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Bjorn Lomborg, an environmental economist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center has some pretty harsh criticism to make against electric vehicles (EVs). But is he correct?

Here are a few of the points Lomborg makes against electric vehicles:

• Coal-burning power plants generate the electricity used to charge them.
• Coal is more polluting than gasoline.
• Lithium mining for the batteries is environmentally harmful.
• More CO₂ is emitted when manufacturing an EV than a conventional vehicle.

Those are fairly valid points of critique, but if you're looking at your Prius right now with

Afraid of cars that drive themselves? You’re not alone. 3 of 4 U.S. drivers are afraid of the technology: https://t.co/I5FqTdG8Gy

— Edmunds.com (@edmunds) March 8, 2016

Many new technologies are looked at with suspicion. Cellphones could give you cancer, people say. The Large Hadron Collider could rip the fabric of space-time apart and suck us all into a black hole.

Most of these suspicions turn out to be unfounded... but what about self-driving cars?

Proponents will point out the large number of fatal traffic accidents that occur every year, the majority of which are caused…