we have had the wool pulled over our eyes regarding the “purity” of EVs in this respect never mind the environmental cost of building and installing wind and solar farms.
There is indeed an awful lot of 'wool pulling', most of it can be traced to research financed by the fossil fuel industry which is a massively powerful lobby that has a truly global reach.
When trying to evaluate claims, one has to always try to ensure that the same yardsticks are always applied. One of the most common with anti-EV arguments, for example, is to look at complete lifecycle emissions of the EV - mining materials for batteries, building the cars, generating the fuel and so on, whilst at the same time conveniently excluding parts of the equivalent lifecycle for ICE vehicles like exploration, drilling extraction, transport and so on of oil.
Most of the peer-reviewed material I have seen so far appear to agree that the best way to reduce environmental impact from vehicles is to keep individual vehicles for a long time and to use them sensibly. It's a lot better to amortise the total emissions from any vehicles over a 20 year lifespan than buying the latest model every 3 years.
But then of course you then run into not only the fossil lobby but also the VM lobby, another very powerful group. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs dependent on people consuming vehicles on a 2 year cycle.
