Follow the smoke. An average petrol car burns around 17,000 litres of fuel over its lifetime. That’s 17,000 litres of something that has to be extracted from the ground, transported, refined, distributed and eventually burned. And yet, every time someone wants to convince you that electric cars are bad for the environment, where do they point? A lithium mine? Cobalt mining? They’ll show you pictures of scarred landscapes, enormous mining equipment and mountains of displaced earth. They’ll tell you about the environmental damage caused by extracting lithium, nickel and cobalt. And they’re right about one thing. Mining has an environmental impact and nobody should pretend otherwise. They’ll happily show you a lithium mine, but strangely enough, they never show you the oil wells. They never show you the drilling rigs, the leaking pipelines, the gas flaring, the oil tankers crossing oceans or the refineries operating around the clock. They never mention the energy required to extract crude oil from beneath the ground, transport it thousands of miles, turn it into petrol and deliver it to your local filling station. And all of that happens before you’ve driven a single mile. The materials required to manufacture an electric vehicle battery are largely extracted once. Those materials can remain in the battery for hundreds of thousands of miles, and valuable metals can eventually be recovered and recycled. An ICE vehicle needs a continuous supply of freshly extracted fossil fuels for its entire working life. And when that petrol disappears through the exhaust, it doesn’t magically vanish. It becomes carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, benzene and other emissions. Burning just one litre of petrol produces approximately 2.3 kilograms of CO2 at the exhaust. Multiply that by 17,000 litres. That’s approximately 39 TONNES OF CO2. And that’s just the exhaust emissions. It doesn’t include extracting the oil, transporting it, refining it or delivering the petrol. Meanwhile, the battery materials in an electric car are still physically there, ready to be recovered and used again. That’s the difference between an energy system built around continuously burning resources and one increasingly capable of reusing them. Lifecycle studies consistently find that electric cars produce substantially fewer greenhouse gas emissions than comparable petrol cars, even after accounting for battery manufacturing and electricity generation. In fact, the International Council on Clean Transportation estimated in 2025 that battery electric cars sold in the European Union produce approximately 73% fewer lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than comparable petrol cars. That’s not 73% less pollution from the exhaust. That’s across the vehicle’s entire lifecycle, including manufacturing, energy production and driving. Of course, electric vehicles aren’t environmentally perfect. But nobody needs to pretend electric cars are perfect to demonstrate that they’re significantly cleaner. They just need to compare the whole picture. Where are the pictures of the oil industry? Where are the drilling rigs? Where are the refineries? Where are the tankers? FOLLOW THE SMOKE.