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Audi’s choice to show an ad depicting Gestapo-like Green Police at the Super Bowl might not have been a good idea, with Washington, D.C., (the new capitol of all things Green Police-y) in the middle of its biggest blizzard in years and Climategate still running full blast … But hey. Maybe that’s just me.

The ad is meant to encourage people to buy a “green-friendly” Audi. If people buy this wonderful car, the ad suggests, they will be able to bypass the Green Police, while other unlucky people get slammed face-first onto store conveyor belts for choosing plastic grocery bags, arrested for throwing away old batteries, and have their homes invaded for using incandescent light bulbs.

Unfortunately for Audi, the part of the commercial about the actual car gets lost. Who wants to buy a car when they’re caught up in a commercial that could become reality? People may look at the commercial and laugh (”Who would ever arrest somebody for putting the temperature up too high on their jacuzzi?”) but these people have obviously never read the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454).

The bill, which passed the U.S. House on June 26, 2009 and is currently stuck in the Senate, includes many provisions that would make the fantastical situations depicted in the Audi commercial something of a reality. For instance, according to the Wall Street Journal, the bill would require furnaces, laundry machines, dishwashers, showerheads, faucets and jacuzzis to meet new efficiency standards.

Lights would also be regulated in the bill, which states that “the manufacture of any general service lamp that does not meet a minimum efficacy standard” will be prohibited by 2020. The punishment for having these illegal lamps? Legal charges can be brought on “any person … distributing in commerce any covered product which does not comply.”

That’s right. If the bill passes, you may go to court for not getting rid of your old “inefficient” lamps and buying new ones.

The bill also dictates terms for planting trees in your yard and for selling your home, but there’s no need to overstate its importance yet. As of January 27, House and Senate leaders announced plans to scale back their ambitions and focus on a smaller, less intrusive bill.

So, while Washington politicians shovel their way out of more than two feet of snow, and global warming fanatics suffer a meltdown in the face of daily reports of falsified data in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, maybe Audi should sell their cars in a way that is less creepy, less Big Brother/1984 kind of way.

But again. Maybe it’s just me.