>but can we not bend the facts like this
Right back at you. Can we please not bring up this utterly inane and incorrect talking point every single time the topic of electric vehicles is discussed? The equation is absolutely not the same.
>Electric cars use electricity to charge. Lots of electricity comes from fossil fuels (about 2/3 in the US and higher in China).
Obviously true, but also completely irrelevant. Part of the core advantage of using electric machines in general is that electricity acts as an abstraction layer between energy production and consumption, two areas which have wildly divergent time horizons, economics and politics. At one point all machines were tightly coupled to specific energy production systems, but now engines are one of the only ones left. Loose coupling has fundamental advantages in terms of achieving goals, and that includes pollution production. Electric cars, like any other electric machine, do not produce emissions themselves like a direct hydrocarbon system does. The energy sources feeding them may have hydrocarbon combustion as part of the mix, but they don't need to, and that that's a separate issue is precisely the point. Cars tend to have significant life times. An ICE car by definition locks in emissions for that entire time, but what if a company announced fully scalable, commercially cheap fusion a year from now? Or more realistically, look at how the price of solar has continued to plummet. What if 5 years from now solar completely dominates on price, with significant upgrades made to grids (include energy storage) allowing the contribution of fossil fuels to electric generation to plummet in turn? In a world that was 100% electric powered (or close enough, aircraft seem likely to remain a sticky wicket for longer) that would translate into an instant response in terms of overall emissions. But if ICE cars still dominated, then in turn they'll continue to emit anyway even as the overall world changes as they continue in service for decades.
All this too ignores additional basic advantages of making even fossil fuel combustion more centralized. Power plants can have higher temperature deltas and thus better fundamental thermodynamic efficiencies. It is easier to regulate and enforce better scrubbers, carbon pricing, and so forth on a small number of centralized plants then hundreds of millions of distributed mobile point emitters. Geographic considerations can be taken more easily into account with power plants placement. Investment in the grid and electrical production benefit the efficiency of a higher percentage of the economy, more rapidly, then even transportation alone.
So no, "a significant amount of electricity current comes burning coal" does not make loosely coupled electric appliances (of which fully competitive mass production economic electric cars are merely one of the more recent ones) at all the equivalent of tightly coupled fossil fuel consuming machines.
## Edited to add for anyone reading this down the road ##
On the front page of HN right now:
"The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11617988
This is exactly the sort of development that underlines why decoupling usage and generation matters. It's hard to predict even 5 years ahead of time let alone decades, yet represents a significant continuing shift of the economic foundation for policy strategies. Every single electric appliance, be it a brand new mobile device or a decades old fridge, benefits from power generation shifts right away. Every single ICE car cannot.