The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the highest rates of electric vehicle adoption in the U.S., and it is in the area that emissions from passenger vehicles will drop by 2.6 percent between 2018 and 2022. This helped reduce CO2 emissions by 1.8 percent.
Despite all the promises that electric cars will pollute less air and help the planet in the future, their adoption is at such an early stage that there is not much real evidence of their effectiveness. But the new study, published in the journal Environmental Sciences & Technology, shows that CO2 emissions have steadily declined by 1.8 percent per year between 2018 and 2022 in the San Francisco area.
More specifically, vehicle emissions fell by 2.6 percent per year over that time period, and a key challenge for the scientists was how to distinguish them from industrial CO2 emissions. Ironically, the pandemic actually helped the team understand how to distinguish pollution from passenger vehicles, commercial trucks and industry. The lockdown, introduced at the height of the pandemic, helped the team understand the intricacies of different types of pollutants.
Ronald Cohen, a chemistry professor at Berkeley who began installing CO2 sensors for this study back in 2012, said the findings are direct evidence that electric cars do have an impact on the environment. But to reach California's goal of zero emissions by 2045, Cohen says emissions would have to fall by 3.7 percent a year.