I hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Perhaps the author is making a point about the owners of electric cars not being particularly "green" because of their huge houses.
To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.
Of course, but being more efficient isn't the same as having a smaller overall footprint. The point is that wealthy customers probably have bigger houses that require more energy to heat and cool in absolute terms, even if it's done more efficiently relative to poorer folks.
Instead of pumping out CO2 in our cities, the CO2 is pumped out at the electricity plants - making our cities cleaner and safer to live in. :)
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/mpg-for-electric...
"From a carbon-dioxide standpoint, you’d be better off burning the fossil fuel directly in your car."
I would love to see this chart and the projection of how it would be shaped if 50% / 75% / 100% of cars on the road were electric: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16511&src=Tot...
What happens when you shift the energy requirements from transportation to residential? What happens when you shift from high yield energy (gasoline) to low yield energy (coal)?
Actually, it still helps a lot, because burning fuel at power plants is much, much more energy efficient than in internal combustion engines (I think I saw a factor of 3 or 4 in some analysis). So by going all electric, you get 3 times less pollution for the same number of cars (actually, you'd get even less, because power plants are better at filtering pollutants).
Also another added benefit is that the moment you go green by e.g. switching to nuclear power, suddenly all your cars get their carbon footprint cut down by two orders of magnitude.
You are right in that electric cars only relocate the pollution and energy consumption, but it still has to happen somewhere.
By moving this source of pollution out of the cities to an unpopulated location you're saving the health of millions of people.
I own a Prius. I don't care about being "green". (I'm not some "drill, baby, drill" wacko, but I do think that saving the environment is a collective action problem to the extent that "doing my part" won't make any real difference.) I bought it because it's a really nice car, the price was right, and I really enjoy infrequent, cheap visits to the gas station.
Similarly, I'd love to own a Tesla, not to be "green", but because they're really nice cars and I enjoy the thought of never buying a gallon of gasoline again, even though I know it won't save me money over the Prius unless gas goes up to about $500/gallon.
I don't think I'm very wasteful in my life as a whole, either. I believe my house is smaller than average for my area and the size of my family, although I wouldn't call it "small". We use public transportation a lot, and specifically moved near a Metro station for that. We have lots of LED and CFL bulbs. High efficiency equipment keeps my electric and gas usage down. But I do all of this to save money, not to placate my inner Greenpeace. And if you want to bring large-scale change, that's the angle to push on. "Save money," not "save the planet."