--- title: How School Buses Can Be a Force for Climate Change Good description: 40,000 school buses are bought every year in the U.S. We need to electrify them to help fight climate change canonical: https://time.com/6138439/american-school-bus-electric-climate-change/ author: John Doerr article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-01-12T12:00:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-14T09:18:19.016Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Ubiquitous Yellow School Bus Can Be Turned Into a Force for Climate Change Good og:description: 40,000 school buses are bought every year in the U.S. We need to electrify them to help fight climate change og:url: https://time.com/6138439/american-school-bus-electric-climate-change/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blted0b6f7cea260e78/698a2156929fad2920bf827d/Climate-Goals-electric-schoolbusYELLOW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1350 og:image:alt: The Napa Valley Unified School District on Friday August 28, 2009 in Napa, Calif., is filled with one of the most eco-friendly school bus fleets in Northern California if not the entire state. The school district began using electric buses starting back og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Ubiquitous Yellow School Bus Can Be Turned Into a Force for Climate Change Good twitter:description: 40,000 school buses are bought every year in the U.S. We need to electrify them to help fight climate change twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blted0b6f7cea260e78/698a2156929fad2920bf827d/Climate-Goals-electric-schoolbusYELLOW.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Ubiquitous Yellow School Bus Can Be Turned Into a Force for Climate Change Good > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=6452d3cd-9fc0-493b-8c67-d37cd7dca61e&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice [Watch (HLS stream): Generation Now: The Fight for Climate Justice](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/CIHrS8Mv.m3u8) (14:03)  _Published 2021-11-05. Today’s young people are coming of age just as the stable climate that has allowed previous generations to thrive on our planet begins to visibly break down—and just before our last chance to stop it falls out of reach._ by [John Doerr](https://time.com/author/john-doerr/) ## John Doerr Jan 12, 2022 12:00 PM UTC by [John Doerr](https://time.com/author/john-doerr/) ## John Doerr Jan 12, 2022 12:00 PM UTC Transportation accounts for at least 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly eight billion tons of carbon per year. With Tesla rising, [General Motors pledging](https://www.forbes.com/sites/samabuelsamid/2021/01/28/general-motors-commits-to-being-carbon-neutral-by-2040/?sh=b3f3d7963550) to retire gasoline-powered lines by 2035, and other major car makers ready to follow suit, the electric vehicle era will soon be upon us. One EV segment is especially ready for electrification: the humble school bus. Where passenger cars have yet to reach price and performance parity with combustion engines, and long-haul trucks are waiting on more powerful batteries, forward-thinking school districts are already shifting to electric buses. About 40,000 new school buses are [purchased each year](https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/united-states-school-bus-market#:~:text=In%202019%2C%2040%2C714%20units%20of,transportation%20to%20and%20from%20schools). If districts bought only electric ones from this point forward, the nation’s entire fleet could be converted within a decade or so. All-electric school buses would cut U.S. carbon emissions by more than 5 million tons, the equivalent of [removing a million cars](https://www.electrichybridvehicletechnology.com/opinion/how-the-us-plans-to-turn-all-its-iconic-school-buses-electric.html) from the road. It would be a tangible boost for our planet, our neighborhoods, and our children. This is more than a niche market. In the U.S. alone, close to half a million school buses carry 26 million children more than 4 billion miles [each year](https://time.com/6117544/electric-school-buses/). Since school buses are used for relatively short distances and only a handful of hours during the day, the main barriers to electrification—limited range and charging infrastructure—are neutralized. In short, school buses are tailor made for electrification. And while electric buses have significantly higher sticker prices than the diesel-run variety, they save up to 80% on fuel, maintenance, and repairs. In terms of total cost of ownership, over a typical vehicle’s 12-year lifespan, school districts can actually come out ahead. The incentive will only grow with continued innovations in battery technology. Besides cutting greenhouse gas emissions and offering stable, long-term economies, electric school buses help eliminate hazardous pollution and smog. According to the [International Agency for Research on Cancer](https://www.epa.gov/dera/school-bus-idle-reduction), diesel fumes are “carcinogenic to humans.” They’ve been linked to asthma, chronic respiratory disease, and premature death. As the Environmental Protection Agency has noted, particulate pollution is most dangerous to children, “who have a faster breathing rate than adults and whose lungs are not yet fully developed.” Diesel exhaust is a significant source of student illness and absenteeism. It poisons bus drivers and maintenance workers too. As the buses idle in traffic, they despoil our residential neighborhoods with noise and toxic soot. It is past time to bid them goodbye. At present, barely 1% of U.S. school buses are electric. But the future is now in Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb with more than one million residents. The local school district has [contracted to replace](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2021/02/24/climate-solutions-electric-schoolbuses/) 25 old diesel buses with electric models this year and three hundred more within three years, the biggest single deployment in North America to date. By 2035, the county plans to convert its entire fleet—more than 1,400 vehicles—to EVs. To finesse the new buses’ higher sticker price and keep the contract budget-neutral, the district signed a comprehensive lease with [Highland Electric Transportation](https://highlandfleets.com/), a Massachusetts start-up. For a fixed fee, Highland provides the e-buses, five charging depots, and the electricity. The ultimate goal is to power the system with 100% renewable energy, the zero-emissions holy grail. On a national level, the e-bus movement is a grassroots coalition of policymakers, school officials, parents, and students. In Phoenix, the cross country team at South Mountain High School partnered with their coach and the advocacy organization Chispa to drive the district’s first purchase of an electric bus. In Miami, after 12-year-old Holly Thorpe persisted in pushing the county’s school board, it recently passed a district plan to replace 50 diesel buses with electrified ones. Momentum is building. President Biden’s infrastructure package includes $2.5 billion for [electric school buses](https://time.com/6117544/electric-school-buses/).