It's great if you're an EV manufacturer though because you can rack up your price and customers won't have much of an alternative. Bonus points if the government also bans imports of EVs from certain other countries.
Even if this isn't the objective, it nevertheless is a way people will see the whole situation as.
That's only true in the absence of any market failure, but in this case we have mispriced negative externalities.
EDIT: Changed "unpriced" to "mispriced", since gas taxes exist as pointed out below.
This doesn't mean the gas taxes are big enough to correct the market failure. Your comment would be true even if we multiply gas taxes by 0.01, 0.1 or 10.0.
I would prefer it if we just used properly calibrated (larger) gas taxes as the single mechanism. But voters hate that, so we're left with second best solutions.
The bans are in great part likely due to politicians trying to score points.
That could be true but we can't say for certain because the market is already so incredibly distorted by oil and gas subsidies.
Automobiles in general are insanely subsidized in the form of state funded road infrastructure.
There's nothing free market about transportation, especially in North America.
Most countries in the world also implement significant excise taxes on petroleum fuels. The American one is about 5%, while in Europe they can go to 40% excluding VAT.
[1] <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/climate/tax-breaks-oil-ga...>
[2] a few examples under <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/subtitle-A/chapte...>
You're just regurgitating some O&G spin talking point that was put out to counter a recent report that may or may not have over estimated the amount of subsidies to O&G depending on your interpretation of the statistics.
But that doesn't mean that O&G subsidies don't exist.
How do I know? My salary comes from those subsidies.
EVs are automobiles too, using the same roads.
Even if you're suggesting everyone should move to something non-automobile (bikes?) you still need the roads because society needs things like ambulances, fire trucks, garbage trucks, etc. You can't have a society without roads, they have existed for millenia before cars.