Canadian automakers breathed a sight of relief Thursday after U.S. lawmakers scrapped part of a massive incentive package for electric vehicles that would have excluded those assembled in Canada from a proposed consumer tax credit.
The $7,500 US credit for “clean vehicles” — which include battery-electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen fuel cell — is part of $369 billion in proposed new spending on energy- and climate-related initiatives included in the Inflation Reduction Act.
U.S. senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin, both Democrats, reached a deal late Wednesday to include the credit and a series of other tax and investment measures aimed at expanding the clean energy sector and spurring adoption of EVs in the bill, which hopes to revive an economy struggling to dig out from under 9.1 per cent inflation.
The deal was a surprise, coming less than two weeks after Manchin, a centrist Democrat whose vote is needed to get the bill through the evenly divided Senate, had said he would not support an extensive climate bill President Joe Biden was hoping to pass until inflation was under control.
The Senate is expected to vote on the bill next week before it goes to the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.
U.S. Democratic senators Chuck Schumer, left, and Joe Manchin have agreed to do away with a restriction that would have limited a proposed electric vehicle tax credit to American-made electric vehicles. If it passes, it will now apply to cars made anywhere in North America. (J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press)
Canada lobbied hard to be included
Flavio Volpe, CEO of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, said the importance of the proposed amendment could not be overstated and, coupled with the hundreds of millions of dollars the Canadian government is funnelling into EV and battery manufacturing, should give the EV sector the boost it needs.
“This couldn’t be a bigger vote of confidence in the North American auto sector,” he told CBC’s Katie Simpson. “All of these new investments in Canada now have an incredible runway to have this rebirth of Canada’s auto sector.”
Around 5.6 per cent of new car sales in the U.S. are electric and about 12.6 per cent are electric and plug-in hybrid. In Canada, it’s 5.8 and 7.7, respectively.
Volpe said the “Buy American” restriction in the original Build Back Better bill posed a worse threat to the Canadian auto industry than any of the trade restrictions the previous administration of Donald Trump had imposed.
Although Canadian consumers won’t directly benefit from the tax credit, the hope is that incentivizing EV consumers in the U.S. will spur manufacturers to make new investments in Canada and rev up related industries, such as critical mineral mining, to help meet growing demand on both sides of the border.
BREAKING<br><br>Trade War averted on the crazy proposed ???????? EV Tax Credit that illegally excluded ???????? made vehicles.<br><br>New Democrat Senate package with <a href=”https://twitter.com/Sen_JoeManchin?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@Sen_JoeManchin</a> support NOW says credit applies to vehicles “manufactured in North America”.<br><br>A lot of us spent A LOT of time on this. ???? <a href=”https://t.co/GMVUKFpf1i”>https://t.co/GMVUKFpf1i</a> <a href=”https://t.co/ze6h2jgr0w”>pic.twitter.com/ze6h2jgr0w</a>
It means “job security for anyone who exports cars and parts to the U.S.” from Canada, Volpe said, “which is 85 per cent of our exports.”
Volpe was part of the team of Canadian industry representatives, government officials and diplomats who lobbied Manchin and other U.S. lawmakers relentlessly to get Washington to include Canadian-assembled cars in the credit and to recognize how seamless the cross-border auto parts and manufacturing supply and production chains are.
“We’re one integrated market, especially in automotive. There is absolutely no border here,” he said.
Good news for workers, says minister
Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman, was one of the people meeting with senators and lobbying on behalf of Ottawa over the last nine months. She was relieved to see that work seems to have paid off.
“The bottom line is the Canadian auto sector, the Canadian battery sector, our critical minerals sector are being treated on a level playing field with our American neighbours, so we’re thrilled about that,” she said.
Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador the U.S., said the EV tax credit has the potential to benefit not just Canadian auto manufacturers but also companies that produce batteries and mine critical minerals. (CBC)
International Trade Minister Mary Ng said the development is good news for workers and manufacturers.
“As the bill moves through Congress, we will continue to advocate for the importance of maintaining these integrated supply chains and growing a greener and more prosperous future for North America,” she said.
The proposed legislation includes a separate $4,500 credit for used EVs and a $10 billion investment tax credit to build clean-technology manufacturing facilities.
To be eligible for the consumer tax credits, vehicles must be priced at $55,000 or lower for new cars and $80,000 or less for pickup trucks, SUVs and vans.
They must also contain batteries that have a certain percentage of material sourced from countries that the U.S. considers free trade partners. That could be good news for Canadian mining companies supplying those critical minerals.
To qualify for the credit, U.S. consumers have to earn no more than $150,000 if they’re filing for the tax credit individually or $300,000 for joint filers. For used cars, the eligibility limit is $75,000 and $150,000, respectively.
WATCH | International Trade Minister Mary Ng relieved at EV news:
Canadian politicians welcome U.S. electric vehicle tax credit
1 day ago
Duration 6:13
Canadian politicians are celebrating after U.S. lawmakers backed a ‘buy North American’ amendment to proposed legislation which would give Americans a tax credit for purchasing electric vehicles.
