The Surprisingly Unequal Benefits of Electric Vehicles, Mapped

If you only listened to electric-vehicle evangelists like Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, or, heck, Justin Bieber, you might think EVs were the most eco-friendly machine since the waterwheel. The U.S., like China, Europe, and the U.K., has heavily incentivized EV purchases to speed electrification, fronting billions in subsidies to buyers and carmakers. In early November, the U.S. DOT dropped a few billion for a 25,000 mile-network of EV charging stations. All of these dangling carrots do seem to be working: EV purchases are currently on the rise. (Of course, there’s still only about 400,000 of them on U.S. roads, about 0.16 percent of all cars.)

But are all Americans breathing easier thanks to electric vehicles? And how much cooler does the planet stand to stay as a result of their adoption? These are questions of ongoing, heated debate. According to a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economics, the answer is: It depends. The researchers looked at the air-quality costs and benefits of registered electric cars at the county level across the U.S., and further broke down those results by income and race. It seems some Americans are breathing much cleaner air than they would have been, but some Americans have been worse off—and the winners and losers largely fall along urban and rural divides.