By Adam Vaughan, New Scientist
Highlights
A new comprehensive study finds that electric cars are much more climate-friendly than their gas and diesel counterparts.
Florian Knobloch at Radboud University in the Netherlands and his colleagues looked at the average emissions across many classes of car and the projected carbon emissions generated on average over a car’s lifetime, including during its production, while it is being driven and when it is destroyed, for all the conventional and electric cars sold in 59 regions across the world in 2015. These represent 95 percent of the world’s current road traffic. Study findings:
- Electric vehicles already have lower net carbon emissions in 53 of those 59 regions, making the case for phasing out fossil fuel-powered vehicles as soon as possible
- Only in heavily coal-dependent countries, such as India and Poland, are electric vehicle emissions worse than those of fossil fuel-powered cars
- Many countries’ electricity supplies have become steadily cleaner in the past five years, making electric cars cleaner too, and this trend will continue as grids decarbonize further
- The same is true for heat pumps, making the case for phasing out natural gas space and water heating
Click here for the Abstract from Nature.com.
The Climate Center’s Climate-Safe California campaign includes supporting clean mobility, including a phase-out of all gas-powered vehicles.
