Is television worse than coal?

In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, is your new flat screen TV a bigger polluter than a coal-fired power plant? That is the (really) surprising conclusion reached by a study conducted by the environment institute at the University of California.

The culprit is nitrogen trifluoride, a gas used in making flat screen TVs. It turns out that nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 (that's seventeen thousand) times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. To make matters worse, no one is sure just how much nitrogen trifluoride is being released into the atmosphere while all these new flat panel screens are rolling off the assembly lines, nor is it a pollutant measured under Kyoto, or other greenhouse gas reduction schemes. One estimate was that the production of flat screen TVs this year put the equivalent of 67 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It makes me wonder if some of the old technologies weren't a better deal. Earlier in the year it came out that the compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), meant to replace the older incandescent ones, each contain mercury - a very bad environmental pollutant. CFLs actually should be disposed of as hazardous waste when they burn out, something few consumers likely are aware of.