The negatives of ICE cars and EVs are not comparable. EVs are an important solution against climate change, ICE pollutes much more. One lithium battery is not the same as literally 10 years of directly burning oil, the rest of the car takes the same ressources to build in both cases.

Daily reminder that "batteries are the devil and EVs pollute just as much as ICE" is pure oil industry propaganda.

I'd argue EVs are a solution, just not the ones the government is subsidizing.

Electric bikes and micro-mobility punch way about their weight, but are still considered niche.

I’d argue that the techs been here for at least a decade. In modern production EVs the only negatives are that while on a road trip you have to stop every two and a half hours for a whole twenty minutes and arguably price, through the latter is mostly just a North American thing. Better a minor inconvenience now than a perfect solution after the last coral dies.

As for mining, Australia’s lithium mines arn’t much different than any other major mines, much less the drilling and fracking needed to supply the constant consumption of gasoline and diesel vehicles.

As much as trollybuses and overhead electric trains are definitely the best solution for urban and suburban transportation, where they can and do bear cars even from a speed, comfort, and convenience standpoint, we can’t reasonably expect to relocate everyone in Canada to urban areas, and even if we did you would still need hundreds of thousands to millions of vehicles for transport, delivery, emergency, etc.

Even the small “carless” villages of Switzerland still need custom small electric vehicles, and Canada requires far longer ranges than small villages that were never connected to the road network.

As long as any of that holds true, your going to need smaller than bus vehicles, and battery electric remand the best option, and thusly I would argue that they are indeed a climate solution. Not the solution, but a solution. We could never replace what has been the foundation of the industrial world with a single alternative. There is simply too much that would need to be covered for a one size fits all solution.