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Biden officials push to hold up $11.3 billion USPS truck contract, citing climate damage

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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God for them. The USPS needs to be moving away from gasoline powerd trucks:

The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans’ health.
The dispute over the Postal Service’s plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden’s goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power. Postal Service vehicles make up a third of the government’s fleet, and the EPA warned the agency last fall that its environmental analysis of the contract rested on flawed assumptions and missing data.
The EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality sent letters to the Postal Service on Wednesday that urge it to reconsider plans to buy mostly gas-powered vehicles and conduct a new, more thorough technical analysis. The EPA also asked the Postal Service to hold a public hearing on its fleet modernization plans, a request the agency had rejected when California regulators made it Jan. 28.
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“The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world,” wrote Vicki Arroyo, the EPA’s associate administrator for policy.
Read the letter: EPA says USPS truck contract is 'seriously deficient' in acknowledging climate concerns
Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and even rising sales of electrical vehicles have yet to make a dent. Electric vehicle proponents had hoped the Postal Service purchase would provide a boost for the industry.
While policymakers agree that the Postal Service’s aging and unsafe fleet is due for an upgrade, the question of how to do it has fueled a fight between Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Donald Trump donor and holdover from the last administration, and Biden officials, as well as environmental groups, state regulators and the United Auto Workers union.
Biden’s spending package would give USPS $6 billion to replace dangerous mail trucks with electric vehicles
DeJoy, who oversaw the agency’s decision to award the truck contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense, signed off on a plan calling for only 10 percent of the new trucks to be electric and offering only a 0.4 mile-per-gallon fuel economy improvement over the agency’s current fleet, which is nearly 30 years old. When asked why the Postal Service wasn’t buying more electric vehicles, he said it couldn’t afford them.
Over the past week, environmentalists and California’s top air quality regulator have called on the EPA to block the Postal Service from moving forward with what they described as a poorly thought-out purchase that would harm communities across the country. They asked the EPA to refer the dispute to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which mediates disagreements between federal agencies over actions affecting the environment and public health.


EPA officials declined to invoke this rarely used power. Instead, senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said they decided to send the warning letters to the Postal Service to give its leadership a chance to voluntarily change course.
They acknowledged that DeJoy might reject their requests, as he has rebuffed previous calls for the agency to rethink its plans. But they said that even if the postmaster general charged ahead with an order for mostly gas-powered vehicles in 2023, the contract’s first year, there is still time for the agency to pivot to electric trucks in later years if more funding became available or the leadership’s perspective changes.
It’s also likely that if the mail agency — which enjoys independent status from the executive branch — disregards the Biden officials’ objections and orders the new delivery trucks, environmental groups would sue. Adrian Martinez, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said the groups would have a strong case.
“It is hard to predict what courts will do, but the Postal Service’s work here is just so embarrassingly flimsy,” Martinez said. “They don’t reveal the source of the information for many of their conclusions, instead dismissing electrification outright.”
The objections took senior postal leaders by surprise. The Postal Service’s governing board was largely unaware of tension around the environmental impacts of the trucks, according to three people involved with the contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The House plans to vote in the coming days on legislation relieving the Postal Service of much of its debt, and the individuals said postal officials privately worry that an ugly spat over its environmental record could spur congressional Democrats to delay the vote.


