Electric vehicles have lowered San Francisco’s carbon footprint

The growing popularity of electric vehicles has helped drive an almost 2 per cent annual decrease in carbon emissions for the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years.

“Really, it’s both electric vehicles and more fuel-efficient cars,” says Ronald Cohen at the University of California, Berkeley. “There have been some efficiency gains in the gasoline-powered fleet, and not just the hybrid-electric ones.”

Cohen and his colleagues calculated the emissions impact of electric cars in the Bay Area by…