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I don’t buy that assumption - simple as that.

From Darker side of electric cars in spotlight

Every electric vehicle (EV) will have a significant environmental impact in production – often greater than the impact of making a car with a combustion engine, experts say. In particular, EVs will require a huge rise in the raw materials needed to create the batteries and related hardware.
One recent study by scientists in Norway has found that in some circumstances electric cars can have a greater impact on global warming than conventional cars. Electric cars are only as green as the power that supplies them and, in many parts of the world, most electricity is still derived from fossil fuels.
Guillaume Majeau-Bettez, one of the authors of the report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says he was shocked and disappointed by the study’s findings. "The electric car has great potential for improvement, but ultimately what will make it a success or failure from an environmental standpoint is how much we can clean up our electricity grid - both for the electricity you use when you drive your car, and for the electricity used for producing the car."
Mining companies are positioning themselves to meet the increased need for raw materials that include lithium from Australia and Chile, cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo and nickel from Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Russia and the Philippines.
Environmentalists are alarmed by the mines and smelters needed to supply the electric vehicle industry. The Philippines has closed or suspended 17 nickel mines this year because of environmental concerns.
In Columbia, residents who live near the Cerro Matoso nickel mine, which spun-off from BHP Billiton in 2015, have reported elevated rates of birth deformities and respiratory problems associated with exposure to pollution generated by nickel mining and smelting.
UBS estimates that the combined production of pure EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs will mean a 12-fold increase in battery power will be needed by 2025.
This will boost global cobalt demand for plug-in vehicles at an average rate of around 20 per cent per annum for the next five years. Lithium demand is also set to rise by 16 per cent per year over the course of the next decade, quadrupling by 2025 to 750,000 tonnes. As a result, prices of key commodities associated with making batteries have exploded.
While demand for the minerals is growing, concerns are accelerating over the environmental footprint of the vast processing plants that are required to turn rare earth elements into materials that are needed in electric vehicles. Many of these are in located China, where environmental standards are low and difficult to monitor.

You think the Congo has decent labor laws? Kids are dying in order to get your battery resources. Mines all over the world are destroying the environment so you can drive 200 miles.

Why Lithium Mining For EV Batteries Should Be Our ‘Absolute Last Resort’

Lithium mining is having a devastating impact on local and indigenous communities as well as ecosystems around the globe, and reducing dependence on automobiles must be a key part of our strategy to curb the damage, a new report says.
According to a new analysis from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the rapid expansion of the electric vehicle battery market is driving a boom in demand for lithium carbonate, a synthesized compound whose key component — lithium itself — is derived from just a tiny handful of natural deposits located throughout the world. By 2030, experts expect global lithium carbonate demand to increase sixfold — and when it does, and a whopping 79 percent of that massive market will be consumed by automakers alone.
That’s particularly alarming for the Puna de Atacama region, which has become known in the battery industry as the global “Lithium Triangle” — much to the chagrin of local and indigenous communities. Located at the junction of Argentina, Chile and Bolivia, it’s a fragile ecosystem that’s home to more than 58 percent of the world’s supply of the rare metal, and has become a hotbed for a destructive mining process known as brine evaporation, wherein operators drill under the area’s spectacular wetland salt flats to pump out a lithium-rich slurry, damaging the habitats of three out of the world’s six total species of flamingos as well as countless other living creatures which call the landscape home. The saline mixture then spends over a year sitting in a series of “evaporation pools,” essentially wasting all the water involved.
Battery makers brag that producing a battery for a Tesla Model 3 through salt-flat drilling uses the equivalent amount of the water to make a nine-ounce steak or “half a pair of jeans,” and add that the water within the brine isn’t suitable for drinking or agricultural uses anyway. But the NRDC report authors say that “willfully ignores” the cycle by which the brine aquifers help supply surrounding freshwater aquifers, a process which scientists don’t fully understand — beyond that fact that disruption of the cycle is already causing fresh water sources to vanish.
Indigenous people have lived and farmed the Puna de Atacama region since at least 10,000 B.C., but their millennia-old practices are being upended by the mining industry, stoking tensions that sometimes precipitate violent altercations with police and state officials.

“An entire [water] vein that supplied the town, which was fundamental to the livestock and agricultural lifestyle of residents, dried up completely,” said Ezequiel Carrizo, an Argentinian activist with Fiambalá Despierta (Fiambalá Awakened) and other groups. “Today there’s nothing there.”

Meanwhile the hypothetical diesel rolling coal is having virtually zero impact on our environment--especially long-term damage. The oil well providing fuel takes up 100-200 square feet, with plants and tress growing quite close by.

So--it doesn't matter how far you are concerned. Truth is truth--and your EV is destroying the environment.