Interesting. The more common argument I've seen is that every hybrid or electric vehicle purchased takes a gas powered car, presumably one with decent life left it in, off the road. The pollution created by doing that outweighs the gains of reducing fuel use.

Although, Lithium ion batteries do suck. They degrade quickly, relatively speaking, and once they've degraded past the point of being useful, you have a big piece of borderline explosive hazmat to deal with, and probably a lot of pollution given that the car is almost certainly worth less than the replacement battery and installation process.

Once hydrogen fuel cells or some other low-degradation power source is available, I'll look seriously into hybrid or electric vehicles.

---