The surprisingly great idea in Bernie Sanders's Green New Deal: electric school buses

[babylonsister]

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/23/20828842/bernie-sanders-electric-school-buses


The surprisingly great idea in Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal: electric school buses
A small idea in Sanders’s Green New Deal could reap big benefits for kids.
By Kelsey Piper Updated Aug 23, 2019, 2:21pm EDT


Bernie Sanders’s just-released Green New Deal plan is huge — $16 trillion, dozens of different clean energy and climate adaptation programs. But one of its more modest proposals stands out as a spectacularly good idea.

That’s his proposal to make school buses stop poisoning our children.

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In short, we can stop pumping health- and grade-affecting pollutants into our children’s lungs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and save school districts money.

And an investment like this is likely to help electric buses transition into the mainstream. Replacing our school buses with electric buses might give the industry, with all its innovations, the chance to prove itself — and then win over municipalities and private bus markets as well.

Lots of the proposals in Sanders’s Green New Deal proposal are exciting, and some of them have much greater potential than the bus proposal to fight climate change. But the bus proposal is worth paying attention to. It’ll give 24 million kids cleaner air to breathe and support the development of an emerging green technology — electric buses — that are needed the world over. The net costs to the government might be zero (thanks to the lower long-term costs of electric buses), and the net benefits to society look enormous.

Sometimes, a serious look at policy turns up some clear wins. This is one of them — and whoever becomes president, I hope it becomes policy.

[we can do it]

1. Great idea! And how about solar powered schools?

[whistler162]

15. Some are....

https://auburnpub.com/news/local/port-byron-s-new-solar-panels-will-save-money-educate/article_5e7e8a7e-fa94-5677-8201-2b9c80c12ba5.html

The Port Byron school system has one school building so the panels help power all grade levels.

[we can do it]

18. Nice. We are solar all electric home.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread babylonsister.

[TexasTowelie]

3. Of course the electric buses cost about 50% more than a diesel bus.

What happens if the battery discharges before they return to the place where they garaged?

[HerbChestnut]

7. What happens when a diesel bus runs out of gas?

[TexasTowelie]

9. Great question.

It only takes a few gallons of diesel to get to the next service station so the diesel can be carried or transported by truck to the bus. Try loading and installing a replacement battery pack that is the size of a miattress while you are on your road, keeping in mind that those battery packs are mounted on the underside of the bus. Thanks for asking and proving my point.

[The Figment]

4. This is a great idea in urban/suburban areas but...

In rural areas ( like where I live in very rural Kansas) I think natural gas/electric hybrids would be a much better and more reliable option.
Fully electric vehicles have one big fault...winter, the battery life and operating range drops dramatically in subzero temperatures, ask any Tesla owner what happens to the range of their cars in winter.
In places like mine school buses travel up to 100-120 miles a trip twice a day the last thing one wants is a bus that won't go and with no heat at 6:30 am in rural Michigan, Montana, or Maine.

[NNadir]

5. Ignorance of the laws of thermodynamics will save no one.

I note that the ethical costs of batteries includes children, real children, digging cobalt in the "Democratic Republic" of the Congo under conditions of slavery.

The idea that electric vehicles are clean is absurd, since a battery is not a primary source of energy, and is, in a purely thermodynamic sense, a device which wastes energy.

Perhaps Bernie Sanders thinks that electricity doesn't come from dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the atmosphere our generation is destroying for all others, but it does come, increasingly from exactly that in this country, dangerous natural gas.

I personally am tired of such contempt for future generations as to play shell games for political popularity.

[The Figment]

6. So what do you propose?

We all agree that gasoline/diesel is Nasty.

[NNadir]

10. Reality.

Bernie Sanders seems to believe that electricity is clean because he believes, quite wrongly, that it's provided by so called "renewable energy." It isn't. So called "renewable energy" is a massive and tragic failure. We've spent trillions of dollars on this planet on it in the last ten years alone and climate change is accelerating, not decelerating. We hit 415 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide this spring, and the rate of increases of carbon dioxide have hit 2.4 ppm/year, after being under 1.0 ppm/year in the mid 20th century.

Despite what Bernie Sanders thinks, here is the reality about energy in this century:

In this century, world energy demand grew by 164.83 exajoules to 584.95 exajoules.

In this century, world gas demand grew by 43.38 exajoules to 130.08 exajoules.

In this century, the use of petroleum grew by 32.03 exajoules to 185.68 exajoules.

In this century, the use of coal grew by 60.25 exajoules to 157.01 exajoules.

In this century, the solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 8.12 exajoules to 10.63 exajoules.

10.63 exajoules is under 2% of the world energy demand.

2018 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38 (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

My journal in this space is filled with tons of my ideas - what I think - on energy and the environment, most referring to the primary scientific literature. They may not be popular, but I am interested in reality, something that Bernie Sanders isn't interested in.

The idea that batteries are "clean" is appalling.

I note that Bernie Sanders represents the only State in the Union ever to generate all of its electricity internally without dumping dangerous fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere, something it did for decades. That is no longer true. Sanders applauded this state of affairs.

While I am quite aware of what dangerous fossil fuels are, and the fact that their wastes kill, coupled with biomass combustion waste, seven million people per year, a device that uses dangerous fossil fuels to generate electricity to charge a battery is a thermodynamic nightmare that increases the use of these fuels.

As a scientist, I cannot endorse swell sounding foolishness just because it's popular. What is popular is not necessarily right or just. There's too much at stake.

[HerbChestnut]

8. That's why you transform the electrical grid too.

That's also in the plan.

[NNadir]

11. And the engineering knowledge behind this glib statement is what?

I spend thousands of hours per year in academic libraries studying energy and the environment.

You?

[Vegas Roller]

13. +1,000,000 nt

[Vegas Roller]

12. Meh

as long as we burn fossil fuel to create electricity, the net impact on the environment will be ZERO.

Looks good on paper but in reality -- a big nothing.

Whether we burn the fuel IN the bus or in an electric power plant -- same emissions.

[George II]

14. Not a surprising idea. This has already been proposed and is being implemented:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/school-districts-rolling-out-electric-buses#gs.xvakm1

School Districts Rolling Out Electric Buses as Economics Improve: ‘It’s Time to Switch’
The environmental, public health and economic arguments for electric school buses are getting stronger.

JUSTIN GERDES NOVEMBER 15, 2018

School districts eager to replace polluting diesel buses can tap a suite of financial tools to overcome the additional upfront cost of electric buses, according to a new report.

Released last month by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund and Environment America Research and Policy Center, the report emphasizes both the public health benefits of a diesel-for-electric bus swap and the availability of financing tools to enable school districts to make the switch.

The report calls on school districts to commit to transitioning to 100% all-electric bus fleets by 2030 and immediately phase out the purchase of diesel buses.

“It’s time to switch to electric school buses,” Matt Casale, report co-author and U.S. PIRG’s transportation campaign director, told Greentech Media in an interview. “Ninety-five percent of school buses in the United States still run on diesel. But we know there’s no safe level of exposure to diesel exhaust for children.”

(more details....)

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And who is helping to promote this and fund electric school buses? The Clinton Global Initiative!

This is a VERY good read.

[betsuni]

16. And last month California got funding to replace 200 old diesel school buses with electric.

Not a new idea, like the $15 minimum wage or Medicare for All.

The Clinton Global Initiative is impressive!

[George II]

17. More on this topic, from the Clinton Global Initiative, April 2016:

https://green-technology.org/gcsummit16/images/35-ZEV-School-Buses.pdf

ZEV School Buses They’re Here and Possibly Free
Clinton Global Initiative V2G EV School Bus Working Group