how much CO2 is created making batteries.

That’s actually an important consideration. I think there might be a failure to understand the overall environmental impact of forcing all cars to electric.

80% of power stations in the USA use fossil fuels to generate power. However power plants are much more efficient than IC engines. Powerplants can be as much as 50% efficient and an electric car can be as much as 80% efficient. End to end efficiency is around 40%, but considering 20% of power stations don’t burn fuel let’s make that 50% efficient.

So around half of the fuel consumed to power an electric car goes to waste. An IC powered car is around 20% efficient so 80% of the fuel consumed goes to waste. An electric car wastes less, but it’s not an enormous amount, a waste of 50% versus 80%.

Then there’s the environmental impact of producing and disposing of batteries. An electric car battery contains around a thousand pounds of materials and is industrially intensive to produce. I don’t know the numbers as far as how much pollution is created in making batteries and how much environmental impact there is in materials, but were talking about a huge number of cars in the USA, around 300 million which equates to around 300 billion pounds of batteries. That’s definitely going to leave a mark.

There’s some other considerations like electric cars consume tires faster because they’re heavier. Also an amount of pollution is created to refine gasoline which is not required for power plants that use coal or natural gas.

At this point I don’t think there’s a huge advantage in electric over gasoline in terms of environment impact. However gas will always present the problems it does at the level it does. As power generation relies less on fossil fuels and as battery tech improves the benefits could be dramatic. So it’s more a matter of poising ourselves for future tech rather than an immediate fix.