Biden Bureaucrats Want Your Kids Riding Unreliable Electric Buses—and Bribing Schools to Do It

Will children be left stranded in their big yellow buses by Biden’s Green New Deal policies?

Radical climate activists are using Biden’s puppets at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to push their socialist agendas in a school near you.

The EPA released a report on their “Clean School Bus Program” which has shelled out $1.84 billion of your hard-earned tax dollars to fund nearly 4,900 electric school buses and charging stations in 642 school districts nationwide. .

That’s just the start. Under Biden’s misnamed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, taxpayers will ultimately dole out $5 billion over five years to replace diesel buses with what the government calls Zero Emissions (ZE) vehicles—all in pursuit of the Left’s global warming agenda.

Studies have found that the true cost to operate an EV is $17 per gallon of gas. So what’s it going to cost your family?

Sticker Shock

The classic big, yellow, gas-powered school bus costs around $100,000, but an electric bus is over 4 times more—up to $420,000 per bus. The charging stations needed to recharge the electric buses can be $50,000 a pop for installation plus lifetime maintenance costs and ballooning electric bills.

Those are just the obvious penalties to local schools. Then there are other important factors to consider. At the end of their shifts, bus drivers take the bus home or park in a public spot near their home. If the bus must be charged every night, this will require every driver to take the bus to a centralized charging station—using their gas-powered vehicles to go to and from their homes, increasing wage costs and vehicles on the road.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are significantly heavier than traditional vehicles, so tires wear out 30 percent faster than tires on gas-powered vehicles. The cost of tire replacement to schools will be much higher, more so as demand for the materials rises. It takes approximately 7 gallons of oil to produce one tire. The impact of heavier vehicles on transportation infrastructure such as bridges has not been evaluated and could become a major problem with America’s already broken road systems.

In light of the infrastructure demands, some school districts in Wisconsin turned down the government money for ZEs because they couldn’t handle the electric buses. Rural districts will struggle even more to charge the buses since local utility companies often don’t have the capacity to provide the extra electricity.

Temperatures are another big factor in ZEs’ performance, since they can lose as much as 33 percent of their driving range when temperatures drop to 25 degrees Fahrenheit (like, you know, every winter).

The official “solution” from the federal Office of Energy and Transportation recommends using “fuel-fired heaters” on buses when temperatures are 20 degrees or below. Yes, the solution to maintaining electric buses that replace fossil fuel-powered buses is to use fossil fuel-powered sources to improve their performance. Only socialist bureaucrats could come up with these great ideas.   

New York adopted a mandate that all school buses in the state must be zero-emission by 2035—and after 2025 all new buses purchased must be ZEs. However, 14 New York Senate Republicans have just called for lifting that mandate or forcing the state to fully fund the $20 billion it’s estimated to cost for replacing the state’s entire bus fleet.

“At a time when rural, upstate schools could use more funding to focus on educational services, this expensive mandate would raise taxes and divert resources away from students,” said Dan Stec (R)—one of the senators who signed onto a letter to Governor Kathy Hochul (D).

LEED: Energy Efficiency or Socialist Climate Agenda?

The LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program is administered by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a nonprofit that reported revenue of over $27 million in 2022, $3 million of which paid just 14 employees.

The LEED program was created to “be able to transform the marketplace toward sustainable buildings” and the USGBC touts that a LEED certification will provide “a framework for healthy, highly efficient, and cost-saving green buildings, which offer environmental, social and governance benefits” (ESG).

In 2010, the federal government committed $5.5 billion to improve energy performance and used the LEED certification methods to retrofit its buildings. Critics claim LEED is just a marketing scam to push a socialist climate agenda. Yet these items continue to be funded in congressional Democrats’ budget bills like Biden’s so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” itself really a climate funding bill.

(RELATED: How the Left’s Global Warming Ideology Wrecked Science—And How to Stop It)

A 2021 Carnegie Mellon University study on the energy efficiency of  LEED certified buildings examined 19 years of data, determining that “to the best of our knowledge . . . there is no credible evidence on the effectiveness of green certification programs in reducing energy consumption in commercial buildings.”

In other words, having a LEED designation did not lead to a reduction in energy consumption.

Nevertheless, the USGBC has an entire arm—the Center for Green Schools—that proselytizes the school construction industry with help from federal bureaucracies.

The Department of Energy’s “Efficient and Healthy Schools Program” is run in collaboration with the Center for Green Schools to recognize school districts which conform with LEED’s agenda as “Retrofit Revolutionaries”: Districts “that implement smart retrofit projects that promote energy efficiency and healthy learning environments.” Apparently, these government bureaucrats failed to read the Carnegie Mellon study that determined retrofitting buildings under the USGBC standards was ineffective.

USGBC advertises continuing education resources on their website and lessons push radical “climate justice” initiatives. A course titled, “Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy” can be purchased to learn about “the key to addressing the climate crisis is to diversify leadership so that antiracist, feminist priorities are central.”

Leftists’ agendas always point back to social justice talking points. How does this have anything to do with energy efficient buildings?

While Democrats fiddle with electric buses and climate mandates, American public school students are falling far behind and are being outperformed in academics by students in South Korea, China, Poland, and even Russia. Yet climate extremists want to waste money on light bulbs, air purifiers, social justice agendas, and making government bureaucrats rich at your expense.

I have a suggestion for an energy efficient learning environment where children succeed—open the windows, let the kids breathe fresh air, and teach them how to think and not what to think.

(READ MORE: Leftists Are Profiting From Equity Agendas That Target Our Children)