 
“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” agency spokeswoman Kimberly Frum said in a statement.
The agency would not say how much money it has already sent to Oshkosh, though the EPA’s letter notes that it awarded the contract “and funded as much as $482 million to the vendor” before conducting an environmental analysis, “exactly what CEQ regulations prohibit.”
Concerns about the Postal Service’s contract have been simmering for months.
Independent auto industry and climate experts have panned the way it calculated the costs of maintaining and fueling the trucks. The 0.4 mpg improvement ranks well below the industry standard for a new service vehicle, according to experts.
The Postal Service once bragged that it could convert the new gas-powered vehicles to a battery-electric drivetrain with taxpayer funding, but has since backed off those claims.
Representatives from Oshkosh — which has little experience building electric vehicles for civilians — declined to answer questions about the postal procurement, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Oshkosh Executive Vice President John Bryant said in a statement that the company was “honored” to be selected to manufacture the trucks, and that production would begin in 2023.
How well do you know Biden's environmental record? Take our quiz.
In its public comments, the EPA questioned why the Postal Service had assumed in its economic and climate study that battery and gasoline prices would remain the same decades from now and overestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by electricity powering plug-in vehicles.
The EPA also criticized the mail agency for basing its analysis of electric vehicles on current charging infrastructure, which is in a nascent stage, and for only considering either shifting to an entirely electric fleet or switching over just 10 percent of its delivery vehicles. The Postal Service’s own analysis showed that about 95 percent of mail carriers’ routes could be electrified.
The Postal Service’s draft analysis “presents biased cost and emission estimates” that favor gas-powered vehicles, the EPA wrote, urging postal officials to revise their calculations. The mail agency largely disregarded this advice, barely changing its final assessment released in December.
Read USPS's analysis: Postal Service analysis proposes buying 90-percent gas-powered truck fleet
“There were just pages and pages of detailed economic and environmental analysis by EPA that the Postal Service either ignored or dismissed with a rhetorical wave of its hand,” said John Walke, who directs the clean-air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
The Postal Service’s current delivery truck model, the Grumman “Long Life Vehicle,” was revolutionary when it began rolling down neighborhood streets in 1987. But hundreds of thousands of miles of overuse have led to a rash of vehicle fires. The trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning, which has left postal workers exposed to rising summertime temperatures and at risk of heatstroke.
USPS trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning. They get 10 mpg. And they were revolutionary.
Postal leadership has long seen the deteriorating vehicles as one of the agency’s most pressing challenges, saddling it with hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly maintenance costs and putting it at a disadvantage in the e-commerce marketplace. But long-standing financial constraints — the agency is $206.4 billion in debt — have kept it from investing in new trucks.
DeJoy included new vehicle purchases in his 10-year plan for the agency, which lengthens mail delivery times to save money while raising the cost of some postage. The Postal Service is also flush with cash. It reported $23.9 billion in liquidity — much of it thanks to emergency pandemic funding from Congress — at the end of fiscal 2021.
The Oshkosh contract seemed like it would improve upon the old fleet. Yet environmental activists and some electric vehicle industry experts said the trucks that would be built according to its terms have significant shortcomings.
The new, gas-powered trucks would be air-conditioned — much to the delight of letter carriers nationwide — but with the air conditioning running, they would average just 8.6 miles per gallon. Electric vehicle experts said the industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 and 14 mpg.
Without a major improvement in their fuel economy, the Oshkosh trucks are expected to burn about 110 million gallons of gasoline each year, just an 18 percent drop in fuel consumption compared to the current model.
Compared to an electric fleet, the agency estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from its new trucks could cause more than $193 million in economic and environmental damage each year by 2050. Environmentalists argue this undercounts the Oshkosh truck’s true carbon footprint because the Postal Service calculated emissions based on the wrong metric.
Push to electrify mail trucks gains wide support, an unlikely win for both DeJoy and Biden
Environmental groups have also questioned the Postal Service’s claim that the electric Oshkosh trucks could only travel 70 miles per charge. Although the market for commercial electric vehicles is still young, most of the electric delivery vans being snapped up by the Postal Service’s competitors have a driving range of well over 100 miles. The Oshkosh truck would run on a similarly sized battery.
DeJoy initially tried to counter critics’ climate concerns by saying that Oshkosh’s gas-powered trucks could be retrofitted later, converting them into electric vehicles, even touting the technology to a House panel last year. Scott Bombaugh, the Postal Service’s chief technology officer, praised the convertible capability in a March 2021 interview with The Washington Post.
“Even if we were to roll out the door with an internal combustion engine in the vehicle, we have the opportunity, the way the vehicle is designed is to allow us at the end of the life of that engine to swap in a different drive train alternative,” Bombaugh said.
But the Postal Service backed away from that strategy in its latest environmental analysis, saying it “has no plans to retrofit any vehicles.”
Frum said powertrain conversions typically occur more than a decade into a vehicle’s life, and the agency had no intention to conduct them.
As the Postal Service has backtracked on its initial plans for the fleet, it has retooled its public relations campaign. In the fall it ran ads in outlets such as Time magazine, showing a lush forest with the line, “New routes to a sustainable world.”
“We’re committed to building a new fleet for a better environment, with more fuel-efficient vehicles driving by cutting-edge technologies,” the ad said, directing readers to a website for more information on the trucks.
But the site barely discusses the new fleet. “American business is changing,” reads the top of the page, “and USPS is changing with it.”
 
