- The U.S. Postal Support introduced final spring that it would get about 150,000 new mail vehicles from Oshkosh Defense, and that they would be fuel-powered instead of electric powered.
- The EPA is now inquiring the USPS to pause the deal and choose a additional critical search at EVs for these everyday function vans that adhere to a recognised route and return to a centralized locale every night time.
- The USPS is unbiased of the executive department and so won’t have to abide by the EPA’s request, but it appears to be like this messy battle isn’t pretty completed.
U.S. Postal Support
Robert Alexander/Getty Photographs
Upgrading the U.S. Postal Service’s truck fleet has been a extensive and controversial approach, and we’re not completed but. As a swift recap, the USPS started out wanting for replacements for 150,000 or so Grumman Prolonged Existence Motor vehicles (LLVs) in around 2015. For a while, it seemed like the new fleet could possibly be produced up of largely electric vehicles, but when the deal for the new mail vehicles was awarded to Oshkosh Defense in the spring of 2021, the USPS explained only 10 % of the new mail vehicles might be electrical. A single of the contenders for an electric powered truck, Workhorse, sued the USPS final summer months around the offer.
Now the government is inquiring the USPS to pause on the $11.3 billion agreement and rethink the gas-powered truck buys in the confront of weather injury.
U.S. Postal Company
The Biden administration and the EPA advised the USPS, which operates impartial of the government branch, that the new Oshkosh vans are just .4 mile for every gallon more successful in comparison to the outgoing LLVs—8.6 mpg versus 8.2 mpg for the more mature cars. It also mentioned that the Environmental Affect Statements (EIS) the USPS performed as it resolved where by to award the contract ended up not done effectively.
The EPA despatched a letter to the USPS yesterday that mentioned that the full cause to purchase new mail vehicles was to make them cleaner, greater, and safer. The EPA reported previous fall that it had a dilemma with how the USPS performed an previously EIS about the truck invest in and that “the last EIS continues to be seriously deficient.”
“Specially,” it went on, “the final EIS does not disclose vital information and facts underlying the crucial analysis of Total Price of Possession, underestimates greenhouse-fuel emissions, fails to take into account extra environmentally protecting possible alternate options, and inadequately considers impacts on communities with environmental justice issues,” the EPA letter mentioned. The EPA or the Biden Administration could also sue the USPS to rethink the truck purchases, anything that Adrian Martinez, an legal professional for the environmental law company Earthjustice, thinks could do the job.
“It is tricky to predict what courts will do, but the Postal Service’s do the job right here is just so embarrassingly flimsy,” Martinez told the Washington Put up. “They will not expose the source of the facts for a lot of of their conclusions, in its place dismissing electrification outright.”
Powering the USPS’s common mail shipping vans with electrons rather of gasoline would go a extensive way to hitting President Biden’s January 2021 executive get that would replace the federal government’s recent fleet of cars with EVs as section of an expanded Obtain American act. The federal govt experienced more than 645,000 automobiles in its fleet in 2019, about a quarter of which would be replaced by the 165,000 new trucks the USPS is hunting to acquire over the next 10 years.
Oshkosh Protection
Way too Pricey, States USPS
The USPS’s protection is that it would just be as well pricey to invest in tens of thousands of electrical autos.
“When we can have an understanding of why some who are not liable for the economic sustainability of the Postal Provider might want that the Postal Company receive far more electric powered autos, the regulation requires the Postal Service to be self-enough,” a USPS spokesperson explained to the Put up in a assertion.
President Biden’s social shelling out package proposal unveiled last calendar year involved $6 billion for the USPS to invest in new cars, but that proposal is still currently being debated in Congress. In late January, the California Air Methods Board questioned the USPS to hold a community hearing about its auto buy programs, and the EPA joined that connect with in its letter yesterday. EPA officers advised the Put up that even if the USPS goes forward with the fuel-driven cars this year, there may still be time to change the bulk of the purchases to electric in the coming many years.
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