Everyone has a dog in this hunt, because everyone has political beliefs, and everyone lives on the planet.

Your friend is off by quite a bit.

There are roughly a billion cars in the world: https://www.worldometers.info/cars/

Copper reserves are here:

https://copperalliance.org/about-copper/long-term-availability/

There are estimated to be 5000 million tonnes of copper on the planet. Let's concentrate on known reserves, 870 million tonnes. That's 870 billion kilos, or at 80kg per car, over 10 billion cars. (If we use all the copper on the planet as the metric, that's 60 billion cars.)

So actually there's between 10 and 60 times as much copper as is needed to replace all the world's cars.

I however agree that we can't just throw away all the gasoline cars and make new electric cars. Individuals should simply not own cars at all.

I never had a car or any internal combustion engine, and for most of my life I've had enough money saved I could have walked into a store and buy one for cash - by which I mean that I chose not to own a car.

This October I bought my first new bicycle in 40 years - just a mechanical bike, no batteries.

(I've had second hand bikes. I had managed to prolong the junker I was riding for years, but eventually, the bike shop refused to work on it, saying it would be too dangerous for me and I thought I'd splurge a bit.)

It's one of the favorite possessions I have ever had.