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So let me get this straight, this guy wasn't able to renegotiate a contract with terrorists, that he had months to complete, because the wheels of motion had started but he is going to renegotiate or stop funding of our mail service with no problem? In addition to that, the guy who has opened a shit ton of Oil leases is going to do it under the guise of protecting the environment?




And you guys just keep swallowing this shower of shyte huh?
 
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“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” agency spokeswoman Kimberly Frum said in a statement.
The agency would not say how much money it has already sent to Oshkosh, though the EPA’s letter notes that it awarded the contract “and funded as much as $482 million to the vendor” before conducting an environmental analysis, “exactly what CEQ regulations prohibit.”
Concerns about the Postal Service’s contract have been simmering for months.
Independent auto industry and climate experts have panned the way it calculated the costs of maintaining and fueling the trucks. The 0.4 mpg improvement ranks well below the industry standard for a new service vehicle, according to experts.
The Postal Service once bragged that it could convert the new gas-powered vehicles to a battery-electric drivetrain with taxpayer funding, but has since backed off those claims.
Representatives from Oshkosh — which has little experience building electric vehicles for civilians — declined to answer questions about the postal procurement, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Oshkosh Executive Vice President John Bryant said in a statement that the company was “honored” to be selected to manufacture the trucks, and that production would begin in 2023.
How well do you know Biden's environmental record? Take our quiz.
In its public comments, the EPA questioned why the Postal Service had assumed in its economic and climate study that battery and gasoline prices would remain the same decades from now and overestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by electricity powering plug-in vehicles.
The EPA also criticized the mail agency for basing its analysis of electric vehicles on current charging infrastructure, which is in a nascent stage, and for only considering either shifting to an entirely electric fleet or switching over just 10 percent of its delivery vehicles. The Postal Service’s own analysis showed that about 95 percent of mail carriers’ routes could be electrified.
The Postal Service’s draft analysis “presents biased cost and emission estimates” that favor gas-powered vehicles, the EPA wrote, urging postal officials to revise their calculations. The mail agency largely disregarded this advice, barely changing its final assessment released in December.
Read USPS's analysis: Postal Service analysis proposes buying 90-percent gas-powered truck fleet
“There were just pages and pages of detailed economic and environmental analysis by EPA that the Postal Service either ignored or dismissed with a rhetorical wave of its hand,” said John Walke, who directs the clean-air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
The Postal Service’s current delivery truck model, the Grumman “Long Life Vehicle,” was revolutionary when it began rolling down neighborhood streets in 1987. But hundreds of thousands of miles of overuse have led to a rash of vehicle fires. The trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning, which has left postal workers exposed to rising summertime temperatures and at risk of heatstroke.
USPS trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning. They get 10 mpg. And they were revolutionary.
Postal leadership has long seen the deteriorating vehicles as one of the agency’s most pressing challenges, saddling it with hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly maintenance costs and putting it at a disadvantage in the e-commerce marketplace. But long-standing financial constraints — the agency is $206.4 billion in debt — have kept it from investing in new trucks.
DeJoy included new vehicle purchases in his 10-year plan for the agency, which lengthens mail delivery times to save money while raising the cost of some postage. The Postal Service is also flush with cash. It reported $23.9 billion in liquidity — much of it thanks to emergency pandemic funding from Congress — at the end of fiscal 2021.
