American Lung Association President: Electric School Buses Protect Kids' Health. Congress Should Continue To Support Them
This is still the experience of too many children today, as most of the half million school buses on the road are diesel-powered. While stronger pollution standards have made these vehicles cleaner than they used to be, they still spew exhaust that impacts student health and even learning outcomes. The toxic exhaust from diesel-burning buses is unsafe for students, drivers, and residents of the communities they drive through and park in.
An electric school bus is pictured.
An electric school bus is pictured.
Getty Images
There is a solution that reduces pollution exposure while improving kids' health: electric school buses, the only type of school bus with no tailpipe emissions. Over a quarter of a million students already ride these clean buses to school each day.
To ensure more children have the opportunity to ride on clean, electric school buses, I strongly urge federal lawmakers to preserve two critical tax incentives, the Qualified Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit (45W), a tax credit that provides up to $40,000 for each delivered electric school bus, and the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit (30C), which allows entities to claim a credit for up to 30 percent of the cost of qualified property, such as electric school bus charging infrastructure.
I have worked at the American Lung Association for more than 40 years and now serve as the president and CEO. For more than 50 years, we have known about the health impacts of vehicle emissions and the particularly harmful emissions of diesel engines. It is time—and our responsibility—to ensure that all children have a healthy ride to school.
According to the Lung Association's most recent State of the Air report, 46 percent of Americans—156.1 million people—are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. Diesel exhaust, in particular, is dangerous for everyone to breathe, even healthy adults, but children are especially sensitive to the variety of pollutants known to cause lung cancer and respiratory harm and impact cognitive development.
The health impacts of air pollution are not felt equally. The State of the Air report also found that a person of color is more than twice as likely to live in a community with a failing grade for all three measures of pollution covered in the report. Communities that have been historically disadvantaged are more likely to be exposed to vehicle-based air pollution due to lending, transit, housing, and zoning policies that concentrated Black and brown communities closer to highways and other pollution sources.
The good news is we already know one thing that can help: a widespread transition to zero-emission vehicles and electricity, including buses, would dramatically improve the health of children. According to another Lung Association report, the transition would prevent 2.79 million pediatric asthma attacks and millions of other respiratory symptoms and save over 500 infant lives by 2050.
More communities than ever have the opportunity to transition to clean, tailpipe-emissions-free electric school buses, thanks in large part to federal incentives like tax credits and grant programs.
Since 2021, the number of electric school buses on the road or on their way to school districts has increased almost tenfold, and 1,500 school districts have said yes to electric school buses across the nation. There's clear demand for electric school buses, but it's only just getting started and needs continued policy support to drive the transition. It is imperative that lawmakers protect incentives like the 45W and 30C tax credits, which are popular and utilized across the country to help keep the wheels turning.
Our kids deserve to live in a country where no student is forced to inhale toxic exhaust from their own bus just to get to and from school each day. With continued support from our elected officials, we can make it happen.
Harold Wimmer is president and CEO of the American Lung Association.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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San Francisco Chronicle
28 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
It's a year of rapid change, except when it comes to Trump's approval numbers, AP-NORC polling finds
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Atlantic
29 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Socialism Was Dead. Trump Revived It.