[](#%5Fftn5) The Bezos Earth Fund has chipped in with a grant for $37.5 million. Making all new school buses electric is a practical goal with long-term climate benefits and an immediate payoff for our children’s well-being. And while we’re at it, why not electrify the nation’s 65,000 municipal transit buses, as well? _This essay is part of a series on concrete goals the world should aim for in 2022 in order to put us on track to avert climate change-related disaster._ [_Read the rest here_](https://time.com/climate-goals-2022) [](#%5Fftnref1) ## Transcript [Namrata Iyer]: I think some of the biggest challenges my generation faces is convincing the previous generations about why it's important to talk about what we believe in. [Greta Thunberg]: We can't choose between us young people saying to adults you must behave but we can't wait for us to become the ones in charge because we don't have time for that. [Timothée Chalamet]: Your youth does not have to work against you by way of experience, your youth can be a virtue by way of what you ethically and earnestly expect of the world. [Billie Eilish]: People can be so selfish about the environment and their experience versus the globe and literally our lifespan. [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]: The America we grew up in is like nothing like the America our parents or grandparents grew up in. [Nyke Slawik]: When you have young people who are confronted with not having a future at all of course this is going to radicalize a whole generation. This is a question of survival basically. [John Kerry]: I don't doubt that we will get to a net zero carbon economy. Will we get there fast enough to heed the science and avoid the worst consequences? That's the battle. That's what we're trying to do with Glasgow. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice. [Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: What do we want? [Audience]: Climate justice. [Thunberg]: When do we want it? [Audience]: Now. [Thunberg]: Thank you. [Justin Worland]: This generation has reframed the way we talk and think about climate to make it an issue of intergenerational justice. The question is will this anger turn into action? Will leaders who have been listening actually take the message to heart and do something about it? [Kerry]: Our diplomacy is guided by what the scientists are telling us we must achieve. Three years ago they had a report in 2018 the IPCC gave us 12 years within which to make the critical decisions to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. [Hoesung Lee]: Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is not impossible but will require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society. [Worland]: It was alarming in its the seriousness with which it portrayed the consequences of climate change. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people migrating. We're talking about the possibility of countries disappearing in their entirety. We're talking about a world that is totally transformed. Already 85 percent of the world's population has been affected by human-caused climate change. [Jim Skea]: The message is over to governments at this stage. We've told you what you—the scientific facts, the evidence, the costs. It is up to the governments now to decide what to do with it. [Ciara Nugent]: We've had loads and loads of reports about climate change over the last couple of decades and the massive threat to our planet but despite all of the science there are still people who are skeptical about how much of a big deal it really is. And I think for those people it's much harder to dismiss young people, normal school kids because they're part of their communities, they're part of their families often. [Nyke Slawik]: What we need is politicians who implement the policies in their home countries and that's—that's what has not been happening in the last years. And so now young people are saying why go to school? Why go to university? Why start planning a family? Why buy a house when I don't even know that in 50 years time or 70 years time I will still have a future, because right now that's at stake. [Ocasio-Cortez]: If we do nothing this is what's going to happen: sea levels are going rise, crops are going to die out, there will be mass starvation. There's going to be all of these things that are going to happen and kids see that, they internalize it. [Charlotte Alter]: Researchers have found that young voters form their lifelong political attitudes in response to the events of their early adulthood, mostly late teens into the late 20s. And for millennials and gen z that period of time has been defined by climate catastrophe. [Christian Hidalgo]: I'm from Bakersfield, California, central valley. Earlier today I've been getting snapchats from all of my friends talking about how orange the sky is because of the wildfire surrounding us. The closest wildfire is probably not even 60 miles away but we have horrible air quality like we're—I'm in the middle of the valley and it just it really strongly affects us and that's what—that's what's drawn me to climate activism. [Isabella Guariniello]: This is my first strike ever. I watched a bunch of like sad penguin videos on YouTube and I started to get really sad when I learned about the effects of animals and like how much earth that we're actually losing. It's hard not to get discouraged when you're constantly learning about what people before you did wrong. [Sassy Fernandez]: Like I remember being in elementary school and watching Al Gore's documentary about climate change and the effects that we could be seeing within the next 10, 15 years and so far he's been pretty right about everything that he said in his documentary. I totally forgot what it was called but shout outs to my science teacher. [Thunberg]: We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us but we will not back down. And if you feel threatened by that then I have some very bad news for you. We will not be silenced because we are the change and change is coming whether you like it or not. We need to work together intergenerational of course that is