Action Alerts

Electrify the school bus

What's At Stake

What if schoolkids could ride a magic carpet to school — swift, smooth, silent, with no tailpipe and no exhaust fumes? Alas, magic carpets don’t exist anywhere except in cartoons — but electric school buses do, and they come pretty close. School districts around the U.S. are starting to convert their fleets from dirty diesel buses to pollution-free electric ones, sparking a transformation in how 26 million of the country’s schoolkids get to school every day. You can help accelerate this progress.

Read More

Federal climate bills recently passed made billions available for electric school buses, putting school districts in a prime position to move ahead in electrifying their fleets. This has been a massive boon for district’s that have taken advantage of it, but there are two key ways the program can be improved moving forward.

First, the government needs to prioritize money for school districts where kids are breathing the dirtiest air. Diesel exhaust produces some of the dirtiest, most toxic pollution in existence that fouls the air in our neighborhoods and directly hurts kids riding in diesel buses.

Children are particularly vulnerable to harm from air pollution. Their lungs aren’t fully developed, and they tend to be outside and active more than adults — meaning they breathe in more of whatever junk is in the air. Research shows that children who grow up in more polluted areas are at greater risk for reduced lung growth, from which they may never recover. The average loss of lung function is about equal to growing up in a home with parents who smoke.

Additionally, the EPA needs to ensure the program does not continue to subsidize combustion buses. Right now, school districts can purchase buses powered by propane or methane gas — locking communities into further pollution. Propane and methane gas engines perform equal to or worse than diesel when it comes to health-harming air pollution. Combustion engine buses — whether they run on diesel or on methane gas — pump out pollution that hurts our lungs and cooks our planet’s climate.

It’s time for school buses to move into the 21st century. The technology is here now to replace dirty diesel school buses with something that truly is almost magic — clean, efficient, better for our kids’ health and able to save money for school districts and local communities.

You can help out by telling the EPA to prioritize clean, electric school buses for districts where kids breathe the dirtiest air in the country.

Led by a chaperone, a group of school children board a yellow school bus.
A group of children board a school bus. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)

Delivery to Environmental Protection Agency

Important Notice

Your message is delivered to a public agency, and all information submitted may be placed in the public record. Do not submit confidential information.

By taking action, you will receive emails from Earthjustice. Change your mailing preferences or opt-out at any time. Learn more in our Privacy Policy. This Earthjustice action is hosted on EveryAction. Learn about EveryAction’s Privacy Policy.

Why is a phone number or prefix required on some action forms?

Trouble Viewing This Action?

If the action form is not loading above, please add earthjustice.org as a trusted website in your ad blocker or pause any ad blockers, and refresh this webpage. (Details.) If the action form still does not display, please report the problem to us at action@earthjustice.org. Thank you!

Your Actions Matter

Your messages make a difference, even if we have leaders who don't want to listen. Here's why.

You level the playing field.

Elected officials pay attention when they see that we are paying attention. Read more.

They may be hearing from industry lobbyists left and right, but hearing the stories of their constituents — that’s your power.

Our legislators serve at the pleasure of the people who gave them their job — you.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. When you contact your elected official, you’re putting a face and a name on an issue.

Whether or not you voted for them, they work for you, for the duration of their term.

Make sure your elected officials know whose community and whose values they represent. (Find your local, state, and federal elected officials.)

Your action is with us in court.

If a federal agency finalizes a harmful action, the record of public comments provides a basis for bringing them into court. Read more.

Throughout each of the public comment periods we alert you to, Earthjustice’s attorneys are researching and writing in-depth, technical comments to submit — detailing how the regulation could and should be stronger to protect the environment, our communities, and our planet.

We need you to join us — your specific experiences, knowledge, and voice are crucial to add to the Administrative Record through the comment periods.

Lawsuits we file that challenge weak or harmful federal regulations rely on what was submitted during the comment period. The court can only look at documents that are in the Administrative Record — including the public comments — to decide if the agency did something improper.

Your actions aid our litigation. Taking action and submitting comments during a comment period is substantively important.

It’s the law.

Federal agencies must pause what they’re doing and ask for — and consider — your comment. Read more.

Many of us may have never heard of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but laws like these require our government to ask the public to weigh in before agencies adopt or change regulations.

Regulations essentially describe how federal agencies will carry out laws — including decisions that could undermine science, or weaken safeguards on public health.

Public comments are collected at various points throughout the federal government’s rulemaking process, including when a regulation is proposed and finalized. (Learn about the rulemaking process.) These comments become part of the official, legal public record — the “Administrative Record.”

When the public responds with a huge outpouring of support for environmental protections, these individual messages collectively undercut politicians' attempts to claim otherwise.

What this means is each of us can take a role in shaping the rules our government creates — and ensuring those rules are fair and effective.