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The new socialism addresses the problems that wrecked the old socialism only by denying or ignoring them. But if socialism is to be beaten back, and if market economics are to uphold themselves in democratic competition, exposing the unworkability of proposed alternatives won't be enough. It will be necessary to reform and cleanse the market economics indispensable to sustaining Americans' standard of living. During socialism's heyday, the world's leading minds hailed the superior potential of a planned socialist economy. Albert Einstein wrote in 1949: The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. 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Communist Vietnam and other formerly closed and controlled economies followed the Chinese example. Across the democratic West, socialist ideas went into eclipse. In 1995, under the new leadership of Tony Blair, the British Labour Party amended its party constitution to delete venerable language pledging 'common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.' In Germany in the early 2000s, Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic coalition government introduced the most dramatic reductions in decades to social benefits to push the long-term unemployed back to work. In the United States, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared in 1996, 'The era of big government is over.' The seeming triumph of market economics was not welcomed by all, of course. Those disgruntled by the seeming triumph rejected Margaret Thatcher's taunt that 'there is no alternative,' yet they could not articulate in any concise or coherent way what that alternative might be. The anti-corporate activist Ralph Nader ran for president in part to challenge the Clinton-era pro-market consensus. In his 2000 campaign as the nominee of the Green Party, Nader assembled an array of grievances: over-lengthy commutes to work; unhealthy meals at fast-food chains; excessive CEO pay; young people getting too much screen time; the criminalization of narcotics; the demise of urban electric-trolley systems. He could not have been more specific about what he opposed. But what was he for? Nader could not say. And so it went for one project after another to imagine an anti-capitalist future. Some who belonged to the era's left glumly quoted a saying attributed to the American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson: 'It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.' Over the quarter century from early 1983 to late 2007, the United States suffered just two brief, mild recessions: one in 1990–91, and a second that lasted only from spring to fall of 2001. From the beginning of Ronald Reagan's second administration to the end of George W. Bush's first, the U.S. unemployment rate never once reached 8 percent. Over that same period, inflation was low and interest rates steadily declined. Economists call this era 'the Great Moderation.' The moderating influence was felt on politics too. For nearly 50 years, Gallup has surveyed Americans' mood with a consistent series of questions about the general condition of the country. From 1983 to 2007, the proportion of Americans satisfied with 'the way things are going in the U.S.' reached peaks of about 70 percent, and was often above 50 percent. Then the long period of stability abruptly ended. Over the 15 years from 2007 to 2022, the U.S. economy suffered the Great Recession, the coronavirus pandemic, and post-pandemic inflation: a sequence of bewildering shocks. You can see the effects in the Gallup polling. Over this period, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as generally satisfied rarely exceeded one-third and often hovered at about a quarter. The era of moderation yielded to a time of radicalism: Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement, 'birtherism,' the wave of militant ideology that acquired the shorthand 'woke.' In 2015, in the throes of this radicalism, Hillary Clinton announced her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In a stump speech some weeks later, she listed categories that described the American electorate as she saw it, offering a fascinating portrait of the politics of the 1990s meeting the realities of the 2010s. She dedicated her candidacy equally to 'the successful and the struggling,' to 'innovators and inventors' as well as 'factory workers and food servers.' In other words, she addressed herself to Americans for whom the world was working more or less well, and to familiar and long-established blue-collar categories. She made no specific mention of gig workers, downwardly mobile credentialed professionals, or any of the other restless social categories that multiplied after the shock of 2008–09. A few weeks after Clinton's announcement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont declared his campaign for the same Democratic nomination. Sanders was an odd messiah. He had spent a lifetime in politics with little to show for it. No major piece of legislation bore his name, and precious few minor pieces either. An independent socialist, he had stayed aloof from the Democratic Party without building a movement of his own. Few had considered him an inspiring personality or a compelling orator. Yet amid this new radical temper, he quickly gathered a cultlike following—and won 13 million votes, to carry 23 caucuses and primaries. When he ultimately lost to Clinton, the defeat left many of his supporters with resentments that divided leftists from liberals in ways that may have helped Donald Trump win the Electoral College in the general election in November 2016. In 2002, toward the end of her public career, Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement. 