When I was little, grandpa used to speculate that someday there would be a car that could run without gas. I don’t know if he could have envisioned modern wind and solar power, or lithium-ion batteries, but as a highly skilled blacksmith he had considerable imagination about the future of gadgetry and machinery. He might have been surprised, though, how soon such innovations would come. He has been gone 42 years, and in that short time nearly all the technological barriers to renewable energy have been conquered.
It is the economic barriers that remain unsolved. Energy can now be created from almost anything – sun, wind, rivers, tides, waves, even trash – but doing so remains more expensive than fossil fuels. In mid-2021, President Biden decided the federal government should change those economics. He ordered federal agencies to “catalyze clean energy industries and jobs through federal sustainability.” Translation: federal agencies will buy so many renewable products, like electric cars, that it will make them, and the companies who manufacture them, competitive.
With the White House pressuring appointees, you might think every agency would quickly trade in its entire fleet for new electric vehicles. But still today only a small fraction of federal vehicles is electric, a year and a half after Biden’s order. However, one agency now seeks to lead the way, showing how easily electrics can replace traditional fleet vehicles, by 2027. The announcement generated laughter and mockery in Washington, though, because the agency in question is the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
The USFS has a $9 billion budget, 35,000 employees, 600 ranger districts, and 193 million acres, including 154 national forests, 209 national grasslands, 80 experimental forests, and six national monuments. Those holdings, in 40 states, span over 22 million acres in Alaska alone, along with 20 million each in California and Idaho, 17 million in Montana, 15 million in Oregon, and 13 million in Colorado. Rangers driving around in pickups check on roughly 18,000 grazing permits, just to mention one regular duty of the field staff.
To enable such mobility in isolated rural areas, USFS has a fleet of over 18,250 vehicles, one for every two employees. The agency says more than 9,000 of those vehicles are pickups, mostly Ford F-150s. Now it proposes to replace that fleet with electric vehicles to prove it can be done, reducing one agency’s carbon footprint, doing its part to address climate change. The new fleet will be phased-in, we are told, beginning with a small experiment – three Ford F-150 Lightnings.
One will be used in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, one in the Huron-Manistee in Michigan, and the other in the White Mountain in New Hampshire. Interesting that none of these experimental uses of battery vehicles will be in the far-flung reaches of Alaska, or any other western state. Could it be that the USFS already knows such vehicles are impractical in isolated places where the closest charging station is – oh wait, there are no charging stations in most national forests across the West.
We already know the F-150 Lightning has received mixed reviews since its unveiling in 2022. Experience so far shows that its range decreases substantially when towing and in cold weather. So, here’s an idea perfect for the federal mindset – try them first in an agency whose vehicles are frequently used for towing and in cold weather.
I think such technological issues will eventually be solved, perhaps before too many more years. The issue remains, once again, mostly economics. And that’s where the USFS reverts to what can only be seen, charitably, as fuzzy math. Its publicity statements say, “Similarly priced to its combustion counterparts, the electric Lightning pickup starts at about $52,000.” But Ford’s website shows the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the Lightning starts at $60,000, whereas the regular F-150 starts at $33,700. That $26,000 difference is not close to “similarly priced,” except perhaps to a federal agency spending someone else’s money.
The real irony, though, is the reason USFS is doing this in the first place – to address climate change. Does it even need to be said that a healthy forest does far more to sequester carbon dioxide than all the electric vehicles in the world? Or that forest fires in the U.S. release more CO2 and particulate pollution annually than all the cars? Perhaps the USFS should put electric fleet plans on hold long enough to do its other job – actively managing the forests, instead of letting them choke, die, collapse, and burn.
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