Electric vehicles will not save the planet on their own but anti-EV rhetoric conveniently ignores the problems caused by petrol and diesel vehicles.

A recent article in The Australian warns that electric vehicles may ‘feel right for the wealthy’ but will ‘destroy our planet’. The script is familiar: EVs require minerals; their interiors contain plastic; some manufacturing uses coal-fired electricity; China makes many of them; Pauline Hanson mentioned it. Case closed. It manages to sound environmentally concerned, while showing little interest in environmental comparison.

Let us start with the part that is true.

Electric vehicles are not magic. They do not float out of a eucalyptus forest after being assembled by morally pure koalas. They require mining, factories, shipping, tyres, batteries and electricity. Some mineral supply chains are environmentally damaging. Indonesia’s nickel industry, cobalt mining in the Congo, lithium extraction in dry regions and the broader politics of critical minerals deserve scrutiny.

But this is where the useful discussion ends and the performance begins. The problem is not that the article mentions the environmental cost of EVs. The problem is that it treats those costs as if they exist in isolation, while petrol and diesel vehicles apparently arrive from a more innocent universe, perhaps grown organically behind a regional servo.

Oil does not appear as an industry. It appears only as absence. There is no comparable tour through offshore drilling, oil spills, refinery pollution, tanker routes, fracking, fuel security vulnerabilities or the daily combustion of imported........

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