Technology

Pretty much all of the arguments against EVs from the right are solvable. There are arguments against them that are also unique from the left, but I've seen too many leftists adopt some of the bullshit arguments from the right.

Charging does need to improve. Believe me, I drove a Mini EV from Madison to Chicago once, and it was a nightmare to find two working stations along the way. But this is solvable with time. At least, it is when you're presenting it honestly, and not "haha EVs suck ROOOOLLL COOAAAALLLL!"

They're a huge facet to fixing climate change. Mining issues are not part of climate change. Burning petroleum is.

The problems with lithium mining do exist (and in ways that are less hypocritical for the left to point out than the right), but it's also not permanent. There's an interesting string technique that, assuming it can be scaled up, can use far less land and open up more reserves (that being the amount of lithium that can be economically mined, which people often mistake for the amount of lithium actually there). Even if it doesn't, oceanic methods of extraction are being ramped up already, and there's more lithium available there then we'd have a use for.

All that's even assuming we stay on lithium batteries, or that we won't reduce the amount of lithium per kwh.

Now, there's another set of arguments--the kind conservatives would never touch--which get into how cars are bad for society regardless of what they run on. They take up tons of space just sitting there, they enable urban sprawl, they hit pedestrians and animals, and are all around an inefficient way to move your moist meat flesh around. These are why I did an e-bike conversion recently and am looking to heavily reduce my car reliance.

But we're stuck with them to a certain extent. There are decisions literally set in concrete about where people live and where they work. Even with the most radical government imaginable, we could not rip our cities up and lay new concrete without releasing so much CO2 that we might as well drive ICE cars for an additional decade.

Getting rid of cars is not on the table, at least not in any reasonable timeframe. That said, what can we do to get American cities from <5% bike commuters to 25%? That alone would be massive.