the only way and we need to—everyone needs to participate and help out in the way we can. So I'm doing what I can. I'm trying to use my voice to spread awareness and to—to put pressure on those in power. [Alter]: When TIME put Greta on the cover in 2019 she had just gone from being a school girl protesting alone outside of Swedish parliament to being the leader of a global climate movement. That year her activism inspired four million people to join the global climate strike in 2019 which was at that point the largest climate movement in world history. [Worland]: Across the world with very few exceptions there are examples of people who have been inspired by her and have led—who've taken up the mantle the Fridays for Future movement in countries across the world. [Thunberg]: I'm not a leader or the face of the climate movement, I'm just one of many faces. [Vanessa Nakate]: There are far too little evidence of the 100 billion dollars per year that was promised to help climate vulnerable countries to meet these challenges. In fact, those funds were promised to arrive by 2020 and we are still waiting. [Nugent]: Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, is one of many people who have been working to remind us that climate action is going to be expensive and many countries who are most vulnerable to climate change can't afford to pay for it alone. [Nakate]: Historically Africa is responsible for only three percent of global emissions and yet some Africans are already suffering some of the worst and brutal impacts of climate change, so to me climate justice doesn't just have to be about reducing greenhouse gas emissions it goes beyond the primary disasters that we see. It is what happens in the aftermath of those disasters, what happens to families, what happens to individuals, what happens to communities. [Worland]: You think about the fact that the U.S. has emitted a quarter of emissions historically. Africa has emitted three percent of emissions historically and the U.S. is able to isolate itself, to pay for adaptation, to pay for the costs in a way that developing countries in sub-saharan Africa and across the globe just can't. And so climate change is a justice issue on many different levels. [Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala]: We we have to bear in mind that whether you're rich or poor, a rich country or poor country, there are some things you just cannot do on your own. You can't deliver on this pandemic on your own, you cannot deliver on climate change on your own. [Nakate]: So what we really want is a future that is healthy, that is sustainable, that is clean, that is livable and equitable for all of us. [Nugent]: Some of the activists that I speak to are realizing they can't wait for the older generation to take action so they're trying to get elected to governments themselves. In Germany, the Green Party has really been in the ascendancy. In September they've almost doubled their number of seats in parliament and one of the 118 lawmakers they now have is Nyke Slawik. She's a 27 year old German politician who was elected in September to the Bundestag and she has been involved in climate activism for almost 12 years and now she has political power to make a difference. [Slawik]: The time of just implementing small changes has passed and this is a reality we as younger politicians are bringing with us to the parliament now but of course there's lots of older colleagues who have not quite grasped this yet, and I think this is why we might be more determined to not go for the small compromises, to be a bit more rebellious about these things. The last German government has decided to exit coal in 2038 which is still too late way too late but now we even have the chance to accelerate energy transition from coal to renewables way quicker and that's a major achievement of the youth climate movement. [Alter]: In the United States young voters across the political spectrum understand that climate change is a major issue that needs to be addressed, they just disagree on how best to do it. So even younger Republicans, Republicans under 40, they understand that climate change is happening, they understand that something has to be done about it, they just don't agree with their more progressive peers about the scale and scope of what that intervention needs to be. So this is a big shift from a couple generations ago when you had one side insisting that climate change was a problem and the other side basically denying that it was happening at all. [Worland]: When TIME spoke to Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, he spoke about how the youth movement had made him want to do better. When I talked to the U.N. Secretary General he talked about how he was trying to bring youth into the climate discussion because it had enthused him and he thought it would help change the conversation. Talking to members of Congress about how inspirational Greta was really made clear to me that she was changing the conversation. [Nugent]: In my reporting activists are telling me that COP 26 is a crucial moment to find out if politicians are really listening to them and really taking action or if they're just saying they're listening and delaying action. [Nakate]: Leaders keep praising young people for standing up and protesting but saving the world needs action, it needs decisions from the leaders, decisions that prioritize the lives of the people and the planet, and that is not something that we are doing. The words of the leaders are not matching up with their actions. [Thunberg]: Words. Words that sound great but so far has led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises. Of course we need constructive dialogue but they've now had 30 years of blah blah blah and where has that led us? [Jane Goodall]: I'm about to leave the world and leave it behind me with all the mess whereas young people have to grow up into it. That's why they need every bit of help they can. And if, you know, if they succumb to the doom and gloom ,which many have, then they lose hope. If you lose hope that's the end, because if you don't hope that there's a way out, if you don't hope that your actions can make a difference then you sink into apathy and do nothing. So hope is absolutely crucial if we're to get through this. [Singing]: We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike because our waters are rising. We're going to strike because our people are dying. We're going to strike for life and everything we love. We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? We're going to strike for you, will you strike for us? 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