This is still a win: it’s easier to replace one centralized fossil fuel burner than a bunch of cars.

Even when you take into account the huge environmental cost of those batteries??

What huge envrironmental cost of batteries?

Australia mines >50% of the world's lithium and 1% of worlds oil, and for them oil pollutes more

And lithium is recycled, oil is not.

Oil is a biohazard, we had massive oil spills wich posioned areas as large as fukushima exclusion zone. Pour barrel of oil in a forest, and everything dies

How many lithium spills were there? Zero. If you sprincle lithium in a forest, nothing happens.

I don’t know enough about the battery supply chain: but, generally speaking, centralizing problems often makes it easier to fix them by giving maximizing the leverage of improvements.

Gasoline doesn't just magically appear at the pump. Oil extraction has huge environmental costs too.

Even in places which are pretty decent about green sources like the UK, most populated areas in the country have very dirty electricity - rated at about 250-300g/CO2 per kWh produced. In terms of emissions per mile driven, that's worse than some modern petrol and diesel cars. Yes, you can purchase green electricity from your supplier, but it doesn't change the fact that the electrons going into your car are not from a clean source at all.

That is flat out incorrect. Even in places that use only coal to generate electricity, EV CO2 emissions per mile are lower than gas vehicle emissions. See for yourself:

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

So I don't know why you're linking a US study when I specifically said UK where the emissions are 300g/kWh in some areas, but ok, I mean I can do this too.

Where I'm from(Poland) the biggest power plant is the Bełchatów power plant, which burns lignite for power - the CO2 emissions per kWh generated from that power plant are about 1kg/kWh produced[1]. At such an insane CO2 emissions rate even the most efficient EV - let's take a Model 3 - is worse than a modern petrol car.

According to this site[0] Model 3 is incredibly efficient, using only 11.9kWh for every 100km travelled. So that's about 120Wh per km. If you're getting electricity from the Bełchatów power plant, that also means that Tesla is "emitting" 120g of CO2/km travelled.

There are many modern cars that have their CO2/km emissions at less than 120g of CO2/km. But even if they are slightly above that, it doesn't change the fact that the emissions from driving an EV are not zero like some people say they are. Even if we go back to the UK and use that 300g of CO2/kWh figure, the Tesla is still emitting 40g of CO2/km travelled. That's not zero.

[0] https://thedriven.io/2020/10/20/model-3-achieves-record-low-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...

At 300g/kWh an EV would have to consume 500Wh/km to match combustion cars in terms of emissions.

Highway driving in the winter is the only scenario where an EV can reach 250Wh/km.

Those power plants could implement stronger emission controls.