The Oshkosh contract seemed like it would improve upon the old fleet. Yet environmental activists and some electric vehicle industry experts said the trucks that would be built according to its terms have significant shortcomings.
The new, gas-powered trucks would be air-conditioned — much to the delight of letter carriers nationwide — but with the air conditioning running, they would average just 8.6 miles per gallon. Electric vehicle experts said the industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 and 14 mpg.
Without a major improvement in their fuel economy, the Oshkosh trucks are expected to burn about 110 million gallons of gasoline each year, just an 18 percent drop in fuel consumption compared to the current model.
Compared to an electric fleet, the agency estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from its new trucks could cause more than $193 million in economic and environmental damage each year by 2050. Environmentalists argue this undercounts the Oshkosh truck’s true carbon footprint because the Postal Service calculated emissions based on the wrong metric.
Push to electrify mail trucks gains wide support, an unlikely win for both DeJoy and Biden
Environmental groups have also questioned the Postal Service’s claim that the electric Oshkosh trucks could only travel 70 miles per charge. Although the market for commercial electric vehicles is still young, most of the electric delivery vans being snapped up by the Postal Service’s competitors have a driving range of well over 100 miles. The Oshkosh truck would run on a similarly sized battery.
DeJoy initially tried to counter critics’ climate concerns by saying that Oshkosh’s gas-powered trucks could be retrofitted later, converting them into electric vehicles, even touting the technology to a House panel last year. Scott Bombaugh, the Postal Service’s chief technology officer, praised the convertible capability in a March 2021 interview with The Washington Post.
“Even if we were to roll out the door with an internal combustion engine in the vehicle, we have the opportunity, the way the vehicle is designed is to allow us at the end of the life of that engine to swap in a different drive train alternative,” Bombaugh said.
But the Postal Service backed away from that strategy in its latest environmental analysis, saying it “has no plans to retrofit any vehicles.”
Frum said powertrain conversions typically occur more than a decade into a vehicle’s life, and the agency had no intention to conduct them.
As the Postal Service has backtracked on its initial plans for the fleet, it has retooled its public relations campaign. In the fall it ran ads in outlets such as Time magazine, showing a lush forest with the line, “New routes to a sustainable world.”
“We’re committed to building a new fleet for a better environment, with more fuel-efficient vehicles driving by cutting-edge technologies,” the ad said, directing readers to a website for more information on the trucks.
But the site barely discusses the new fleet. “American business is changing,” reads the top of the page, “and USPS is changing with it.”
God for them? What about God for us?
 
Apparently the post office in northern CR is only delivering 2 or 3 times a week right now, at least to my neighborhood, that should help save some gas.
 
Does Tesla make a jeep-like vehicle with no doors and the steering wheel on the right?
 
mister-magoo-4.jpg
 
Biden did this only because production of the vehicles was not going to be in Wisconsin. Union thugs have pressured him in the last few days.

Wisconsin’s political leaders and labor unions are stepping up pressure on Oshkosh Defense as well as the US Postal Service and White House to get the company to do that manufacturing to Wisconsin. The 10-year contract, which could exceed $10bn, is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs. These leaders warn that unless the production is done in Wisconsin, Democratic candidates will be hurt in that pivotal swing state in this November’s elections as well as in 2024.


“We are extremely disappointed in Oshkosh Defense’s decision to accept the money from the US Postal Service and then turn around and send their production to a different state,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO union federation. “This is just another slap in the face to Wisconsin workers. People are very outraged about it. It doesn’t fit into president Biden’s vision to have high-road manufacturing.”

