Your All-Electric Car May Not Be So Green

[Raistlin]

People who own all-electric cars where coal generates the power may think they are helping the environment.

But a new study finds their vehicles actually make the air dirtier, worsening global warming.

The controversial study raises major questions over the future of 'green' cars.

An electric plug charges a Smart Car electric drive vehicle in New York.

People buying all-electric cars where coal supplies the power may think they are helping the environment. But a new study shows those coal-powered plug-in vehicles can be making the air dirtierand worsening global warming.

HOW THEY DID IT

The authors looked at liquid biofuels, diesel, compressed natural gas, and electricity from a range of conventional and renewable sources.

Their analysis included not only the pollution from vehicles, but also emissions generated during production of the fuels or electricity that power them.

With ethanol, for example, air pollution is released from tractors on farms, from soils after fertilizers are applied, and to supply the energy for fermenting and distilling corn into ethanol.

Unfortunately, when a wire is connected to an electric vehicle at one end and a coal-fired power plant at the other end, the environmental consequences are worse than driving a normal gasoline-powered car,' said Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who wasn't part of the study but praised it.

Driving vehicles that use electricity from renewable energy instead of gasoline could reduce the resulting deaths due to air pollution by 70 percent, it concluded.

Ethanol isn't so green, either, the researchers claimed.

'It's kind of hard to beat gasoline' for public and environmental health, said study 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.'

The key is where the source of the electricity all-electric cars.

If it comes from coal, the electric cars produce 3.6 times more soot and smog deaths than gas, because of the pollution made in generating the electricity, according to the study that is published Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[FROSTYBALLS]

Never been too knowledgeable on 'current` affairs or 'what's watt', but presumably one of the arguments for electric cars has just gone up in flames.

[Raistlin]

I am shocked at the poor level of puns, Try an Alternator supplier to transform your output.