'Tony Blair and New Labour,' she replied. 'We forced our opponents to change their minds.' Sanders might say the same about Trump and his Republican Party. Goodbye to Reagan-era enthusiasm for markets and trade: Trump vowed much more aggressive and intrusive government action to protect American businesses and workers from global competition. He also offered a bleak diagnosis of America's condition, for which the only way forward was to return to the past. At the same time, Trump's persona vindicated every critique Sanders might advance about the decadence of late capitalism. Here was a putative billionaire whose business methods involved cheating customers and bilking suppliers. His private life was one scandal after another, and he spent his money on garish and gimcrack displays. He staffed his administration with plutocrats who were flagrantly disdainful of the travails of ordinary people, and with grifters who liked to live high on public expense. Then, beginning in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic intensified the anti-market feeling. The economic effects enriched those who possessed assets, especially real estate: The median house price in the U.S. had jumped from $317,000 in the spring of 2020 to $443,000 by the end of 2022. The federal pandemic response could also be gamed by business owners; the U.S. government estimates that as much as $200 billion of COVID-relief funds may have been fraudulently pocketed. But if you were a person who rented his or her home and lived on wages, you were almost certainly worse off in 2022 than you had been in 2019. Your wages bought less; your rent cost more. The outlook was especially bleak for young college graduates. The average new graduate owes more than $28,000 a year in student debt. Hopes of repaying that debt were dimmed by the weak post-COVID job market for new graduates. Joe Biden's presidential administration did relieve some student debt, but its most ambitious plans to help new graduates were struck down by the Supreme Court as exceeding executive authority. In some respects, people born since 1990 are more conservative than their elders. Academic surveys find that Americans, male and female, who attended high school in the 2010s express more traditional views about gender roles than those who attended high school in the 1990s. But on economic questions specifically, an observable shift of attitude against markets and capitalism has occurred. Only 40 percent of adults younger than 30 expressed a positive view of capitalism in a 2022 Pew survey, a drop from 52 percent pre-pandemic. Older groups lost faith too, but not so steeply: Among over 65s, a positive view of capitalism dipped from 76 percent pre-pandemic to 73 percent post-pandemic. This disillusionment has opened the door to self-described socialists in the 2020s. The most recent and most spectacular of this new cohort is Zohran Mamdani, who earlier this month won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City in an upset election. Mamdani campaigned on promises to raise taxes on New York's richest inhabitants to finance a bold new program of state enterprise: free bus service, government-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze for the 1 million apartments under city jurisdiction, and a vow to build 200,000 affordable-housing units over the next decade. After the tallies were boosted by New York's ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote. He now tops polls for the general election in November. His agenda already is influencing Democrats nationwide. Few if any of the Americans who use the term socialist would today defend Communist central planning. But as they criticize the many failings of contemporary American society, they tend to shirk the obvious counter-question: If not central planning, then what do they want? Liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton proposed to let markets create wealth, which governments would then tax to support social programs. If that's out of style, if something more radical is sought, then what might that something be? Merely Clintonism with higher taxes? Or a genuine alternative? How can a society that aspires to socialism produce the wealth it wants to redistribute if not by the same old capitalist methods of property, prices, and profits? The socialists of a century ago promised both a new way to create wealth and a new way to share it. The preeminent American socialist of the early 20th century, Eugene V. Debs, outlined that new system in speeches such as the one he delivered in Girard, Kansas, in 1908: We Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity shall produce, not for profit but in abundance to satisfy human wants … Every man and woman will then be economically free. They can, without let or hindrance, apply their labor, with the best machinery that can be devised, to all the natural resources, do the work of society and produce for all; and then receive in exchange a certificate of value equivalent to that of their production. Then society will improve its institutions in proportion to the progress of invention. Whether in the city or on the farm, all things productive will be carried forward on a gigantic scale. As soon as it was attempted, this breathtaking utopian vision bumped into a daunting challenge: Without