Gasoline and diesel used by Americans cars and light trucks cause more than one billion metric tons of CO2 pollution every year, or about 17% of all U.S carbon pollution.
It’s March, 2020, in the first weeks of the COVID-19 global pandemic, and the world has gone quiet. Savannah, an 11-year-old girl living in the Pacific Northwest, sees an opportunity to heal our planet, if we can resist the urge to get back to our gasoline-guzzling normal.
The study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) quantified the impact of air pollution and premature death in the United States, and concluded that nearly 58,000 deaths a year were attributable to road transportation alone (52,800 from particulate matter, and 5,000 from ozone).
THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO FUEL GAS CARS: BY PUMPING GASOLINE AT A GAS STATION. ELECTRIC VEHICLES, IN CONTRAST, CAN FUEL WHEREVER THERE’S EITHER 1) ELECTRICITY; OR 2) SUNSHINE AND SOLAR PANELS TO CAPTURE IT, LIKE A SOLAR CANOPY.
California has imposed standards for Zero Emissions Vehicles, or ZEVs. Its ZEV mandate sets up a credit system relating to a requirement that a certain percent of passenger vehicle sales by each automaker be ZEVs.
Air quality is getting better as a result of anti-pollution regulation, and we are all healthier as a result. But air pollution remains a deadly killer, in unexpected ways that go way beyond lung diseases such as asthma and lung cancer.