4 Comments

  1. A new study from U of T Engineering’s Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering suggests that large-scale adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could lead to significant population-level health benefits.

    The team used computer simulations to show that aggressive electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet, coupled with an ambitious rollout of renewable electricity generation, could result in health benefits worth between US$84 billion and 188 billion by 2050.

    Even scenarios with less aggressive grid decarbonization mostly predicted health benefits running into the tens of billions of dollars.

    “When researchers examine the impacts of EVs, they typically focus on climate change in the form of mitigating CO2 emissions,” says Professor Marianne Hatzopoulou (CivMin), one of the co-authors of the study, which is published in PNAS.

    “But CO2 is not the only thing that comes out of the tailpipe of an internal combustion vehicle. They produce many air pollutants that have a significant, quantifiable impact on public health. Furthermore, evidence shows that those impacts are disproportionately felt by populations that are low-income, racialized or marginalized.”

    [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320858121](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320858121)

  2. SnowSlider3050 on

    Huh, Besides climate impact, future generations may look at combustion vehicles like we do smoking cigarettes, what used to be deemed safe to do everywhere, turns out to be spewing toxic substances all around us.

  3. $188 bn over **25 years** is just $7.5 bn/year. Manifestly, that chump change. A rounding error in the annual US federal budget, much less the whole economy.

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