EV no answer to air pollution: Chicago professor Michael Greenstone

The government’s aggressive impetus to electric vehicles to reduce air pollution may be misplaced in terms of both emissions and cost, cautions Faculty Director, Tata Center for Development at UChicago, Michael Greenstone, an energy and climate change expert helping Gujarat and Maharashtra in cutting particulate emissions from industries. The professor says if the charging grid for EVs remained largely coal based, net impact on emissions could be in fact “worse.”

“The challenge with EV is, what you plug them into. If the grid remains largely coal based, the net impact could be worse. In some parts of the United States, it is worse to drive an EV compared to an internal combustive vehicle as the grid is largely based on coal, which is CO2,” said Greenstone. He also said, “if the goal was to reduce particulate air pollution, I suspect there are more direct and more efficient ways to do that.”