Switch to EVs could save lives in these 5 big cities

Air pollution kills. It’s responsible for up to 6.5 million premature deaths worldwide per year, according to a study published this March in the academic journal Lancet Planetary Health. Beyond that, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 99% of people breathe contaminated air that has been deemed unsafe.

Stray pollutants that we inhale, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, or other floating particles that have broken off from toxic matter, once lodged in our bodies, can wreak all kinds of havoc. They attack the respiratory system, causing chronic diseases. They beget lung cancer. They branch out into heart disease, stroke, or other deadly ills.

A chief perpetrator is smog—the suffocating smoke that blankets cities, woven from the fumes of big industries, burnt coal, and tailpipe exhaust. Especially in dense urban cores, vehicular emissions are a chunk of the problem.

“It’s not like power plants, where the stacks are usually far away,” said Oliver Gao, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University. “While we enjoy the mobility that passenger vehicles provide, many of us don’t realize how bad those carbon emissions are, and how they’re impacting our health.”

Gao and his colleagues have just published a study, in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, that takes a stab at quantifying that impact. The team used data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emission Inventory, as well its Community Multi-scale Air Quality Modeling System—an open-source tool that conducts simulations to estimate levels of ozone, toxics, acid deposition, and other reactive chemicals in any given area—to calculate the harmful effects of the microscopic soot that gasoline-powered cars exhale.

And they found that with fresher air, lives could be saved, and money could be made.

Here’s what could happen by 2050:

• Los Angeles: 1,163 fewer premature deaths per year, corresponding to $12.61 billion in economic gains
• New York City: 576 fewer deaths per year; $6.24 billion in economic gains
• Chicago: 276 fewer deaths per year; $3 billion in economic gains
• San Joaquin Valley, California: 260 fewer deaths per year; $2.82 billion in economic gains
• Dallas-Fort Worth: 186 fewer deaths per year; $2 billion in economic gains

That’s if the electric vehicle craze in the United States keeps on, the study notes. As buzzy EV automakers like Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid Motors have grabbed headlines in recent years, and legacy brands like Ford and Chevrolet have cranked out their own eco-friendly designs, more Americans than ever are buying green. The share of EVs in the national passenger vehicle market was 4.5% in 2021—but it trended much higher in some cities, landing at 22% in San Francisco, 11.9% in Los Angeles, 11.7% in Seattle, and 3.4% in New York City.

Globally, the EV market share was 6.6% in 2021, up from less than 1% in 2016.

But according to the study’s lead author, Shuai Pan, a former Cornell post-doctoral researcher now at China’s Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, it will take a village to drive electric adoption. And he hopes this data may spur city governments to get involved.

“In addition to sound policies at the national level,” he said, “the successful implementation of zero-emission vehicle goals requires commitments and actions at the regional level.”