In St. Cloud, VP Harris promotes electric vehicles
Updated 3:52 p.m.
Vice President Kamala Harris toured an electric bus manufacturer in St. Cloud on Thursday afternoon as part of an effort by the Biden administration to promote its record in the days after the State of the Union address.
Harris promoted green energy initiatives at New Flyer’s St. Cloud bus manufacturing facility.
“Businesses that do this kind of work, combined with union leadership and workers, are building the future of our nation,” Harris said during brief remarks after touring the factory.
New Flyer is a Canada-based company that makes electric buses and has two manufacturing operations in Minnesota.
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“Electric buses are key to the future of public transportation in America,” Harris told an audience of a few hundred people. “Together with Democrats and Republicans we have invested more than $5.5 billion to put thousands of new electric transit buses on the streets of our nation.”
The bipartisan infrastructure law that President Joe Biden signed in 2021 includes billions of dollars to help the electric vehicle industry. And the Inflation Reduction Act, which no Republican supported, includes tax credits for people who buy electric vehicles.
Harris said building electric vehicles will help create cleaner air and good jobs that pay well.
“Minnesota, this is a transformative moment,” Harris said. “The climate crisis has presented an historic challenge to our nation and to the world. It also presents an historic opportunity, to create good jobs, to drive innovation, to generate prosperity in all communities.”
Harris said the laws the administration passed have created 100,000 new jobs.
Moaz Uddin, an electric vehicle policy specialist with the Great Plains Institute, said with about 30,000 electric vehicles in use, Minnesota lags the national average but has big plans to change that.
“Minnesota has a goal of making 20 percent of all of these private vehicles on the roads by 2030 to be electric vehicles,” Uddin said, adding that the state also plans to significantly expand vehicle charging capacity. “Minnesota would require 28,000 level two chargers and 2,400 DC fast chargers by 2030 These charges would have to be spread all across the state.”
Republicans criticized Harris and Biden for promoting electric vehicles while blocking mining near the Boundary Waters. Last month the Department of the Interior issued a 20-year mining moratorium on 225,000 acres of federal land near the Boundary Waters, dealing a further blow to the proposed Twin Metals mine near Ely, Minn., and other potential mines for copper, nickel and precious metals within the watershed of the wilderness area.
A group of Minnesota House and Senate Republicans from the St. Cloud area and the Iron Range held a news conference before Harris’ arrival to criticize the administration’s energy and mining policies.
Rep. Spencer Igo, R-Wabana Township, called the vice president's visit a slap in the face to the Iron Range and the union workers of northern Minnesota. Igo said 90 percent of the nickel reserves in the country are in northern Minnesota, and that Biden's ban will send mining jobs overseas, where labor and environmental standards are much less stringent.
"The Biden administration and the Walz administration are failing Minnesotans. They're failing union workers,” Igo said. “One of these copper-nickel mines that produces the materials needed for these electric vehicles produces millions of hours of union construction jobs, not to mention the hundreds of union jobs that are combined with that and all the spin-off jobs that keep Greater Minnesota alive and well."
This wasn’t the first time a Democratic vice president has visited St. Cloud. In 2009, then Vice President Joe Biden visited the New Flyer plant to promote the stimulus package passed during the Obama administration.
She noted that Biden said the company is an example of the future.
“A lot has changed in the past 14 years, but one thing has not,” Harris said. “You are still an example of America’s future.”