It's really hard to say which is the lesser of two evils.
Natural gas is incredibly cheap. And it's also fairly common to convert coal power plants to natural gas, so you don't need to shut down the plant. And a lot of coal plants are already plenty old enough to shut down.
To summarize here: Just 30.5% of US utility scale electricity for the last 12 months (rolling) have come from coal. This is down from over 50% in the early 2000s. 33.5% is natural gas. 34.9% is emissions-free (nuclear or renewables... but it increases to about 35.3% if you include non-utility-scale solar). So now the plurality of power is emissions free, with most of the rest being (relatively) clean-burning natural gas.
This is a HUGE difference in a short amount of time, and the story keeps changing. The old story that most electricity is coal (about 51% of electricity was coal in 2003) is now definitely obsolete. But people keep recycling the same talking points.
I like to occasionally check up on this table, which is where most of my data comes from: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...
At the very least, it allows for the possibility of changing the power generation under the cars, which current engines don't allow.
[1] http://wolfstreet.com/2016/06/13/why-us-coal-production-coll...
[2] https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-year-solar-panels-finally...
[3] http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/04/20/minnesota-study-chal...
My main point was that a centralized environment comes with its own downsides, the main one being inertia.
Natural gas, which is leaked heavily during fracking [2], is an order of magnitude more harmful than CO2 in the short term [3]. But it breaks down far faster in the atmosphere [4] and is comparatively better than coal when it's burned [5]. Thankfully, fossil fuels are losing to cleaner technologies [6].
Cheap renewables, like solar, allow EV owners to opt-out of centralized power generation and charge their cars with clean power [7]. One could argue that this is the entire business model of Tesla [8].
[1] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/re...
[2] https://thinkprogress.org/methane-leaks-erase-climate-benefi...
[3] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-methane-once-it-is-rel...
[5] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fue...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...
[7] https://www.wired.com/2011/11/evs-go-off-grid/
[8] https://www.wired.com/2016/06/tesla-solar-city-elon-musk/
And then I remembered that the cheapest form of power generation is using coal, which is extremely abundant.
Electric cars are a little bit cleaner, even in Kentucky which runs on 84% coal power. Everywhere else, they are significantly cleaner.
Oddly, hybrids turn out to be cleaner than BEVs in Kentucky that may point to light trucks skewing the gasoline vehicle numbers.
There's a lot of "thinking with your feelings" going on about this for a topic with so much hard data easily available.
I admit I'm not sure how centralized coal burning compares in emission efficiency to internal combustion engines in cars.
How much of that infrastructure was built in the post WW2 period so is nearing replacement anyway?