Amid air quality concerns, U.S. districts embrace electric buses

Hopefully the electricity for the buses will come from relatively clean sources, if not they are only moving the pollution from their city to other locations.

A study of school buses . . . found using cleaner fuels or upgrading older diesel reduced children's exposure to airborne particles by as much as 50% and improved their health. Their findings suggest a nationwide switch to cleaner school buses could result in around 14 million fewer absences each year.

Now if they would only remove the mold, pesticides, asbestos, likely asthma triggers, and lead pipes from school buildings, the kids should be alright.

As mentioned above, the electric grid needs to be cleaned up, as well. That is also part of what the country is doing under Biden.

While everyone, everywhere, needs to do what they can to stop putting green house gases into the atmosphere, global warming is already here, and will be with us for hundreds of years, even if we could somehow become carbon-neutral overnight.

CO2 has a half life in the atmosphere of nearly a hundred years, so the warming that we have going on now won't stop anytime soon.

The tundra across the arctic region has been melting for years now, and nothing we are doing will stop it. The melting tundra is releasing large amounts of CO2 and methane, contributing to the green house effect.

Methane hydrates in the ocean have started to melt. The ocean is reaching its limit of solubility for CO2, and the increasing temperature of the ocean is contributing to the melting of the hydrates, a vast store of methane in the ocean.

Articles about what we are doing to reduce green house gas emissions are important, but we need to start thinking about how we are going to move the 10% of the human population that will be flooded out within the next hundred years due to rising sea levels.

On the subject of electric vehicles, it was in the news yesterday that Hertz (car rental company) ordered 100,000 EVs from Tesla, bypassing the offerings from the traditional major vehicle manufacturers.

It's about time American cities got on the ball with this. City buses are often filthy, inside and what they belch from the tailpipes.

It's about time American cities got on the ball with this. City buses are often filthy, inside and what they belch from the tailpipes.

The great majority of transit buses in the US have been CNG powered for well over a decade and their exhaust stacks are on the upper rear corner of the bus. No smoke either. Not carbon free but vastly cleaner than diesel powered buses.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/06/rising-seas-could-result-2-billion-refugees-2100

Some estimates are of over a billion people displaced by the rising ocean within 40 years, and 2 billion within 80 years. If we wanted to prevent the rising sea level, we should have gone carbon-neutral a long time ago. The only chance we have now to prevent the sea level rising catastrophically is to go massively carbon negative, and there are no plans to do so.

As much as 90% of the people who will be displaced will be in Asia. Perhaps that is why Xi has recently taken such drastic action to cut back on China's carbon emissions.