If the Biden administration’s green energy agenda were a bus, it would have no wheels, a dead battery, and a $160 million price tag. Enter Lion Electric, a Canadian electric school bus company that was handed nearly $160 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies—only to collapse into bankruptcy, leaving school districts across America high and dry.
Now, watchdogs like EPA administrator Lee Zeldin are demanding answers, exposing yet another mismanaged, wasteful, and completely avoidable green energy failure.
$160 Million to Nowhere
As part of Biden’s $5 billion Clean School Bus program, Lion Electric was awarded $159 million to produce 435 electric buses. The administration touted it as a hallmark of its climate agenda, with Kamala Harris herself front and center, gushing over the initiative.
Fast forward to today:
- Lion Electric has stopped manufacturing.
- It has laid off its workforce.
- It hasn’t delivered $95 million worth of promised buses to 55 school districts.
Superintendents across the country are left wondering whether they’ll ever receive the buses they were promised. “No buses have been delivered to our district. We are on hold,” said Dawn Wallace, superintendent of Ohio Valley School District in Ohio.
Warnings Were Ignored
Here’s the kicker: Lion Electric was in deep financial trouble long before Biden started funneling money into it.
- Since 2020, the company has lost $301.6 million.
- Its stock price has collapsed from $33.48 per share to just $0.08—a staggering 99.7% wipeout.
- It was hit with a class-action lawsuit after allegedly misleading investors with “grossly unrealistic financial projections”.
And yet, the Biden administration kept the money flowing, rewarding a failing company because it fit the “green energy” narrative.
Lee Zeldin Calls Out the Corruption
Unlike the rubber-stamp bureaucrats who handed Lion Electric millions with no oversight, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is demanding answers. He pointed to an undercover video from Project Veritas in which a Biden official admitted that the EPA frantically pushed billions into green projects before the administration left office.
Zeldin isn’t buying the excuses, stating:
“They knew they were wasting hard-earned American taxpayer dollars… The American people deserve answers. I am committed to delivering for them.”
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) also blasted the administration, saying:
“The Biden-Harris Administration spent four years wasting taxpayer dollars pursuing its Green New Deal agenda… Communities across the country are paying the price”.
The Joliet Factory Debacle
One of the biggest symbols of this failure is Lion Electric’s 900,000-square-foot factory in Joliet, Illinois.
- The plant was supposed to create 1,400 jobs.
- Local officials hyped it as a clean energy success story.
- Today, it’s a ghost town, with Lion Electric halting operations and laying off workers.
Even Joliet’s economic development director admitted, “Now we have in our community a large space that is potentially going to sit vacant for a while.” Translation: We were conned, and now we’re stuck with an empty factory.
Another Green Energy Scam Implodes
Lion Electric’s collapse follows a familiar pattern of government-funded green energy disasters:
- Biden administration throws taxpayer money at a politically favored company.
- Company was already financially unstable but gets millions anyway.
- Company burns through cash, fails to deliver, then collapses.
- Taxpayers and local communities are left with nothing but empty promises.
We saw it with Solyndra. We saw it with Proterra. And now, we’re seeing it with Lion Electric.
The difference this time? Lee Zeldin and House Republicans aren’t letting Biden off the hook.
The Bottom Line
The Biden administration’s obsession with green energy subsidies has led to billions in waste, failed projects, and broken promises.
Meanwhile, school districts still need buses, communities still need jobs, and American taxpayers are once again paying the price for Biden’s reckless spending.
It’s time to stop funding fantasies and start demanding real accountability—and thanks to Lee Zeldin, that reckoning might finally be coming.
About the feature image. Lion Electric did win mHUB’s Chicago manufacturer of the year award last March.
Climate change long since degenerated into a moral panic, and a contemporary example of Mark Twain’s observation, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
A dwindling cohort of zealots in the most affluent precincts of the West have gone mad, swamped media with feverish propaganda, and convinced only themselves that if they can browbeat their less fortunate neighbors to give up all their comforts, that vengeful weather gods will be appeased, and climate will return to a former, halcyon condition.
Never mind that 7/8ths of the world’s people find those zealots loony and ineffectual, and that even the most fanatical can never pinpoint when those halcyon conditions prevailed.
Even the typical slushfunders are getting cold feet with the fantasies-
Hydrogen plant in doubt as SA premier refuses to commit to $600m project linked to Whyalla steelworks | Watch
PS: You listening with the fickles Bowen and Albo?
Government rips up rules to fire-up nuclear power – GOV.UK
Education systems in English-speaking countries have become notorious for wasting money on philosophies and methodologies that have never proved to produce improved student achievement. They just look good on paper until they’re revealed to be inferior and are abandoned, while student performances have been affected adversely. So why would anyone expect anything different when it came to electric bus purchases. There was no evidence to support their being superior in costs and reliability to the traditional gas/diesel types; but since it was the taxpayer footing the bill, they were blindly adopted and now the school districts/divisions have gone back to what has always worked. So who’s being help accountable for such a boondoggle, or is it just being dumped in taxpayers’ laps?
Another slant on the growing lithium battery fire problem from Mguy worth watching at the 10 minute mark among the usual tales of woe with net zero-
Lion Electric on BRINK of bankruptcy | MGUY EV News – 8 February 2025
The firies are increasingly trying to tell the numpties-
Four e-scooter and e-bike fires in 12 hours across Sydney – Sydney – Fire and Rescue NSW
Massive E-Bike Fire in Poland: Danger of Stockpiled Batteries
The numpties can play the 3 monkeys with net-zero but the insurance underwriters will cut through their indolence.
Bureaucrats who signed off on this are as corrupt as the Biden administration. I hope that Zeldin seeks evidence and prosecutes a few hundred of them. A few “public servants” going to jail will be a very good thing and remind the rest of them that while their job is to serve the government of the day, they cannot do so where it breaches the law by giving taxpayer money to a failing company without the express approval of Congress which would and should put the lawmakers on the hook.
Normal school buses cost $135,000 to $150,000. These electric buses, spreading the $159,000,000 across all 435 buses, are $365,517 each. 2.7 to 2.4 times as expensive as a gasoline or diesel powered bus.
When something costs nearly three times as much to do exactly the same task, and won’t do it as well, that sounds like Big Scam to me.
Pssst! Howsabout we build them with green hydrogen steel?
Premier lifts pressure on steelworks as debts grow
Everywhere you look the greening turns to net zero