A new study led by researchers from Northwestern University projects that if electric vehicles replaced 25% of combustion engine cars currently on the road, the United States would save approximately $17 billion annually by avoiding damages from climate change and air pollution. The open-access paper is published in AGU’s journal GeoHealth . The Northwestern team, with colleagues from Boston University and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton combined climate modeling with public health data to evaluate the impact of electric vehicles on US lives and the economy. Results show that in more aggressive scenarios—i.e., replacing 75% of cars with electric vehicles and increasing renewable energy for every generation—savings could reach as much as $70 billion annually. Vehicle electrification in the United States could prevent hundreds to thousands of premature deaths annually while reducing carbon emissions by hundreds of millions of tons. This highlights the potential of co-beneficial […]