Many Oshkosh Defense workers are wearing buttons to work, saying, “We Can Build This.” These workers, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), say they’re dismayed that the company – unionized since 1938 – plans to do postal vehicle production in one of the nation’s most anti-union states. UAW Local 578 in Oshkosh has collected over 1,500 signatures urging the company to rescind its South Carolina decision, and Wisconsin’s unions are planning a big rally in February to further pressure Oshkosh Defense.

“When we were notified the company won the contract, we were all excited – that’s another contract under our belt, more work for us to do,” said Thomas Bowman, a welder at Oshkosh Defense. “But when we were told it wasn’t being built here, we were all asking, why not? We know we can build it. We got the workers. We got the tooling. It can be done here.”

In a statement, Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat of Wisconsin, said: “Oshkosh Defense has a history of manufacturing trucks for government service in Wisconsin with skilled union labor, so I remain deeply concerned that they decided to manufacture the postal trucks in what appears to be a newly acquired facility with inexperienced, likely non-union hires, in South Carolina.” Baldwin said she would continue urging Oshkosh Defense and the Postal Service to do further scrutiny of the production site in South Carolina. “I want these trucks made in Wisconsin,” she said.

On Tuesday, the UAW’s president, Ray Curry, issued a statement saying that production of the new postal vehicle “is an opportunity for the Biden administration to make real investments in both a cleaner future and good union jobs, but the contract, as it currently stands, fails on both accounts.”

Curry urged the administration to have the Environmental Protection Agency review the postal service’s contract because the union asserts the project will have “adverse environmental” and socioeconomic impacts that it says the postal service failed to examine in its Environmental Impact Statement.

The post office says its impact statement was done in full accordance with federal environmental law after having reviewed all comments submitted.

But Cindy Estrada, a UAW vice-president, said: “We’re saying Build Back Better, but you’re getting it wrong right out of the gate. These are public dollars where we could have more control over making sure this goes to good, union jobs.

When Oshkosh Defense announced plans to produce the vehicles in South Carolina, it chose to use a large, empty, former Rite Aid warehouse in Spartanburg. The company said it was eager to have a “turnkey” plant where it could quickly begin production to help meet its goal of delivering the first vehicles in 2023. At the time, John Bryant, president of Oshkosh Defense, said Spartanburg “has a skilled workforce and a proven history in advanced automotive manufacturing”. BMW has its only US assembly plant there.

Bryant said: “We evaluated sites in multiple states, including Wisconsin, for production of the [Next Generation Delivery Vehicle]. The Spartanburg, South Carolina, facility ranked highest in meeting the requirements of the NGDV program and gives us the best ability to meet the needs of the USPS.” Bryant noted that the company plans to establish a postal vehicle technical center in Oshkosh that will employ more than 100 people.

When the Postal Service was asked about Wisconsin leaders’ demand to move production to Wisconsin, it said: “We remain committed to modernizing our delivery fleet in service to our customers.” It added: “The NGDVs will be manufactured in the United States, which is consistent with the terms of the Postal Service’s contract with Oshkosh Defense.”

In November, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and 30 union presidents wrote to President Biden saying the Oshkosh Defense contract “missed an opportunity” to “ensure high-road, union manufacturing”. They concluded by asking him to “support our call” to have the Postal Service make sure the contract “supports and protects Oshkosh Defense’s existing, union workforce. In this way, the administration can join us in opposing Oshkosh’s use of a USPS contract to facilitate union evasion and a race to the bottom in wages, benefits and working conditions”.



