> We need widespread renewable electricity generation first anyway. Otherwise our electric cars will be running on coal.
Even this is preferable to internal combustion engines. ICEs really aren’t very efficient, and electric car is easily 3x more energy efficient than an ICE. Which means that’s even if you include transmission losses and heat losses at a coal power station, you’re still ahead. Because of coal power stations are significantly more efficient than ICE.
All that is ignoring the other benefits like being able to perform carbon capture at source, filtering waste gasses for pollutants etc. Additionally as the grid gets greener, so does your electric car. Something that will never be true of an ICE car.
> Lithium batteries will pollute the world. We will exploit impoverished counties and extract their lithium reserves while destroying their environments.
This is clearly a concern, and thankfully we’re taking big steps to reduce the amount of rare Earth metals needed to manufacture batteries. Additionally that largest produces of lithium aren’t small countries, they’re places like China and the US.
But heavy metal pollution, and toxins produced through the refining process are still a serious concern. But I would argue less a concern than CO2 release. At least the heavy metals a d toxins can be easily contained, they don’t have a tendency of floating into the atmosphere and spreading around the earth.
Simple fact is that modern western society is currently unsustainable, just because we don’t have all the answers, and don’t have perfect solutions, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I suspect even you wouldn’t be prepared to make the sacrifices needed for a sustainable future using only the technology we have readily available to us today.