Buyers worldwide go for bigger cars, erasing gains from cleaner tech. EVs would help.

abcnews.go.com:

Over the years, cars have gotten bigger and so has their cost to the climate.

The negative impact on the climate from passenger vehicles, which is considerable, could have dropped by more than 30% over the past decade if not for the world's appetite for large cars, a new report from the Global Fuel Economy Initiative suggests.

Sport utility vehicles, or SUVs, now account for more than half of all new car sales across the globe, the group said, and it's not alone. The International Energy Agency, using a narrower definition of SUV, estimates they make up nearly half.

Over the years these cars have gotten bigger and so has their cost to the climate, as carbon dioxide emissions “are almost directly proportional to fuel use” for gas-powered cars. The carbon that goes in at the pump comes out the tailpipe.

Transportation is responsible for around one-quarter of all the climate-warming gases that come from energy, and much of that is attributable to passenger transport, according to the International Energy Agency.

But the negative environmental impact from SUVs could have been reduced by more than one-third between 2010 and 2022, if people had just continued buying the same size cars, according to the initiative, which is a global partnership of cleaner vehicle groups.

One fix for this could be electric vehicles.

George Parrott, an avid runner at 79, who lives in West Sacramento, California, decided to switch to cleaner vehicles in 2004 when he bought a Toyota Prius hybrid. Since then, he has owned several pure-electric cars, and currently owns both a Genesis GV60 electric SUV and a Tesla Model 3.

“This was all a combination of broad environmental concerns,” he said.

Parrott and his late partner also knew their region