This originally was published on WRI.
The past year has been all about protecting ourselves and our children from a serious respiratory illness: COVID-19.
But as schools reopen and children return to in-person classrooms, many kids will spend part of every day in a toxic environment that causes harm to young lungs and minds: diesel-powered school buses. Nearly all of the approximately 480,000 iconic big yellow buses in the United States are exclusively fueled by diesel and produce diesel exhaust, a known carcinogen.
This doesn’t need to happen. Clean electric school buses already successfully transport kids in a handful of school districts. We can and should deploy electric school buses across the nation.