Electing new politicians who say they will push for implementation of more sustainable energy and for companies to bear the burden of the full lifecycle of the products they produce (the world’s ICE vehicles won’t just disappear unless someone is made to properly recycle them) is a long term strategy typically only available as an option every 3 or 4 years.
Another strategy is to hound your current politicians to push for these things. Find your representative(s) and start bombarding them with letters outlining how you want them to vote and why. Why wait for the election cycle to come round when the current representatives are already in and deciding things.
Maybe we could start a Lemmy community/KBin magazine etc and start finding like minded individuals who are keen to do the same. We could use it to host a repository of well written letter templates that outline specific issues while not making the people sound like nutbags and a set of guides for different jurisdictions and tiers of government in different countries.
EVs tend to beat internal combustion cars even when the electricity comes entirely from fossil fuels, since the big power plants tend to be able to convert heat to electricity much more efficiently than a car engine can. But we don’t get all our power from fossil fuels these days – renewables, nuclear, and hydroelectric are all producing a significant portion. Depending on where you are it might be about half fossil fuels on average, but with huge regional variation.
We do need to transition away from fossil fuel power generation, but that’s a thing we can do in parallel to replacing our vehicle fleet.
(We also need to drive a lot less and use smaller vehicles on average, but that’s another topic.)
