As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there's no argument here.
Re:
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
- the article focuses on lithium, which is not the only problematic material used in electric batteries
- the first source I checked (on total lithium in the world) was offline, so I could not confirm my suspicion that the author was talking about the total amounts including those inaccessible in the Earth's mantle
- the author admits herself that we have "enough lithium for decades to come", which is in-fucking-credibly stupid, because this planet has been around for billions of years, and one of the biggest flaws of mankind has been to empty a natural resource over a few decades "coz profits". Creating a demand for a resource that would only make it last a few decades would create another clusterfuck like all the wars and blood shed over crude oil. As a matter of fact, for mining conditions, we already have this clusterfuck, if you look at e.g. how cobalt is mined in the "democratic" republic of Congo
Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?
By the way - sodium requires salt, and that's also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we'd extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).
My overall point is: the world's car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.