It’s really simple: EVs mean cleaner air in our cities
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who operate a network with dozens of sophisticated sensors in the San Francisco Bay Area, have found that between 2018 and 2023, pollution decreased annually by an average of 1.8%, and that this decrease is almost exclusively due to the increase in the use of EVs.
It’s not a huge number, certainly not when compared to the total emissions of such a huge area, although it is estimated that to meet California’s ambitious goals, a 40% reduction over 1990 levels by 2030, would require a fall of 3.7% per year, a little more than double, that many predict will not be attainable.
However, if the reduction obtained is almost entirely due to the use of EVs, there is room for hope: despite the fact that California in general and the San Francisco Bay Area in particular constitute, within the United States, the place with the highest adoption of EVs (in a country shamefully addicted to gas guzzlers) and with a high percentage of energy obtained from renewables, we are talking about a total of 1.1 million electric vehicles out of a total of more than twenty-eight million, less than 4% (and that, including plug-in hybrids, which serve no purpose in terms of emissions’ reduction). If, as is the case in Norway, more than 90% of new vehicles purchased were to be electric and the…
