There's an old truth saying that the longer you wait the more expensive and hard things will be to change.
Ironic, since the truth is the reverse.
Only if you ignore the cost of the obsolete infrastructure you spend money on and the cost of decommissioning it, in addition to the cost of the new infrastructure.
Yeah, I've seen it. The one where they talk about leasing the battery pack to the owner of the car. This is because the battery will not last as long as an average car, which is only about 7-9 years. Imagine if you had to completely rebuild your engine every two years, how well would that vehicle compete in an open market?
toyoto warranties the prius' battery for 8 years/100k miles. do you really think they would do that if they didn't think it would last at least that long?
one of the local taxi companies jumped on the original prius as soon as it came out here back in 2001. the batteries are still going strong.
Food shortages, as a result from climate change, isn't a credible threat. Far more likely is the rapid expansion of agriculture for the above noted reasons.
only up to a point. past a certain degree of warming (+3 degrees, IIRC), the losses overtake the gains, mostly because much of the land the growing zone expands into is utterly useless for farming. permafrost just turns into a marshy mess and you're not growing anything on barren rock regardless of how warm it gets.
They contain huge amounts of poisons that would contanimate any area that a major accident occurred.
These aren't lead-acid or nickel-cadmium.
NiMH batteries contain nickel (obviously), cobalt, magnesium ,or aluminum. and various rare earths (lanthanum, cerium, neodymium, and praseodymium), which aren't particularly toxic.
You're electric vehicle burns coal, as delayed and distant that combustion may be. And don't even bother to bring up solar power or wind power to run the American private vehicle fleet. That doesn't even come close to being realistic.
It would still be an improvement due to efficiency of scale. a car-size IC engine is about 25% efficient, at best. combined cycle coal will do 50%+.
it's also nicer for general pollution outside of CO2, as it's loads easier and cheaper to scrub the hell out of the emissions of a handful of big plants than to try to scrub tens of thousands of itty bitty engines.