>>13726601>implying a car recharged by a network powered mostly by fossil fuels isn't (slightly) cleaner than a car with an internal combustion engineBecause of the colossal size and efficiency-of-scale of of most power plant turbines, kWh-for-kWh of power, they're cleaner than the power generated by internal combustion engine cars.
Furthermore, as power networks begin cleaning up their national power supply and slowly adding solar, wind, hydro and nuclear into the mix, electric cars get cleaner and cleaner with time, while combustion engine cars will remain only as clean as the day they were made.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that emissions emitted at point A can have a different effect to emissions emitted at point B. For instance, let's say you have a city with a smog problem. The local geography and atmosphere is set up such that emissions have a tendency to hang around and not get dispersed broadly, building up into smog. If you convert that car to using mostly electric cars, the tailpipe emissions are greatly reduced there while the burden is shifted to the area surrounding the power plant - which, mind you, will be situated in a location a good distance from heavily populated areas, with good geography and weather for dispersing the resulting emissions broadly and thinly. Even if the amount of pollution transferred is 1:1 (as pessimists would like to think), and the contribution to global climate change is the same (which it wouldn't be, but again, sake of argument), the effect on local communities is completely different.
