16 states sue US Postal Service over gas-powered truck purchase

theguardian.com:

California and 15 other states that want the US Postal Service to buy more electric delivery vehicles are suing to halt purchases of thousands of gas-powered trucks as the agency modernizes its mail delivery fleet.

Three separate lawsuits, filed by 16 states and environmental groups Thursday in New York and California, ask judges to order a more thorough environmental review before the Postal Service moves forward with the next-generation delivery vehicle program.

Plaintiffs contend that purchases of fossil fuel-powered delivery vehicles will cause environmental harm for decades to come.

“Louis DeJoy’s gas-guzzling fleet guarantees decades of pollution with every postcard and package,” said Scott Hochberg, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, referring to the postmaster general.

One lawsuit was filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, Earthjustice, CleanAirNow KC and Sierra Club in San Francisco. Attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia filed another suit in the same venue.

Another was filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and United Auto Workers in New York.

All three of them target the environmental review underpinning of the Postal Service’s planned purchase of up to 165,000 next-generation delivery vehicles over the next decade.

The review process “was so rickety and riddled with error that it failed to meet the basic standards of the National Environmental Policy Act,” said Adrian Martinez, senior attorney on Earthjustice’s Right to Zero campaign.

“The crux of this case is that the Postal Service performed its [environmental] analysis too late, and even the analysis it did prepare was incomplete, misleading, and biased against cleaner vehicles,” Martinez wrote in his