The United States Postal Service’s vehicles are in dire want of alternative, and the company has a plan to just do that. Last yr, it introduced its plans to maneuver ahead to purchase the mail truck of the future.

Late final week, it detailed these plans extra totally in an environmental impact statement, sussing out just a few totally different situations. One included transitioning all 165,000 of its day by day workhorse fleet to electrical autos. But in the long run, the USPS determined that wasn’t its most popular possibility, as a substitute saying it could like 10% of its new fleet to be electrical whereas the remaining 90% will run on inside combustion engines.

There are challenges to the 100% EV possibility, together with the place to put in charging infrastructure in city places and having the vary for mail supply in rural areas. But the principle cause the USPS prefers the 90/10 cut up is value. It referred to as the 100% electrical truck situation its “preferred alternative,” however famous that it “is not achievable, absent additional funding.” The whole value to affect the fleet fully could be $11.6 billion, a $3.3 billion distinction from the 90/10 cut up. To which I say, why has no person given the Postal Service this cash but?

You can most likely discover the $3.3 billion sitting within the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s collective sofa cushions. Consider that the F-35, a $1.5 trillion boondoggle of a fighter jet that can’t even shoot straight. If the Department of Defense is actually critical about nationwide safety risk posed by local weather change, it should instantly cancel, I don’t know, one or two F-35 contracts and provides that cash to the USPS. Having 165,000 electrical autos quietly delivering mail would, in keeping with the EIS, scale back greenhouse fuel emissions by greater than 537,000 metric tons of direct tailpipe emissions alone. The USPS useful notes this is able to “be the most beneficial” situation on that entrance, along with reducing air and noise air pollution. That would save lives and cash, significantly in poor neighborhoods and communities of colour. Can the F-35 program say the identical?

But OK, I hear you. Canceling just a few Lockheed Martin contracts could be distinctly un-American. We love the military-industrial complicated! So then it have to be incumbent on Congress to get its act collectively. Specifically, the Build Back Better Act, which included roughly $6 billion for the USPS and electrification. A relative princely sum in comparison with what the company outlined in its EIS!

Yet the act was killed by Sen. Joe Manchin dwell on Fox News late final yr. The senator from West Virginia has since mentioned that he might come to an settlement along with his fellow Democrats on local weather “much easier than anything else.” What higher approach to show that he’s not a foul religion negotiator owned by particular pursuits than by voting for Build Back Better and guaranteeing the USPS has its additional $3.3 billion to get that EV fleet buzzing? Manchin has spoken highly of the Postal Service, even urging bipartisan comity to repair delays. Maybe he may even peel off just a few Republicans to modernize mail supply.

The pleasure of seeing these cute vehicles zipping round to ship mail to his constituents, freed from exhaust, must be incentive sufficient to get to sure. After all, West Virginia has the third-highest asthma rate of any state within the U.S. But as an act of goodwill, the USPS might even enable Manchin to call one among its new EVs, very like Michigan allowed the general public to do with its snowplows.

There are nonetheless different methods to get the USPS just a few additional bucks. Consider Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax legislation, which might tax the holdings with greater than $1 billion at 3%. Apply that to Jeff Bezos’ $177 billion fortune alone, and growth, $5.4 billion for candy, candy EVs. We can use the remainder of $2.1 billion to, I don’t know, plant some group gardens on put up workplace property.

All this is able to align with President Joe Biden’s govt order on electrifying the federal automobile fleet and throwing the load of presidency behind addressing the local weather disaster. In quick, there is no such thing as a cause to not give the USPS the cash to do that. Give them the additional $3.3 billion.