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Electric Vehicles Are No Greener than Gasoline Ones, Study Says

All you owning electric vehicles and bragging to everyone about how you help saving the planet and all, they’re useless. Well, not totally useless... but it depends how you charge them, or else they’re sooting the planet even more than classic internal combustion cars.
Tesla Model S recharging 1 photo
Photo: pixabay
Yes, according to a new study, a plug-in electric vehicle is no better than gasoline when it comes to air pollution. How can this happen if your EV emits nothing? The answer lies further down the line... the electric line.

As far as you (your city, region) get electricity from coal burning plants, the effort is worthless. You can simply go buy a gasoline powered car and the effects will actually be slightly better. Of course, a hybrid non-plug-able car can also make a difference.

Coal is worse than diesel

"It's kind of hard to beat gasoline" for public and environmental health, study co-author Julian Marshall and engineering professor at the University of Minnesota said. "A lot of the technologies that we think of as being clean ... are not better than gasoline."

According to their data, EVs are responsible for 86% more deaths caused by air pollution than gasoline-fed cars do. And that happens because coal is used to produce 39 percent of the US’ electricity. Mind you, burning coal is a lot worse than burning diesel when it comes to particle emissions, the ones responsible for lung cancer and other respiratory diseases.

The Department of Energy shows coal is intensively used to make electricity in Illinois, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia and Wyoming. If all of them would turn burning natural gas instead, the air pollution “encouraged” by electric vehicles would split in half.

Oh, and if you thought feeding your car with ethanol because it’s greener, the study says it’s actually 80 percent more pollutant than burning gasoline or diesel.
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