*More* green?

The abstract of the paper gives three examples of the fractional benefit of EV to fuel, of 100,000, 150,000 and 200,000 miles - in all three cases EV comes out better (e.g. "An assumption of 100,000 km decreases the benefit of EVs to 9% to 14% with respect to gasoline vehicles and results in impacts indistinguishable from those of a diesel vehicle."). Of course, the implication is that cars that end up doing less than 100,000 miles are less beneficial than fuel cars. So saying that they are unequivocally "less green", as the title of this article currently does, is wrong - they're less green in some cases, more green in others, rather than absolutely one or the other. Perhaps a better title would be "Electric vehicles can be less green than classic fuel cars, Norwegian study finds"?

"Because of its share of hard coal and lignite combustion, the use of average European electricity for EV transportation does not lead to significant improvements relative to ICEVs. Significant benefits may only be expected for EVs using electricity sources with sulfur intensities comparable to or lower than that of natural gas."

That's in Europe, where there are quite a lot of wind turbines (and windbags like Donald Trump to make them spin unfeasibly fast). Ship them over to the U.S. and you've more of a problem. Push them into India, China, and other countries that say they can't afford clean electricity production? Disastrous.

But you're partially right. Assuming we improve, and clean up, electricity production they will have less impact over the full lifecycle. I don't think that's not going to happen; but, I expect it to be fought hard by vested interests in the energy sector. The impact widespread adoption of electrical vehicles would have on electricity consumption is, I strongly suspect, likely to be dealt with by use of 'dirtier', but well-known, forms of electricity production in the short-to-medium term.

So basically the "less green" part is mostly because they assume coal fired power generation. The idea behind the EV as a green alternative is based on the generation of electricity in a clean way. Interestingly the conclusion is that it is possibly pointless at this time to use EVs on a large scale because it would only be a POTENTIAL in reducing GHG emittions. Instead the focus should rather be on actually reducing GHG emissions now - by shutting down coal fired power plants, reduce energy consumption including energy consumption by transportation.