Climate Point: Saving money on EVs could get harder on Friday
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Janet Wilson from Palm Springs, California.
If you're close to buying a particular electric vehicle, you might want to buy it Thursday. That's not just hype from overeager car dealers.
Federal Treasury officials are poised to issue guidance by Friday on the Inflation Reduction Act's domestic supply requirements for consumers to receive full EV tax incentives. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin and others say the legislation clearly requires cars and their batteries to be assembled and largely produced in North America, and critical minerals used in batteries to be increasingly mined here, not overseas.
That could mean many models that don't use enough U.S.-made parts might no longer qualify for half the hefty $7500 IRA tax credit. But the White House signed a trade agreement with Japan on Tuesday that could give their EVs credits, and President Joe Biden recently said he's open to including European trade partners too. And treasury officials may have found a loophole, leaving politicos guessing.
Confused? However it shakes out, Paste BN's Elizabeth Weise offers lots of tips for buying an EV in this excellent piece.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing their own energy plan, with a bit of moderate Democratic support.
Don't worry, be happy. California Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed consumer jitters about his ban on new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 in favor of EVs in an interview with The Desert Sun. He said "the price curve is collapsing in real time" and EV choices are multiplying.
"It's not just Tesla anymore," said Newsom. "Now 31 flavors just moved in ... and the cost pressures are dropping significantly, globally."
Newsom, who spoke at a pilot lithium extraction site in one of the state's poorest corners, said a key part of an $8.9 billion clean car package was "stacking" incentives for those in need. All told, combined with federal tax breaks, $27,000 has been knocked off the price of an EV for a low-income Californian, he said.
He dismissed concerns of rural residents across the U.S. over huge solar farms and wind turbines, saying a transformation is underway that is critical to slowing "whiplash weather" and other climate change impacts. Noting the "billions of taxpayer dollars the people in Montana are paying to California for damage associated with storms," he said, "I mean, we're as dumb as we want to be."
Newsom is also jubilant about legislation passed this week, which he promptly signed, that could allow California regulators to penalize oil companies for windfall profits, and to expand tracking of their profits. It was weaker than what he'd first proposed, and will take months, or even years, to complete, but consumer advocates and environmentalists hailed it as a big win.
Not chicken scratch. Even as EVs surge, a polluting but supposedly cheaper corn ethanol fuel called E15 could get a boost, if the EPA approves a bid by South Dakota and others. But per a new study, it could actually cost up to $800 million for refineries to build separate storage tanks and transportation for the fuel. Those costs would top $1 billion if fire, flood or other disaster disrupted refineries.
Elsewhere around the country, there was another hazardous train derailment in Minnesota, a chemical spill into a river upstream of Philadelphia and higher electric bills and longer blackouts are plaguing Michigan, as climate change in the Midwest amps up crippling ice storms.
In Indiana, Democrats, business leaders and environmentalists were caught off guard by a last-minute bill amendment that gutted wetlands protections. And spring came early in Arizona and across the southwest this this year, a worrisome trend for water supplies that are dependent on correctly timed snowmelt.
In North Carolina, culture wars over climate and the environment almost wiped out a requirement for every high school student to take an Earth science class. But a compromise was reached and the requirement remains. Nice read by Gareth McGrath with the Wilmington Star-News.
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