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Urban Political Ecology theory.
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Sounds like some academic garbage if you ask me.
I don't think it's fair to compare point-source pollution from battery manufacturing and disposal to global scale climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. I believe that, at some cost, the former is something that could be feasibly engineered away. In contrast, you can't really fix CO2 in the atmosphere unless you had unlimited money and science fiction technologies.
Likewise, its unfair to lump in the carbon emissions from energy inputs needed to make batteries when arguing about the merits of renewable energy because the end game is convert everything to carbon-free sources of electricity. In that respect, if it takes a lot of energy to make a battery but the energy comes from the sun, so what? Any counter-arguments to this deviate from the core issue of climate change.
I'm not sure what the end game people who are skeptical of battery tech are advocating for. Is it one where everyone is poor and lives like a Cuban in the 1990s because that's what sustainability without tech or engineering looks like. Or, more likely, are they just apologists for the status quo, who want us to think that it makes more sense to run cars on gasoline forever?