market prices, how can any of those gigantic socialist enterprises know what to make or how to commit their resources? And without market institutions, including the profit motive, how can we have market prices? Socialist enterprises would blunder about in the dark, unable to communicate with one another, unable to respond to changing circumstances, because they severed the lines of communication that connect economic actors. Much brainpower was invested over many decades to solve this riddle. Francis Spufford's novel Red Plenty makes improbably poignant literature out of the desperate hopes of Soviet economists that the new technology of the computer might somehow rescue socialism from its own impossibility. But there was no escape. There is no socialist way to create wealth. There is only a socialist way to spend wealth. The socialist revival of the past half decade no longer even pretends to worry about wealth production. It exists purely as a new set of claims on existing modes of production: socialist apartments funded in effect by taxes on nonsocialist apartments, socialist grocery stores that do not have to pay the taxes or rent paid by nonsocialist grocery stores. The beneficiaries of these claims will not necessarily be society's poorest. New York City distributes affordable-housing units through a process that begins with a lottery but rapidly transforms into a test of skill, savvy, and connections. In the first place, New York favors applicants who work for the city, in itself a step that advantages middle-class people over the truly needy. Then, once the lucky lottery winners get their good news, they must assemble a mass of documents to prove their desirability as tenants—pay stubs, lease records, birth certificates. As an expert on the process explained to a real-estate website: 'Once you've been selected, it's all about being organized and efficient.' The people most at risk of homelessness are those least likely to navigate New York's system of nonmarket and submarket rents. In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams—elected as a Democrat, though now running for reelection as an independent—cut the ribbon on a $120 million project in Far Rockaway. This outer-borough development offered studios starting at $522 a month, two-bedroom apartments for $809 a month. But the building contained only 224 units. For all the excitement of the lucky beneficiaries, this is the faintest replica of a housing solution—as well as a reality check to Mamdani's grandiose vision of government-led housing abundance. Given this disappointing record, why are so many New Yorkers signing up for more and bigger? The short answer is that the debate about socialism is scarcely about socialism at all. Socialism's catastrophes are today obscure, relegated to a poorly remembered past. Dissatisfaction with the present-day economic system is felt urgently in the here and now. The progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz recently remarked, 'Trumponomics is ersatz capitalism.' The president and those around him are accumulating huge fortunes by unashamedly preying on the credulity of their followers. Trump insiders have used political power to harass regulatory agencies and cripple tax enforcement. Trump's big policy moves are accompanied by an avalanche of suspicious trades. 'Of the stock and stock fund sales administration officials reported between Jan. 20 and April 30, 90% fell within 10 days of the tariff announcements,' USA Today reported last week. The New York Times suggested in April that if Trump seems to care little about crashing the stock market but a lot about the bond market, that may be explained by his own holdings: few stocks, many bonds. (Unlike most past presidents, Trump has not put his holdings in a blind trust.) While Trump's behavior discredits markets, his rhetoric vilifies markets. In April, the Trump administration imposed the most crushing tariffs on international commerce since the Smoot-Hawley Act's regime of 1930. The Trump adviser Stephen Miller explained to Fox News the administration's reasons: 'Our leaders allowed foreign countries to rig the rules of the game, to cheat, to steal, to rob, to plunder,' he said. 'That has cost America trillions of dollars in wealth.' Echoing his boss's grievance-laden language, he said, 'They've stolen our industries.' It's not always phrased so vituperatively, but the message is consistent: free exchange is an illusion; there is nothing but exploitation. The only way to protect Americans from this exploitation is for the nation's political leaders to subject more and more of the U.S. economy to state control. If this way of thinking is true, then the severest critics of capitalism are right. Happily, this way of thinking is not true. Free exchange is a system of cooperation and mutual benefit, the most effective that humanity has yet discovered. But who in the Trump-led United States is arguing the case for free exchange? The most influential intellectuals of the left reject markets as too inequitable; those on the right reject them as too cosmopolitan. On one side, the professional politicians are intimidated by their most radical supporters; on the other, the politicians are under the sway of crooks and con artists, whose idea of capitalism is unregulated permission to bilk and defraud. Marxists condemn capitalism as 'organized robbery.' They could not be more wrong. But who will refute them when the government of the world's largest capitalist democracy is in the hands of organized robbers?