 
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“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” agency spokeswoman Kimberly Frum said in a statement.
The agency would not say how much money it has already sent to Oshkosh, though the EPA’s letter notes that it awarded the contract “and funded as much as $482 million to the vendor” before conducting an environmental analysis, “exactly what CEQ regulations prohibit.”
Concerns about the Postal Service’s contract have been simmering for months.
Independent auto industry and climate experts have panned the way it calculated the costs of maintaining and fueling the trucks. The 0.4 mpg improvement ranks well below the industry standard for a new service vehicle, according to experts.
The Postal Service once bragged that it could convert the new gas-powered vehicles to a battery-electric drivetrain with taxpayer funding, but has since backed off those claims.
Representatives from Oshkosh — which has little experience building electric vehicles for civilians — declined to answer questions about the postal procurement, citing a nondisclosure agreement. Oshkosh Executive Vice President John Bryant said in a statement that the company was “honored” to be selected to manufacture the trucks, and that production would begin in 2023.
How well do you know Biden's environmental record? Take our quiz.
In its public comments, the EPA questioned why the Postal Service had assumed in its economic and climate study that battery and gasoline prices would remain the same decades from now and overestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by electricity powering plug-in vehicles.
The EPA also criticized the mail agency for basing its analysis of electric vehicles on current charging infrastructure, which is in a nascent stage, and for only considering either shifting to an entirely electric fleet or switching over just 10 percent of its delivery vehicles. The Postal Service’s own analysis showed that about 95 percent of mail carriers’ routes could be electrified.
The Postal Service’s draft analysis “presents biased cost and emission estimates” that favor gas-powered vehicles, the EPA wrote, urging postal officials to revise their calculations. The mail agency largely disregarded this advice, barely changing its final assessment released in December.
Read USPS's analysis: Postal Service analysis proposes buying 90-percent gas-powered truck fleet
“There were just pages and pages of detailed economic and environmental analysis by EPA that the Postal Service either ignored or dismissed with a rhetorical wave of its hand,” said John Walke, who directs the clean-air project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group.
The Postal Service’s current delivery truck model, the Grumman “Long Life Vehicle,” was revolutionary when it began rolling down neighborhood streets in 1987. But hundreds of thousands of miles of overuse have led to a rash of vehicle fires. The trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning, which has left postal workers exposed to rising summertime temperatures and at risk of heatstroke.
USPS trucks don’t have air bags or air conditioning. They get 10 mpg. And they were revolutionary.
Postal leadership has long seen the deteriorating vehicles as one of the agency’s most pressing challenges, saddling it with hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly maintenance costs and putting it at a disadvantage in the e-commerce marketplace. But long-standing financial constraints — the agency is $206.4 billion in debt — have kept it from investing in new trucks.
DeJoy included new vehicle purchases in his 10-year plan for the agency, which lengthens mail delivery times to save money while raising the cost of some postage. The Postal Service is also flush with cash. It reported $23.9 billion in liquidity — much of it thanks to emergency pandemic funding from Congress — at the end of fiscal 2021.
The Oshkosh contract seemed like it would improve upon the old fleet. Yet environmental activists and some electric vehicle industry experts said the trucks that would be built according to its terms have significant shortcomings.
The new, gas-powered trucks would be air-conditioned — much to the delight of letter carriers nationwide — but with the air conditioning running, they would average just 8.6 miles per gallon. Electric vehicle experts said the industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 and 14 mpg.
Without a major improvement in their fuel economy, the Oshkosh trucks are expected to burn about 110 million gallons of gasoline each year, just an 18 percent drop in fuel consumption compared to the current model.
Compared to an electric fleet, the agency estimates that the greenhouse gas emissions from its new trucks could cause more than $193 million in economic and environmental damage each year by 2050. Environmentalists argue this undercounts the Oshkosh truck’s true carbon footprint because the Postal Service calculated emissions based on the wrong metric.
Push to electrify mail trucks gains wide support, an unlikely win for both DeJoy and Biden
Environmental groups have also questioned the Postal Service’s claim that the electric Oshkosh trucks could only travel 70 miles per charge. Although the market for commercial electric vehicles is still young, most of the electric delivery vans being snapped up by the Postal Service’s competitors have a driving range of well over 100 miles. The Oshkosh truck would run on a similarly sized battery.
DeJoy initially tried to counter critics’ climate concerns by saying that Oshkosh’s gas-powered trucks could be retrofitted later, converting them into electric vehicles, even touting the technology to a House panel last year. Scott Bombaugh, the Postal Service’s chief technology officer, praised the convertible capability in a March 2021 interview with The Washington Post.
“Even if we were to roll out the door with an internal combustion engine in the vehicle, we have the opportunity, the way the vehicle is designed is to allow us at the end of the life of that engine to swap in a different drive train alternative,” Bombaugh said.
But the Postal Service backed away from that strategy in its latest environmental analysis, saying it “has no plans to retrofit any vehicles.”
Frum said powertrain conversions typically occur more than a decade into a vehicle’s life, and the agency had no intention to conduct them.
As the Postal Service has backtracked on its initial plans for the fleet, it has retooled its public relations campaign. In the fall it ran ads in outlets such as Time magazine, showing a lush forest with the line, “New routes to a sustainable world.”
“We’re committed to building a new fleet for a better environment, with more fuel-efficient vehicles driving by cutting-edge technologies,” the ad said, directing readers to a website for more information on the trucks.
But the site barely discusses the new fleet. “American business is changing,” reads the top of the page, “and USPS is changing with it.”
It is borderline comical to buy a new fleet that would average only 8.6 miles to the gallon. We bought a new Sprinter van in 2004 that averaged 22 MPG.
We cannot as a nation stand to have the largest national fleet continue to contribute that much to green house gas increases.
Buying 5% of the fleet yearly as EV would produce huge savings that could go towards the next year’s 5% purchase of more EVs.
 
