Date published: 2007/05/16
The BBC says:
Governments should tax plasma screen televisions because of the large amount of energy they consume, according to a leading expert on climate change.
Professor Paul Ekins, who studies the economics of climate change, said taxing plasma screens would reflect their "greater climate change burden".
This would encourage development and take-up of more energy efficient diode screens, Professor Ekins said.
He said government could label energy hungry appliances as a first step.
Plasma televisions, which are 50% bigger than their cathode-ray tube equivalents, consume about four times more energy, according to the government-funded Energy Saving Trust.
...
But some researchers say exact comparisons are difficult because of the size difference between plasmas and other screen types: cathode-ray tube and Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)."At the very least you might think that government would provide some differential incentives to accelerate the development of more energy efficient diode screens and encourage their take-up," said Professor Ekins, co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC).
...
He also singled out patio heaters as especially energy-intensive.
...
But Robert Gross, head of technology and policy assessment at UKERC, said debates on energy efficiency could become too pre-occupied by prices and incentives."When you are looking at consumer appliances, buildings and vehicles and you are looking at people not responding very well to price-based incentives - for a variety of reasons - there's an absolutely fundamental role for straightforward legislation to improve the efficiency of these devices," he told journalists.
The academic middle class in action. Patio heaters and plasma televisions as the source of all evil on the planet. But why just single out these, the government should be concerned about all energy consumption. The answer is a carbon tax on all producers of carbon (or a carbon allowance for the country). It should not be up to the academic middle class to decide what consumption of energy is allegedly ok and what is not, it should be up to the people of Britain, as long as they pay an appropriate price (which in most cases they do not).
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