Hamilton Spectator
42 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
It's a year of rapid change, except when it comes to Trump's approval numbers, AP-NORC polling finds
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That is a lower rating than those of other recent presidents at the beginning of their second terms, including Democrat Barack Obama and Republican George W. Bush. The most recent AP-NORC poll, from July, puts Trump at 40% approval. While that is not a meaningful change from March, there is some evidence that Trump's support may be softening, at least on the margins. The July poll showed a slight decrease in approval of his handling of immigration since earlier in the year. Some other pollsters, such as Gallup , show a downward slide in overall approval since slightly earlier in his term, in January. But even those shifts are within a relatively narrow range, which is typical for Trump. The new AP-NORC polling tracker shows that Trump's favorability rating has remained largely steady since the end of his first term, with between 33% and 43% of U.S. adults saying they viewed him favorably across more than five years. Those long-term trends underscore that Trump has many steadfast opponents. But loyal supporters also help explain why views of the president are hard to change even as he pursues policies that most Americans do not support, using an approach that many find abrasive. Persistently low approval of Trump's job performance Trump has not had a traditional honeymoon period in his second term. He did not in his first, either. An AP-NORC poll conducted in March 2017 , two months into his first term, showed that 42% of Americans 'somewhat' or 'strongly' approved of his performance. That is largely where his approval rating stayed over the course of the next four years. The recent slippage on immigration is particularly significant because that issue was a major strength for Trump in the 2024 election. Earlier in his second term, it was also one of the few areas where he was outperforming his overall approval. In March, about half of U.S. adults approved of his handling of immigration. But the July AP-NORC poll found his approval on immigration at 43%, in line with his overall approval rating. Other recent polls show growing discontent with Trump's approach on immigration. A CNN/SSRS poll found that 55% of U.S. adults say the president has gone too far when it comes to deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally, an increase of 10 percentage points since February. 'I understand wanting to get rid of illegal immigrants, but the way that's being done is very aggressive,' said Donovan Baldwin, 18, of Asheboro, North Carolina, who did not vote in the 2024 election. 'And that's why people are protesting because it comes off as aggression. It's not right.' Ratings of Trump's handling of the economy, which were more positive during his first term, have been persistently negative in his second term. The July poll found that few Americans think Trump's policies have benefited them so far. Even if he is not a fan of everything Trump has done so far, Brian Nichols, 58, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is giving him the benefit of the doubt. Nichols, who voted for Trump in 2024, likes what he is seeing from the president overall, though he has his concerns both on style and substance, particularly Trump's social media presence and his on-again, off-again tariffs. Nichols also does not like the push to eliminate federal agencies such as the Education Department. Despite his occasional disagreements with Trump, though, Nichols said he wants to give the president space to do his job, and he trusts the House and Senate, now run by Republicans, to act as a safeguard. 'We put him into office for a reason, and we should be trusting that he's doing the job for the best of America,' Nichols said. Overall views of Trump have been fairly steady since 2019 Trump has spent the past six months pushing far-reaching and often unpopular policies. Earlier this year, Americans were bracing themselves for higher prices as a result of his approach to tariffs. The July poll found that most people think Trump's tax and spending bill will benefit the wealthy, while few think it will pay dividends for the middle class or people like them. Discomfort with individual policies may not translate into wholesale changes in views of Trump, though. Those have largely been constant through years of turmoil, with his favorability rating staying within a 10-percentage point range through the COVID-19 pandemic, a felony conviction and attempted assassination. To some of his supporters, the benefits of his presidency far outweigh the costs. Kim Schultz, 62, of Springhill, Florida said she is thrilled with just about everything Trump is doing as president, particularly his aggressive moves to deport anyone living in the country illegally. Even if Trump's tariffs eventually take effect and push prices up, she said she will not be alarmed. 'I've always had the opinion that if the tariffs are going to cost me a little bit more here and there, I don't have a problem with that,' she said. Across the country, Hildenbrand dislikes Trump's personality and his penchant for insults, including those directed at foreign leaders. But he thinks Trump is making things happen. 'More or less, to me, he's showing that he's on the right track,' he said. 'I'm not in favor of Trump's personality, but I am in favor of what he's getting done.' ___ Cooper reported from Phoenix. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
