Emissions Dropped 1.8% Every Year in California's Bay Area. Researchers Credit EVs

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:

A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berkeley set up dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor planet-warming carbon dioxide, the super-abundant greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned. Between 2018 and 2022, the region's carbon emissions fell by 1.8% each year, which the Berkeley researchers concluded was almost exclusively owed to drivers switching to electric vehicles, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

In that time, Californians purchased about 719,500 zero-emission or plug-in hybrid vehicles, more than triple the amount compared to the previous five years, according to the California Department of Energy. The Bay Area also had a higher rate of electric vehicle adoption than the state as a whole.

While the findings confirm the state's transition to zero-emission vehicles is substantially lowering carbon emissions, it also reveals these reductions are still not on pace to meet the state's ambitious climate goals. Emissions need to be cut by around 3.7% annually, or nearly twice the rate observed by the monitors, according to Ronald Cohen, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry. Although cars and trucks are the state's largest source of carbon emissions, it underscores the need to deploy zero-emission technology inside homes and for the power grid.

'I think what we see right now is evidence of strong success in the transportation sector,' Cohen said. 'We're going to need equally strong success in home and commercial heating, and in the [industrial] sources. We don't yet see significant movement in those, but policy pushing on those is not as far ahead as policy on electric vehicles.' Although cities only cover roughly 3% of global surface area, they produce about 70% of carbon emissions.

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