One step forward, one back

Scripps Howard: This week, President Bush took to the Rose Garden to promote his program to address climate change. One of its key provisions was an executive order instructing the relevant federal agencies to coordinate and cooperate on regulations to reduce greenhouse gases from motor vehicles.
He noted that his administration had devoted 37 billion to climate-change-related research and programs, and that he was asking for 7.4 billion for fiscal 2008, an increase of 205 million this year.
Typical, however, of the way the president's luck has been running, that same morning The Washington Post reported that, under an obscure New Deal-era program, the federal government is providing billions in cut-rate loans to build coal-burning power plants, a significant source of greenhouse gases.
Rural electric
The beneficiaries are the nation's rural electric cooperatives, which plan to spend 35 billion on coal-fired plants over the next 10 years, enough, said the Post, "to offset all state and federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gases over that time."
The program was intended to bring power to impoverished rural areas during the Depression. The countryside has long since had electricity and the cooperatives now serve cities and suburbs as well, but Uncle Sam is still subsidizing the loans.
Bush would like to restrict the subsidies for power plants and the White House budget office would like to kill them altogether, but the coops have a powerful lobby and a lot of friends on Capitol Hill.