PrintPeople often wonder, "But is an electric car really a better bet for the climate?" After all, we have to plug them in to charge them, and in many cases that electricity is generated with fossil fuels. And what about hybrid cars? Where do they stack up?
The video below from the Union of Concerned Scientists compares an average passenger car with a traditional internal combustion engine to that of an electric passenger car with an 84 mile range to answer this question. Take a look.
PRESENTER: Here's a question. How much cleaner are battery-electric cars compared to gasoline-powered cars? To find out, the Union of Concerned Scientists studied the total global warming emissions of each vehicle throughout every stage of its life, from manufacturing to driving to disposal. And there's a big difference.
Both cars start out on the assembly line with similar parts made of raw materials like steel and aluminum. For a gasoline car, this manufacturing and assembling stage generates about 7 tons of emissions. Battery-electric cars, meanwhile, are powered by-- you guessed it-- a large battery. This requires more energy and materials to produce for an 84-mile range battery-electric car, bringing its emissions tally up to roughly 8 tons.
But what happens when they hit the road? Gas-powered cars produced pollution with every gallon of gas they burn with even more emissions coming from extracting, refining, and transporting the fuel to gas stations. Electric cars, on the other hand, run on electricity, which can be much cleaner than gasoline depending on how the electricity is made.
2/3 of Americans live in regions where charging an electric car produces fewer global warming emissions than driving even a 50-mile per gallon gasoline car. By the end of their lives, the average gas car will rack up 57 tons of global warming emissions compared to 28 tons for a battery-electric car.
Disposing and recycling each car adds less than 1 ton of emissions. And remember that electric car battery? It can be recycled or reused. In the final tally, an 84-mile range battery-electric car cuts global warming emissions by more than 50% compared with a similar sized gas-powered car, making up for the batteries manufacturing emissions within one year of driving.
And as the country adds more and more renewable sources of electricity, driving electric will get even better. So there you have it straight from the engineers at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Electric cars-- clean and getting cleaner.
For more analysis of the charging emissions from electric vehicles, check out:
- Charging an Electric Vehicle is Far Cleaner Than Driving on Gasoline Everywhere in America (Silvio Marcacci, 2018)
- Climate Explained: The Environmental Footprint of Electric Versus Fossil Cars (Hasan and Chapman, 2019) - this is a nice summary broken down by phase - manufacturing, use, and recycling
The Department of Energy offers this handy tool for consumers who want to understand the relative emissions if they buy (and charge) an EV where they live based on the fuel sources for electricity in their state.
| Source | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Natural Gas | 38.54 |
| Coal | 23.54 |
| Nuclear | 19.72 |
| Wind | 7.31 |
| Hydro | 6.54 |
| Solar | 1.72 |
| Biomass | 1.42 |
| Oil | 0.45 |
| Geothermal | 0.39 |
| Other Fossil Fuels | 0.32 |
| Type | Thousands of Pounds of CO2 Equivalent |
|---|---|
| All electric | 4 |
| Plug-in hybrid | 6 |
| Hybrid | 7 |
| Gasoline | 12 |