[shadowrunner]

Electric cars are a form of self-denial. We think we're doing the environment a favor when in reality we're terrified of a future without cars.

[panacea]

Not true. We can still have electric cars almost in perpetuity if the source of energy is the Sun... the current untapped carbon-neutral energy producing byproducts (hydro, wind, waves); we can also use the Moon (tidal hydro); the Earth's molten core (geothermal). et al.

Progress (as someone said upthread) is refactoring away from internal combustion engines that only operate by burning stored fossil fuels, to engines that operate by storing electrical energy... then we can start to spend the next couple of decades innovating on the electrical production problem and find a way to bend physics and the abundant energy in the system to our advantage.

(and I say all this as a bit of a doom and gloom cynic) OK, admittedly, we make batteries from finite, rare-earth batteries. That's ultimately a problem.

[gnaffle]

You forget that batteries can be recycled.