Vice President Kamala Harris has alleged that school buses running on diesel hurt children’s health and learning abilities.
Harris campaigned in favor of the Biden administration’s electric vehicle politics on a visit to Seattle, Washington, where she criticized old-school diesel-powered buses.
“Today, 95% of our school buses are fueled with diesel fuel, which contributes to very serious conditions that are about health and about the ability to learn,” the vice president declared, as cited by Newsmax.
Harris was in Seattle with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan to announce a new federal grant program worth $1 billion to fund the purchase of electric buses by school districts across the nation.
Almost 400 school districts in all 50 states and the federal District of Colombia will use the funding to buy about 2,500 electric school buses.
While she claimed that diesel-powered vehicles harm children’s learning abilities, the vice president also spoke fondly of her memories of the old-school yellow school buses.
“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus? There’s something about the and most of us, many of us went to school on the yellow school bus, right? It’s part of our experience growing up. It’s part of a nostalgia and a memory of the excitement and joy of going to school — to be with your favorite teacher, to be with your best friends and to learn. The school bus takes us there,” Harris stated at Seattle’s Lumen Field.
However, she argued that some 25 million American kids who ride the yellow school buses every day would have a “healthier future” with the cleaner electric bus fleet promoted by the Biden administration.
“We owe it to our children to, right now, take these issues very seriously. The clock is ticking loudly. We are witnessing, around our country and around the world, the effects of extreme climate,” Harris stated.
She claimed the administration’s electric bus program would help fight climate change and boost the US economy and the skills of the American workforce.
As of 2021, about 1% of the 480,000 school buses in the United States were electric.
The Biden administration’s federal Clean School Bus Program has a budget of $5 billion, derived from the infrastructure law that President Joe Biden and the Democrats passed with partial Republican support last year.
