the regulators don’t want us to know is that half our savings in per capita energy consumption over the past 30 years has come from the evisceration of California’s manufacturing base; it seems that not making stuff saves energy (ignoring the fact that we still consume stuff that we now just import from coal-fired China).  No wonder California’s North Coast is now meeting the target of a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions set by California’s landmark 2006 global warming bill--unemployed people don’t emit much CO2 (unless they’re at home, watching a banned TV).