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God for them. The USPS needs to be moving away from gasoline powerd trucks:

The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service’s plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans’ health.
The dispute over the Postal Service’s plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden’s goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power. Postal Service vehicles make up a third of the government’s fleet, and the EPA warned the agency last fall that its environmental analysis of the contract rested on flawed assumptions and missing data.
The EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality sent letters to the Postal Service on Wednesday that urge it to reconsider plans to buy mostly gas-powered vehicles and conduct a new, more thorough technical analysis. The EPA also asked the Postal Service to hold a public hearing on its fleet modernization plans, a request the agency had rejected when California regulators made it Jan. 28.
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“The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world,” wrote Vicki Arroyo, the EPA’s associate administrator for policy.
Read the letter: EPA says USPS truck contract is 'seriously deficient' in acknowledging climate concerns
Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and even rising sales of electrical vehicles have yet to make a dent. Electric vehicle proponents had hoped the Postal Service purchase would provide a boost for the industry.
While policymakers agree that the Postal Service’s aging and unsafe fleet is due for an upgrade, the question of how to do it has fueled a fight between Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Donald Trump donor and holdover from the last administration, and Biden officials, as well as environmental groups, state regulators and the United Auto Workers union.
Biden’s spending package would give USPS $6 billion to replace dangerous mail trucks with electric vehicles
DeJoy, who oversaw the agency’s decision to award the truck contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense, signed off on a plan calling for only 10 percent of the new trucks to be electric and offering only a 0.4 mile-per-gallon fuel economy improvement over the agency’s current fleet, which is nearly 30 years old. When asked why the Postal Service wasn’t buying more electric vehicles, he said it couldn’t afford them.
Over the past week, environmentalists and California’s top air quality regulator have called on the EPA to block the Postal Service from moving forward with what they described as a poorly thought-out purchase that would harm communities across the country. They asked the EPA to refer the dispute to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which mediates disagreements between federal agencies over actions affecting the environment and public health.


