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Lawmakers cite local weather change and excessive fuel costs
Citing the US navy’s carbon emissions footprint, a bunch of senior Senate Democrats formally launched a invoice on Monday that may require the Pentagon to purchase electrical automobiles beginning later this yr. Spearheaded by Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), the Navy Automobile Fleet Electrification Act would apply to “non-tactical” vehicles, vans or light-duty vehicles purchased or leased by the Division of Protection (DOD) beginning in fiscal yr 2023.
“Transitioning the navy’s non-tactical fleet of automobiles to electrical or different zero-emission automobiles would have a big affect on the US authorities’s greenhouse fuel emissions,” Warren stated in a press release saying the invoice. “That is an efficient resolution that helps us deal with the local weather disaster and retains the navy prepared for the long run,” she added.
Hirono known as the proposal “a crucial step in decreasing our authorities’s carbon emissions” and stated it will “assist fight local weather change whereas serving to to make sure our navy has the benefits of a contemporary fleet of automobiles that reduces the navy’s dependence on oil.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Senators Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), and Angus King (I-Vermont) have additionally co-sponsored the invoice, with a watch to creating it a part of the Nationwide Protection Authorization Act (NDAA) for the following fiscal yr, which begins in October.
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“The US Postal Service and different federal businesses should additionally transition to an electrical car fleet, and I plan to see the navy do the identical for non-tactical automobiles,” stated Congressman John Garamendi (D-California), who launched the Home model of the invoice in early April.
Below the proposal, beginning in October 2022, not less than three out of 4 non-tactical automobiles purchased or leased by the DOD must be of the “electrical or zero-emission” form. All the electrical ones would even have to make use of “nonproprietary, interoperable charging ports and connectors,” with batteries and elements sourced from the US or its allies and never “hostile international international locations just like the Folks’s Republic of China or Russia.”
It additionally offers the Pentagon authorization to permit non-public charging stations to function on navy installations and re-program as much as $6 million value of funding from unspecified building tasks to “help electrical car charging station infrastructure” on bases.
In keeping with authorities figures, the DOD presently operates greater than 174,000 non-tactical automobiles, the second largest federal fleet after the Postal Service. The US navy can be the world’s largest institutional client of petroleum. That is partly on account of tactical automobiles such because the M1 Abrams tank, which requires nearly two gallons of fuel per mile, in keeping with 2008 estimates printed by Forbes.
A sustainability examine by the Biden administration printed in December 2021 claimed that 56% of the federal authorities’s whole greenhouse fuel emissions come from the navy. On Monday, the common US value of a gallon of fuel stood at $5.01, up from $3.08 a yr in the past.
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