Editorial: Case of clouded judgment

Wednesday, May 16, 2007 | 7:14 a.m.

A t a time when Congress is pursuing reductions in the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, a 72-year-old government program to supply rural communities with electricity is still providing billions in federal loans to build additional coal-fired power plants.

The Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Services gives low-interest loans to rural electric cooperatives across the country. These cooperatives plan to spend $35 billion over the next 10 years to build conventional coal-fired plants, The Washington Post reported in a story on Monday.

Coal-fired plants belch copious amounts of carbon dioxide - one of the so-called greenhouse gases that scientists say are responsible for global warming. The rural cooperatives' intended plants could emit enough carbon dioxide to negate all current efforts to reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, the Post reports.

The Office of Management and Budget wants to abolish the rural loan program, which it says is now more likely to provide power to metropolitan suburbs than to impoverished rural areas , as the Depression-era program was designed to do. Many of the regions served by these nonprofit co-ops have large populations of middle- and upper middle-class residents who don't depend on agriculture for a living. But, so far, the rural cooperatives' aggressive lobbying efforts have saved the loan program.

It is nothing short of astonishing that the federal government is subsidizing efforts to build coal-fired plants when state and federal lawmakers are struggling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, maybe we shouldn't be surprised, as Bush and the former Republican-controlled Congress spent six years ignoring calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On Monday afternoon Bush announced that he had ordered the development of new regulations to reduce gasoline consumption and cut greenhouse gas emissions by the end of his term. But the president is taking such action only because a Supreme Court decision is forcing him to, and even then he's doing it at a snail's pace. Bush could enact such regulations sooner, but he is leaving them to the next president to enforce.

This is no way to develop a comprehensive plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or develop a coherent national energy policy. Such efforts cannot begin to take root as long as we have conflicting government priorities and lack a sense of urgency.