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Originally Posted by RobertSmalls
...and why EVs alone are of doubtful environmental benefit.
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But who said they were? They're one component: IF you have electric cars in place, then anything done to clean up the generation grid also cleans up transportation. And worst case - when charged by 100% coal-fired generation - they're no worse than gas/diesel.
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Unfortunately, we do not have a renewable-rich grid, and mass adoption of EVs at present would be a massive fleet of predominantly coal-fired vehicles with a massive CO2 footprint.
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But in fact we do. As the pie chart that dcb posted makes clear, almost 1/3 of the grid is non-fossil, and a good chunk of the rest is natural gas, which produces significantly less CO2 per MWatt generated. So right there, today, you're getting at least a 1/3 improvement. As more non-fossil generation is added, the improvement automatically applies to the whole transportation system.
And of course, if you have an electric/plugin car, you've now got more incentive to install those solar panels on your roof :-)