The Washington Post has an article this morning concerning the Depression-era rural electification program that still operates today. The thrust of the article is that this program, which is highly popular among it’s beneficiaries and politically inexpedient to remove, will likely cause headaches for Congressional leaders who are trying to curb the nation’s carbon emissions. This is because the program provides grants for rural areas to build coal-fired plants, which of course only add to the Global Warming problem:
Federal Loans for Coal Plants Clash With Carbon Cuts – washingtonpost.com
A Depression-era program to bring electricity to rural areas is using taxpayer money to provide billions of dollars in low-interest loans to build coal plants even as Congress seeks ways to limit greenhouse gas emissions. That government support is a major force behind the rush to coal plants, which spew carbon dioxide that scientists blame for global warming.
I submit, however, that this would be less of a problem and more of an opportunity if we had anything approaching real leadership in the White House and if that leadership was interested in leading us to a cleaner, greener future.
As I read this article, it seems to me that we have a large collection of rural (and as the article points out, not-so-rural) areas of the country dependent on federal dollars to provide needed electricity to their citizens. That doesn’t sound like a problem, that sounds like an opportunity. We could just as easily tie federal grant monies to programs which provide greener solutions to the energy problem of rural areas.
Those problems that sparked the original 1937 legislation have not gone away in many areas of the country. Even if we limit the grant funding to locations of a certain population density (admittedly, not an easy political proposition), the government providing affordable energy for the population in exchange for cleaner, more efficient energy sources seems like a good plan to me. And if we do not limit the program’s affective areas, we still have a significant portion of the energy consumption within arms-reach of federal regulation. That makes rural electrical providers much more easily swayed into going green than, say, large metropolitan providers who don’t require federal dollars or don’t require as much.
But of course, all this requires a president who is aware that the program in question is administered by his office, not the Keebler Elves.
Here, in a nutshell, is the problem with the “civility” issue which becomes so much a part of the national political dialogue: most of the problems that people Right and Left bitch about are in fact issues of gross negligence of our president. If he would just do *something* we could at least debate the effectiveness of his plan, but instead, we’re left just bitching because the man doesn’t really *do* anything. We can’t prove that his plan to solve Issue X is working or not working because he doesn’t have a plan for Issue X. Is it any wonder that people get pissy and let things get personal?
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