Will require ramp-up in battery production
AnalystSam Fiorani of Pennsylvania-based AutoForecast Solutions stressed that most EV incentives to date have benefited the manufacturers, not the buyers, and that’s not likely to change since such incentives are meant to inspire companies to develop new products.
“Until a couple of years ago, [GM] sold their Chevy Bolts with a $7,500 incentive. After the incentive went away, the price of the Volt dropped by $7,000 almost immediately,” he said. “So all that incentive was going to General Motors, not to the end user.
“We can expect that to continue.“
Nevertheless, the price cap should help get more entry-level EVs into more hands eventually, Fiorani said, although it will take time to get more cheaper models on the market.
“It’s going to take a long time to build up the infrastructure to provide batteries, batteries being the most expensive part of the whole vehicle,” he said.
Refined tellurium, shown at the Rio Tinto Kennecott refinery in Magna, Utah, is used in the production of solar panels. It is one of the so-called critical minerals that are in high demand as countries around the world invest in green technologies and cleaner energy sources. (Rick Bowmer/The Associated Press)
Shortages of minerals and semiconductors, the critical materials needed to produce batteries and other EV components, have driven up prices and incentivized manufacturers to direct resources to higher-end vehicles, says Scotiabank analyst Rebekah Young.
Canada could eventually help meet some of the demand for critical minerals such as cobalt and lithium but will need to step up its extraction capacity, she said.
“To meet global EV demand, we’re going to see some of these mineral requirements increase by sevenfold at least,” she said. “We have the reserves, not necessarily the production capacity.”
She said Canada and the U.S. are both still catching up to other parts of the world.
“In China, I think EVs are within 10 per cent price parity of an [internal combustion] engine, but they’re much smaller vehicles and they’ve got many more players and many more models,” Young said. “We’re still biased toward big vehicles, [with] lots of material inputs.”
Geothermal mud pots near the shore of the Salton Sea in Niland, Calif., where Controlled Thermal Resources is mining for lithium, a critical component of rechargeable batteries. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/The Associated Press)
Unionized-plant requirement dropped
Under the amendment, the credit will no longer be limited to manufacturers with sales of 200,000 EVs or fewer, which will benefit large companies such as Tesla, GM and Toyota, which have sold more than that.
The vehicles won’t have to be assembled in unionized plants as originally proposed, a provision unions on both sides of the border were hoping would survive.
“Protecting and enhancing workers’ rights throughout this transition is not just an option for governments and lawmakers; it is essential to ensuring a just transition,” said Lana Payne, secretary-treasurer of Unifor, which represents Canadian autoworkers, in a news release.
Workers install a battery onto the chassis of a Ford Focus electric vehicle at the Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich. The original bill would have required vehicles to come from unionized plants in order to qualify for the credits. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
Unifor praised the lifting of the U.S. assembly requirement and said it was the result of aggressive lobbying by unions, industry and government.
“The reality is that auto manufacturing in Canada and the United States is deeply integrated, and our production volumes are tied to the much larger sales market in the U.S.,” said Unifor Auto Council chairperson John D’Agnolo.
Unifor welcomes a revised US Senate proposal that aims to open up tax credits to Canadian-built BEVs. This news “lifts a cloud of uncertainty hanging over Canadian factories,” says <a href=”https://twitter.com/Lanampayne?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>@Lanampayne</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/canlab?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#canlab</a><a href=”https://t.co/EWPYfvPHQ1″>https://t.co/EWPYfvPHQ1</a> <a href=”https://t.co/81zc7Rw9wR”>pic.twitter.com/81zc7Rw9wR</a>
Louise Blais, who also participated in the negotiations to include Canada in the credit during her time as Canada’s consul-general in Atlanta, Ga., called it a “huge win” and said it wasn’t a given the lobbying efforts would succeed.
But she cautioned that Canadian manufacturers and governments have to take a look at some of the other incentives that will flow to energy and climate-related projects and industries if the bill passes, which could lure some manufacturers south.
The proposed legislation includes $20 billion in loans to build new clean vehicle manufacturing facilities and $30 billion for additional production tax credits to accelerate U.S. manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical minerals processing as well as $2 billion in cash grants to retool existing auto manufacturing facilities.
“There’s a lot of provisions in there that will really further incentivize manufacturers to manufacture clean technology like solar panels and others in the United States,” said Blais, who is now a senior adviser with the Business Council of Canada and divides her time between Atlanta and Quebec.
“So, we really need to take a close look at this in Canada and make sure that we do not lose our competitiveness in some of these sectors as a result of this.”
WATCH | Canadian manufacturers welcome news of EV tax credit:
U.S. electric vehicle tax credit brings relief to Canadian auto industry
2 hours ago
Duration 2:06
A new U.S. climate deal has brought relief to Canada’s auto sector, with the agreement changing the terms of an electric vehicle tax credit to include vehicles built in Canada.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
