Toyota shifts Tacoma pickup assembly from US to Mexico

Toyota on Friday said it was moving assembly operations for its popular Tacoma pickups from the United States to Mexico but pledged that no US jobs would be affected. The announcement came a day after the US Senate approved the new US-Mexico Canada Agreement on trade, which importantly revamps the rules for manufacturing and crossborder trade in autos.

Since 2010, the Tacoma has been produced at a plant in San Antonio, Texas that employs 3,200 workers with an annual capacity of 208,000 vehicles. But this will come to an end in 2021, the company said in a statement, and all production will then take place at a factory in Baja California, Mexico.

Beginning in 2022, the San Antonio plant will switch to producing the Toyota Sequoia SUV, which had previously rolled off the assembly line in Princeton, Indiana.

It was unclear how US President Donald Trump would take the news. In an angry tweet, Trump in 2017 had blasted Toyota's decision to send production of the Corolla sedan to Mexico and the company ultimately continued production in the United States.

Trump had long blasted USMCA's predecessor, the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it promoted offshoring of jobs.

US officials say the USMCA, which has yet to take effect, will promote investment in the domestic auto sector. Toyota said Friday that moving the Tacoma to Mexico was part of a restructuring effort that involves $13 billion in US investments through 2021.

The company has already invested $7.1 billion, including $1.6 billion at an Alabama auto plant it shares with fellow

Japanese automaker Mazda. In the 1890s, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius calculated that doubling CO2 would eventually lift Earth's average surface temperature five or six degrees Celsius, though he later revised the figure to 4C.

Remarkably, he recognised that burning fossil fuels could one day drive such a change. By the late 1970s, scientists settled on a climate sensitivity of 3C (plus-or-minus 1.5C), corresponding to about 560 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

That assessment remained largely unchanged-until now. The IPCC, the UN's climate advisory body, posits four scenarios for future warming, depending on how aggressively humanity works to reduce greenhouse gases.

The most ambitious-in line with the Paris goal of capping temperature rise to "well below" 2C-would require slashing CO2 emissions by more than 10 percent per year, starting now.

At the other extreme, a socalled "business-as-usual" trajectory of increased fossil fuel use would leave large swathes of the planet uninhabitable by century's end. The first scenario has become wishful thinking, according to many scientists, while the worst-case is unlikely unless Earth itself begins releasing natural stores of greenhouse gases from, say, melting permafrost.

That leaves two middle-ofthe-road scenarios-known as RCP4.5 and RCP6.0 -- that more likely reflect our climate future. According to the IPCC, the first would correspond to 538 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, while a RCP6.0 pathway would see an increase in CO2 concentration to 670 ppm.

A doubling of 1850's CO2 levels to about 570 ppm falls between the two, and thus takes on a real-world importance that probably would have startled Arrhenius, the late 19th-century Swedish chemist.