I’d like to think ev’s were better for the environment but after you factor in resources of making the battery and then the disposable of it, if it can even be disposed of, it’s hardly environmentally friendly.
On the contrary, the lithium battery packs from a car can be used in power walls etc., for a fair few years, & eventually the lithium can be recovered by mining the battery packs (the plastic membranes are a problem). The cobalt argument has very young Congolese children driven to work in terrible conditions in mines, but this misses the point that their parents want to profit from this work rather than it being an industry standard across the World, let’s not blacklist a product because of the way other peoples choose to live.
Lithium itself is an abundant metal, present in many of the rocks under our feet, it’s just a highly reactive metal that has to be extracted & handled correctly.
So, let’s look at these components from the perspective of us being able to extract them in our own country, is it even possible? Lithium, yes, Cornwall, the old china clay pits, a good source of lithium. Cobalt, yes, Aberdeenshire & other places have substantial reserves even if we can’t employ Congolese children to work at the pit face & have to rely on Scotsmen to frighten the cobalt from the rock at great expense. Copper for the motors, yes, we have plenty of mineable copper (Cornwall, Devon, Wales, Cumbria, Scotland). Rare earth elements for the magnets, difficult, China is a cheaper source at the moment, but they have always been extracted from the production of other metals if economic to do so as it is now.
So, the pollution event is the initial production of the electric car, it’s the same for all cars though, so it’s best to run a car to its life end rather than throw away a fairly new car & replace it with electric. We have the secondhand car market for just that. The difference in pollution between fossil & electric cars is in the running of them, if you can fill the batteries overnight on cheap wind derived electricity it has an insignificant pollution footprint for the running life of the car, if you burn diesel or petrol you are the pollution problem and you’re the fossil that became extinct.