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Unlike Dylan, Postal Service Delivery Trucks May Never Go Electric Now -- Wonkette
https://www.wonkette.com/p/unlike-dylan-postal-service-deliveryDoktor Zoom
It could have been much worse, but still sucks bigly.
The Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicle at its November 2024 welcome party. Now only the gas versions will be built. Photo: USPS.
The Senate’s version of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Blowjobs for Billionaires Bill had a nasty little provision tucked into it: It repealed the roughly $3 billion in new funding that Joe Biden’s climate bill gave the US Postal Service to electrify much of its delivery fleet. Thanks to that boost in funding, something like 75 percent of the USPS’s 60,000 planned “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” were set to be electric, up from just a tenth of the new fleet under the Trump administration. Electrifying most of the USPS delivery fleet — the biggest US government vehicle fleet outside the Pentagon’s — would have been a huge step in reducing the federal government’s carbon footprint.
But Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, and nothing Biden signed into law was legal since he stole the election, so all of Biden’s initiatives to reduce government carbon emissions had to be reversed, by executive action when Trump could get away with it, or by the Republican Congress the rest of the time. It’s not surprising, just disgusting, that congressional Republicans are hoping to repeal virtually all of Biden’s clean energy provisions, including the ones that brought new jobs to red states. They’ll just blame the inevitable factory closings on Democrats anyway.
The bill revisions drafted by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee would, among other cuts, rescind $1 billion in funding for the purchase of postal EVs, although the summary released by committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) doesn’t say what would happen to the remaining $2 billion of the EV allocation. Maybe it would replace the electric trucks with their gas-guzzling internal-combustion counterparts, which get terrible mileage.
Because of production delays and problems in the development process, Oshkosh, the military contractor that won the contract to build the beluga whale-shaped NGDV trucks, has only delivered roughly 100 of the things, although it was supposed to have built more like 3,000 of them by the end of 2024. The full rollout of the NGDVs was to have taken around a decade and delivered about 66,000, with three quarters of them being electric. To help move electrification forward more quickly, USPS under Biden purchased hundreds of Ford E-Transit electric vans and got them into service, and spent about a half-billion dollars on renovating post offices and sorting facilities so they could install chargers and other stuff to rearrange mail delivery around electric delivery vehicles.
As many have pointed out, electric trucks are ideally suited for the frequent stops and starts of mail delivery. When they’re “idling” while a mail carrier goes up the walk to a mailbox at someone’s house, they don’t use any electricity except for accessories like air conditioning (the old rattletraps being replaced don’t even have AC).
. . .
But Donald Trump doesn’t believe in climate change, and nothing Biden signed into law was legal since he stole the election, so all of Biden’s initiatives to reduce government carbon emissions had to be reversed, by executive action when Trump could get away with it, or by the Republican Congress the rest of the time. It’s not surprising, just disgusting, that congressional Republicans are hoping to repeal virtually all of Biden’s clean energy provisions, including the ones that brought new jobs to red states. They’ll just blame the inevitable factory closings on Democrats anyway.
The bill revisions drafted by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee would, among other cuts, rescind $1 billion in funding for the purchase of postal EVs, although the summary released by committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) doesn’t say what would happen to the remaining $2 billion of the EV allocation. Maybe it would replace the electric trucks with their gas-guzzling internal-combustion counterparts, which get terrible mileage.
Because of production delays and problems in the development process, Oshkosh, the military contractor that won the contract to build the beluga whale-shaped NGDV trucks, has only delivered roughly 100 of the things, although it was supposed to have built more like 3,000 of them by the end of 2024. The full rollout of the NGDVs was to have taken around a decade and delivered about 66,000, with three quarters of them being electric. To help move electrification forward more quickly, USPS under Biden purchased hundreds of Ford E-Transit electric vans and got them into service, and spent about a half-billion dollars on renovating post offices and sorting facilities so they could install chargers and other stuff to rearrange mail delivery around electric delivery vehicles.
As many have pointed out, electric trucks are ideally suited for the frequent stops and starts of mail delivery. When they’re “idling” while a mail carrier goes up the walk to a mailbox at someone’s house, they don’t use any electricity except for accessories like air conditioning (the old rattletraps being replaced don’t even have AC).
. . .