At a time when anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions are skyrocketing, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) represent an opportunity for us to transform our transportation sector from one that is powered by fossil fuels to one powered by clean energy. They will replace hundreds of millions of miniature, inefficient, fossil-fuel power plants that emit climate pollution: the internal combustion engine in vehicles. Instead, emissions will be concentrated in just a few centralized power plants that burn fossil fuels. This allows efforts for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving air quality to be focused at a small number of sources. All the BEVs in a region instantly get cleaner together as electricity power production gets cleaner. This cleaning of the electricity grid is already happening at a startling rate. Canada's electricity has become 33 per cent cleaner in the last decade; the US's by over 20 per cent (source: US Energy Information Administration 2017) . Environment Canada projects that existing plans will lead to Canada's electricity being 50 percent cleaner than 2005 by 2020. At that point 85% of the utility electricity supply will be generated from non-emitting sources. The rapidly falling costs of renewable energy like wind and solar look set to continue or even accelerate this trend.

The purpose of these calculations are to compare the emissions that a battery electric car would create (factoring in vehicle embodiment, vehicle maintenance, electricity source emissions and upstream emissions) with a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV). This comparison will then be shown visually on a map of North America. These comparisons would be calculated for each region (provinces and territories in Canada, electrical grid subregions in the USA).