A brief exchange between a Jamestown School Committee member and the school district’s director of finance during a November meeting highlighted why Rhode Island’s asthma rates are high and little progress has been made in mitigating the climate crisis.

In fact, it’s an all-too-common refrain across the region and country when it comes to crafting budgets. It’s all shortsighted accounting.

The Jamestown exchange came during a discussion about whether the School Department should spend $540,000 to pay for five electric buses. (Federal grant money would cover most of the cost, and the buses would be owned by First Student.)

“They’re not our buses, we don’t own them, we can never own them,” the finance director said.

“So what is the return on investment?” the School Committee chair asked.

“Zero,” was the (incorrect) response.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions protects public health — in the case of electric buses in Jamestown that means mostly young students — and helps address global warming.

Doing nothing in the face of a problem — in this case a crisis that impacts the health of both humans and the natural world and sets up future generations with unnecessary hardship — is a dereliction of duty. Sadly, it is society’s default setting: We can’t afford do what’s in our collective best interest.

Now, I’m not saying electrifying our school bus fleet is, by itself, going to solve the climate crisis or rid the world of asthma, but we can’t keep pushing these decisions onto future school departments.

Diesel exhaust has been designated “carcinogenic to humans” by the International Agency for Research on Cancer for the past 12 years. It contains significant levels of particulate matter. These particles can lodge in the heart and lungs, and are linked to premature death, aggravated asthma, and decreased lung function. Children are more susceptible than adults because their respiratory systems are still developing.

Not only can diesel exhaust pollute the air in and around the bus, it can also enter school buildings through air intakes, doors, and open windows.

Besides particulate matter, moving and idling buses and other diesel vehicles also emit other pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, benzene, and formaldehyde. These pollutants can contribute to cancer and short and long-term health problems. In fact, the latter is responsible for more cancer than any other air pollutant. (If you are interested in looking up your address to view your risks from formaldehyde, ProPublica offers an online tool.)

People with asthma, bronchitis, other respiratory problems, or heart disease are most sensitive to the health effects of fine particles contained in vehicle exhaust.

In Rhode Island, school buses can idle for up to 15 minutes per hour when temperatures are between 0 degrees and 32 degrees, and as needed when temperatures are below 0 degrees, to provide heat.

Other than during those specific windows, bus idling is against the law. It’s also against the law for heavy-duty diesel vehicles to idle, but the Rhode Island law is seldom if ever enforced. (An idling truck, or perhaps the broken Washington Bridge, should be the state’s seal.)

Replacing diesel school buses with electric school buses could yield up to a few hundred thousand dollars in climate and health benefits per individual bus, according to a study published in May.

The study, by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that replacing an average diesel school bus in the U.S. fleet in 2017 with an electric one resulted in $84,200 in total benefits per individual bus. Each electric school bus emitted 181 fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide than its diesel counterpart, amounting to $40,400 worth of climate benefits. Meanwhile, each electric school bus was associated with $43,800 in health savings, from less air pollution and reduced rates of mortality and childhood asthma.

The average greenhouse emissions from a fossil fuel-powered (diesel, methane, or propane) school bus is 363 tons compared to an electric school bus’s 116 tons over their lifespans.

There are about half a million school buses in use in the United States and the majority are of the older, highly polluting diesel variety. If half of these buses switched from diesel to electric, about 2.1 million tons of carbon dioxide could be reduced annually, even when accounting for emissions from electricity generation, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

I’m not casting blame on the two Jamestown school officials. It’s a structural accounting flaw embedded in the government, from the municipal to federal level, and in boardrooms nationwide.

The amount of money we waste — e.g., building border walls that do little but impede wildlife and exacerbate riverbank erosion; stockpiling an armory that could destroy the world 10 times over; rewarding shareholders with stock buybacks while ignoring promises to reduce carbon emissions or to stop funding fossil fuel projects — could easily pay for efforts that would improve public health and help alleviate the impacts of a changing climate.

Unfortunately, such efforts can’t compete with kleptocracy and corporate greed. Future generations, and non-human life, will be forced to pay for our self-serving ways.

Note: Rhode Island has the highest asthma percentage in the country, at 12.6%.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.