That's assuming you're not watching TV while you're reading this. If you are, turn off your TV.

Yeah, that's a hell of a thing to advise on a cable-TV channel site owned by a TV network. But said TV network is sponsoring a Green Week this week, so what can I do? As a result, I'm obliged to advise you, if are at all concerned about global warming, to turn off your TV.

TV watching? Global warming? What does one have to do with the other, other than not being able to watch An Inconvenient Truth? Read on.

Where social issues are concerned, I've identified three types of people:

• 1) What Billy Joel called "the angry young man" — the Chicken Little-type who's probably right, but who wants to listen to such an overwrought crazy person?
• 2) The liberal who, according to Phil Ochs, is 10 degrees left of center in good times and 10 degrees right of center when something affects him personally.
• 3) The ostrich, who won't listen to reason regardless of logic because if you're right, he's wrong, and he can't be wrong because that'd be an admission of his imperfection.

Generally, most of us fall into the middle group. We rage against the machine but don't act unless something affects us personally. Global warming is a perfect example. Melting glaciers and drowning polar bears seem a bit distant, and even though Al Gore seems kind of smart, it's an almost sprin-like beautiful day in November, so what am I worried about? Tra-la-la-la-la.

Don't get me wrong — I'm neither an angry young man nor an ostrich. I rationalize to myself that I don't own a car, so it's not really my problem. Like any good liberal, I'm morally outraged at the faceless polluters, but I'm too busy reading the Sunday New York Times to do anything about it other than be morally outraged.

What? Oh, right, turning off your TV. While I don't own a car, I do watch a lot of HDTV. I have a 50-inch Hitachi plasma, a 42-inch Panasonic plasma and a old 35-inch Philips tube set. And these HDTVs require power, anywhere from 300 to 800 watts. The larger the screen, the more power an HDTV consumes. An HDTV uses 84 kilowatts more per year than an analog set.

And the more there is to watch and do (e.g. play DVDs or video games) on your TV, the longer it's on. And when we get a new HDTV, we often move the old TV to another room instead of getting rid of it. Only one device in your home draws more power than your TV, and that's your refrigerator, but most homes have just one of those.

According to the watchdog Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), TVs probably use roughly 4% of all residential electricity in the U.S. That's roughly 45 billion kilowatts per year that produces nearly 30 million tons of carbon-dioxide emisions from power plants this year. That figure is expected to nearly double in three years, to about 50 to 60 million tons of CO₂ just so we can vote some ne'er-do-well our next American Idol. While 60 million tons of CO₂ seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 6 billion tons of CO₂ produced by U.S. cars in a year, that's not a drop you want dropped on your house.

And it's not just your TV. Factor in speakers, receivers and other components, and the combined power draw of your home theater rig easily tops 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. That's at least $100 bucks a year out of your wallet just to watch SpiderMan 3 in Dolby or DTS.

That's why you should turn off your TV.

Of course, if you turn off your TV, you'll likely just turn on your computer, substituting one power-sucking screen for another. Or, if you don't want to be a liberal like me, turn off everything and go outside and enjoy our glorious springlike November. — Stewart Wolpin

Stewart Wolpin has been writing about technology for more than 20 years for such publications as Playboy, CNET, Consumers Digest and American Heritage of Invention and Technology. He's also a Mets season ticket holder and has played poker every Thursday night for the last 22 years.