I think we should encourage them as a transitional solution till we have trains and walkable or bikeable cities.

This is my problem. I don’t think we’ll ever reach that point when we accept half-solutions. It wouldn’t take more than a single decade to uproot our city design if we had any ambition left, but alas.

Our disagreement is that I think the societal cost of cars is more than you think, not that I think electric cars are a bad transitional step. But I also think that we live under an economic model that will kick, fight and scream the whole time we try to uproot such a massive portion of it, being the oil industry. It’s possible we just can’t fix it at this point except by radical change. I don’t have ultimate solutions, I’m just wary of electric cars because lithium mining is just as bad as oil drilling from a different direction and electric cars will kill just as many kids in the street as combustion cars.

By all means make electric vehicles- just please not cars.