EPA officials declined to invoke this rarely used power. Instead, senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said they decided to send the warning letters to the Postal Service to give its leadership a chance to voluntarily change course.
They acknowledged that DeJoy might reject their requests, as he has rebuffed previous calls for the agency to rethink its plans. But they said that even if the postmaster general charged ahead with an order for mostly gas-powered vehicles in 2023, the contract’s first year, there is still time for the agency to pivot to electric trucks in later years if more funding became available or the leadership’s perspective changes.
It’s also likely that if the mail agency — which enjoys independent status from the executive branch — disregards the Biden officials’ objections and orders the new delivery trucks, environmental groups would sue. Adrian Martinez, an attorney for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said the groups would have a strong case.
“It is hard to predict what courts will do, but the Postal Service’s work here is just so embarrassingly flimsy,” Martinez said. “They don’t reveal the source of the information for many of their conclusions, instead dismissing electrification outright.”
The objections took senior postal leaders by surprise. The Postal Service’s governing board was largely unaware of tension around the environmental impacts of the trucks, according to three people involved with the contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The House plans to vote in the coming days on legislation relieving the Postal Service of much of its debt, and the individuals said postal officials privately worry that an ugly spat over its environmental record could spur congressional Democrats to delay the vote.



Not just "climate damage"

Obsolescence as soon as they're put on the road.
USPS should be using renewable energy vehicles. Include in the contract the ability to upgrade battery packs as technology allows down the road.

Few of those tiny USPS trucks go more than 100 miles a day and there's no reason to be using ICE vehicles for that.
 
It is borderline comical to buy a new fleet that would average only 8.6 miles to the gallon.

For ICE vehicles, the continual stop/start and idling that those delivery trucks do is "city driving on steroids"

You make those battery powered, and the regenerative braking alone would allow you to run one for several days w/o recharging it, based on nominal 150-200 mile ranges you can get in even cheap EVs today.
 
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It is borderline comical to buy a new fleet that would average only 8.6 miles to the gallon. We bought a new Sprinter van in 2004 that averaged 22 MPG.
We cannot as a nation stand to have the largest national fleet continue to contribute that much to green house gas increases.
Buying 5% of the fleet yearly as EV would produce huge savings that could go towards the next year’s 5% purchase of more EVs.
I did the research they are a leader in leaving a green footprint.

 
ORLY. Suggesting a fleet average under 9 MPG is a green leader is buncombe.
The Postal Service has more than 46,000 alternative fuel-capable vehicles, which are primarily E- 85 Flex Fuel. USPS also has tested electric, compressed natural gas, bio-diesel and hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Not sure where anyone comes up with 9 mpg.

 
The Postal Service has more than 46,000 alternative fuel-capable vehicles, which are primarily E- 85 Flex Fuel. USPS also has tested electric, compressed natural gas, bio-diesel and hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Not sure where anyone comes up with 9 mpg.

You didn’t bother to read the OP.


The Oshkosh contract seemed like it would improve upon the old fleet. Yet environmental activists and some electric vehicle industry experts said the trucks that would be built according to its terms have significant shortcomings.
The new, gas-powered trucks would be air-conditioned — much to the delight of letter carriers nationwide — but with the air conditioning running, they would average just 8.6 miles per gallon. Electric vehicle experts said the industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 and 14 mpg.
 
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You didn’t bother to read the OP.


The Oshkosh contract seemed like it would improve upon the old fleet. Yet environmental activists and some electric vehicle industry experts said the trucks that would be built according to its terms have significant shortcomings.
The new, gas-powered trucks would be air-conditioned — much to the delight of letter carriers nationwide — but with the air conditioning running, they would average just 8.6 miles per gallon. Electric vehicle experts said the industry standard for a gasoline-powered fleet vehicle is between 12 and 14 mpg.
They don't need ac.
 
Amazon is buying electric delivery vans and they are turning a profit last I checked.

Exactly the point

DeJoy was trying to force this thru to make USPS less competitive than "market" options. With the intention of privatizing the whole thing when saddling them with gas-powered vehicles makes that "wish" come true.
 
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