A new university study has found that billions of dollars that will need to be spent to rectify damage from climate change and air pollution could be saved by a widespread shift to electric vehicles, echoing findings from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) and Australia’s Electric Vehicle Council,
The Northwestern University study led by Daniel Peters, published in GeoHealth, found that in the US alone, $US17 billion ($A24 billion) could be saved in social and health costs associated with carbon and particulate emissions from petrol and diesel cars – even if just one in four cars in the US national fleet transition to electric drivetrain.
Naturally, the greater the adoption of electric cars, the more savings there are to be had for the US economy. If every three in four cars on the road were electric, the research team found that dollar savings would be in the vicinity of $US70 billion ($A97.5 billion).
Although the impact of carbon emissions on the climate is well documented, the researchers note that “combustion engines also produce other harmful pollutants, such as particulate matter and the precursors to ground-level ozone”.
“Vehicle electrification in the United States could prevent hundreds to thousands of premature deaths annually while reducing carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons,” said Peters in a statement.
“This highlights the potential of co-beneficial solutions to climate change that not only curb greenhouse gas emissions but also reduce the health burden of harmful air pollution.”
Social costs were calculated using the “Country-level social cost of carbon” as published in Nature Climate Change in 2018, while health costs used the same metrics as by the ICCT’s 2019 report on global impacts of transportation pollution.
By focussing on premature mortality to calculate the savings that could be made by transitioning to electric cars, the researchers said that they were able to encapsulate the costs of heart and lung damage, such as heart disease, asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and ultimately premature death.
The report focuses on light duty passenger transport for good reason. While heavy and medium duty transport may emit more per vehicle, the light duty transport fleet in the US accounts for some 60% of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions.
Scenarios broken down by the research team include 7 ranging from a base 2014 grid mix, plus a 25% and 75% EV transition with either no emission-free sources of energy, a 2014 mix, or a 2014 mix with doubled emission-free sources.
Even in just the 25% transition scenario, they estimated some 227 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide would not enter the atmosphere, as well as ozone decreases, and localised PM2.5 particulate pollution decreases particularly in states that heavily rely on coal-fired power plants.
“From an engineering and technological standpoint, people have been developing solutions to climate change for years,” said Northwestern’s Daniel Horton, senior author of the study, in a statement.
“But we need to rigorously assess these solutions. This study presents a nuanced look at EVs and energy generation and found that EV adoption not only reduces greenhouse gases but saves lives.”
Citation:
Public Health and Climate Benefits and Tradeoffs of U.S. Vehicle Electrification
D. R. Peters, J. L. Schnell, P. L. Kinney, V. Naik, D. E. Horton
First published: 13 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GH000275
Bridie Schmidt is associate editor for The Driven, sister site of Renew Economy. She has been writing about electric vehicles since 2018, and has a keen interest in the role that zero-emissions transport has to play in sustainability. She has participated in podcasts such as Download This Show with Marc Fennell and Shirtloads of Science with Karl Kruszelnicki and is co-organiser of the Northern Rivers Electric Vehicle Forum. Bridie also owns a Tesla Model Y and has it available for hire on evee.com.au.