[Sohcahtoa82]

It frustrates me that you think this is a genuine talking point.

If we're talking about powering cars, then even if your power comes from 100% coal, it's still cleaner to drive the EV than gasoline, simply because the coal power plant benefits from the economy of scale. It merely takes longer for the trade-off of the higher carbon footprint of manufacturing an EV to happen. But it does eventually happen.

If we're talking about powering an energy grid, nobody expects them to be charged via consumables. That's just silly. But battery storage is how you make wind/solar energy work without requiring burning consumables as a backup.