Why does my TV waste so much?

In this world where saving the planet seems to be the touchy-feely ‘in’ thing, there is something that bothers me greatly everytime a politician attempts to get themselves on the bandwagon and talks about “cutting carbon emissions”. It is that almost every item of electronics available these days cannot be easily switched off properly.

Meet the bane of every power bill: the standby button.

What’s wrong with a proper off switch? Remember them? You used to get off your fat arse and wander over to the TV or video and physical click them off. None of this glowing red or blue funhouses of light that were actually powerful enough to illuminate a room without the lights on. It just turned off. I keep reading about how the standby function on most modern TVs wastes nearly as much energy as when the TV is switched on. I even find now that these things are being sold without a hard off function whereby unless you burrow down behind it and physically pull the plug, it can only be turned to either wasteful standby or on.

Where the hell is common sense? If politicians were actually serious about cutting emissions they would have legislated against this useless wasting of energy for no good reason. And there is no good reason to have electronics on standby doing nothing but slurping from the national grid. I would propose a law that quite simply says: “All new electronics devices must have a switch located at the front of the device that can be easily accessed by the user which when switched brings the device’s power consumption to zero.” There. That wouldn’t be too hard would it? But I still haven’t seen it proposed after years of seeing the rise of power wasting electronics. How many power stations around the world exist just to provide the wasted power for the standby function?

If politicians really were serious about cutting greenhouse gasses, they would be banning the standby function right now.