…I know that the ‘whole’ scientific community can be wrong…
Extremely improbable on this. As a philosophical position, science always concedes that something could come along tomorrow to disprove some position. However, it can also ascribe a level of confidence to such statements. What else would science have to have wrong for the fundametals of the modern understanding on climate change to be wrong? There is so much that routinely and consistently works and makes sense that would have to have been completely misunderstood for the fundamentals on climate change to also be wrong that it is just plain utterly implausible that it is wrong. The physics behind the way molecules like CO2 absorb infra-red radiation has been well documented for over a century and nothing has ever happened in a laboratory or in observations of nature to even hint that we might have got anything wrong about that.
It would be like saying that the fundamentals on the Theory of Evolution in biology are wrong. Possible in principle but as someone famously said “Nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution.” There are so many diverse lines of evidence that all consistently point the same way that Evolution is elevated to Theory, not mere hypothesis.
It would be like telling an engineer that everything we thought we understood about the way a suspension bridge stays up was wrong. It is possible but so unlikely that we can be comfortable about continuing to build bridges based on the consensus understanding.
The evidence on the fundamentals of climate change are as clear and confident as those examples. Of course we would all wish that it were not true but wishing doesn’t make the problem go away.
…Charging stations and electric cars aren’t going to save the world but we are led to believe it is a step in the right direction. It isn’t really…
Of course EVs will not save the world if they are the only emissions reduction measure we undertake. However, given that people are going to keep buying cars, making EVs is a lot better than continuing to make cars that burn fossil fuel. An electric car quickly repays the increased emissions required for its production and they only get cleaner as the electricity grid gets increasing proportions of renewable generation. An EV already produces lower emissions on our still coal-heavy grid and they get less polluting with every passing year. We are already past 36% renewables in the past year and should be past 80% by 2030. An ICE vehicle never gets less polluting.
With EVs, we also get other benefits. Aside from the reduction in global pollution, we can also greatly improve health in cities with reductions in local air pollution. They contribute to energy security. No longer would we need liquid fuels dependent on dodgy regimes half way around the world and long, expensive-to-defend supply lines. No longer would we need to get involved in wars to secure those liquid fuels coming from ever more remote and difficult to extract locations, with greater emissions for extraction, transport and processing before we even get to burn the stuff on our streets. Instead we can run our transport on energy generated in Australia from diverse, distributed sources, which is inherently more robust.
On top of that they are just much nicer cars to drive and much cheaper to operate.