The people who tend to make that argument are people who will eventually hand-wave away all efforts at electrifying society and transportation, minimize climate change and the efforts to stop it, and so on.

Yes, there are up-front environmental costs to electric cars, but I wager it's worth it.

Scenario: We could churn out 50,000,000 electric cars next year, with all the strip mining and oil-burning required. But somehow, we had nuclear/solar energy and a grid in the US capable of supporting the power draw. The outcome would be a much healthier country, on the whole.

The goal long term is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Transport is the most obvious "hard" problem - nuclear/solar/wind are clearly going to take over coal and gas. It would be beneficial to move transport over to electric now, to "centralize" the fossil fuel problem to power plants.