Green Power?
The federal government fuels coal-fired electricity.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

CONVENTIONAL wisdom holds that support for clamping down on greenhouse gas emissions has reached a tipping point. With gasoline prices above $3 a gallon and only a rump of hard-core skeptics still questioning the science of global warming, the time seems ripe to begin weaning the country off carbon. More and more U.S. politicians, from New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), say they want to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and proposals for how and by how much abound.

But as The Post's Steven Mufson reported recently, an outdated federal program that provides cheap financing to rural power plants will undercut all of these efforts. The Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service gives low-interest loans and loan guarantees to rural electric cooperatives, nonprofit outfits designed to generate or transport electricity to rural areas of the country. With coal abundant and cheap, and without the tax incentives for clean electricity that are given to other utilities, such co-ops have little reason to invest in alternative sources of energy. Consequently, they get about 80 percent of their electricity from burning coal, a process that releases liberal amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Worse yet, federally subsidized cooperatives plan to spend $35 billion over the next 10 years building more coal-fired power plants.

Rural electrification was a signal success of the New Deal, lifting vast swaths of the country out of abject poverty. But since the task of building electrical infrastructure in remote areas has largely been completed, the logic behind the program has become far less convincing. In his 2008 agriculture budget, President Bush proposed eliminating loans to pay for new power stations and tightening rules for loans on transmission projects. Congress should accept the idea.

The Rural Utilities Service is just one example of a sprawling set of programs in the Agriculture Department that provide loans and grants to areas of the country designated rural. Too much of the largess is misdirected, financing everything from museums to movie theaters. Agriculture Department officials defend the programs in part on the dubious logic that, without them, young and educated people will continue to move from rural to urban areas -- as if the federal government has such a compelling interest in keeping young Americans in rural areas that it justifies this expense. The government should step in when private funds are insufficient to provide basic services -- such as electricity transmission lines in the remotest of areas or speedy ambulance services -- not to bankroll small-town luxuries. All of these programs deserve scrutiny as the budget process begins.