News Section Stories from Climate Central's Science Journalists
and Content Partners  Special Climate Central Report on Best
Cars for Climate  Repost This   Our calculations begin with the
EPA’s combined highway/city driving fuel economy of cars: miles
per gallon for gasoline cars and kilowatt-hours per mile for
electric cars. (See Appendix Table A1 of Full Report)  For a
gasoline car, the bulk of the lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions associated with driving are due to the CO2 emitted by
combustion of the fuel in the car’s engine. A gallon of gasoline
releases about 19 lbs of CO2 when burned, or about three times
the weight of the gallon before it burns. To these CO2 emissions
we must add the GHG emissions associated with extracting,
transporting, and refining the crude oil used to make that
gallon of gasoline. When these are included, the total lifecycle
GHG emissions for using gasoline in a car come to 25.9 lbs of
CO2-equivalent per gallon. (a)  In this report, the term
CO2-equivalent (or CO2e) is us