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Comment by crdoconnor | Hacker News Reader

This paper reads more like it's designed to foment support around removing electric car subsidies rather than accurately measure their impact. I particularly liked the part where they tried to assign a dollar value to various pollutants. $42/ton for Carbon, in case you were wondering. They totally scienced that shit.

As always with economic research with policy implications, it's good to dig a little and find out where they get their money from, especially when they're coy about it:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Bureau_o...

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The map's a bit of a red flag as well. Apparently it's really good to own internal combustion cars where no one lives. Of course, in a big map full of sparsely populated areas, all that green looks really good, rather than mostly useless.

Obligatory XKCD (with an oddly familiar map):

https://xkcd.com/1138/

    it's really good to own internal combustion cars where no one lives

Isn't that right though? Tailpipe emissions are much worse in urban than rural areas because there are more people to breathe them in.

Right, but be careful with that line of thinking. In terms of cents of economic damage per km driven, yes, gas cars are better driven in the boonies; but watch out! That isn't where most people are driving. Most people are driving around cities. So this map makes it look like electric cars and gas cars are more toe-to-toe than they are.

And really, most of the dirtiest coal power plants are nearing end of life, so if you look at the trending, even in the USA, which has a very dirty energy grid, electric cars are going to be much less pollutant than gas cars everywhere and very soon.

Also note that the car in question, the Ford Focus, is one of the least pollutant gasoline cars out there. Electric cars scale up better than gasoline ones.

Not to mention that the per mile highway efficiency of gasoline powered cars is much better where there is low traffic density than in stop and go traffic in a congested city.

The impact on global warming is the same.

>This paper reads more like it's designed to foment support around removing electric car subsidies rather than accurately measure their impact.

Hit the nail on the head.

The choice of question is telling. "Where should electric cars be taxed based on pollution?" implies that it is electric cars that should be taxed, not the pollution itself. But economics by side-effect rarely leads to a good outcome.

For beautiful economic optimality, tax pollution directly at the power plant, the gas pump, and the polluting refinery/mine/whatever. https://www.aeaweb.org/annual_mtg_papers/2008/2008_90.pdf

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