Electric Cars No Big Improvement

The other DrC has been telling me for several years electric cars are more polluting than gasoline ones. Her argument: it causes more pollution to generate the electricity than simply burning the gas in your car. Simple physics says she is correct, there are inefficiencies in each step and more steps to electric vehicle power.

Now the Daily Mail (U.K.) reports the research which looks at this question. As is often the case, the answer isn't simple. East of the Mississippi she is correct because most of their electricity is generated by burning coal, which isn't clean. West of the big river, much more of the power is generated by natural gas or hydroelectric and it may be cleaner to drive an electric car. I particularly like this quote:

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

For fifty years we've had the goal of making gasoline engines cleaner. It is no surprise we have made large improvements therein.