It isn't necessarily the case that all resource extraction necessitates pollution. We often end up with pollution because we don't have enough energy to impleme

It isn't necessarily the case that all resource extraction necessitates pollution. We often end up with pollution because we don't have enough energy to implement approaches that are more energy-expensive, but pollute less. If we had more energy, perhaps due to cheap fusion, we could extract a lot more resources without necessarily polluting everything. For instance, if we could afford to heat all discarded outputs up to plasma temperatures, we'd never have to chemically pollute anything. We could easily break the chemicals down to safer variants. Most of the elements are either fairly safe or easy to turn into something safe. But by modern standards that's an insane amount of energy. Possible much more sophisticated nano-/bio-tech could do much better. If we had more energy and robotics, we could also do things like backfill our strip mines and put the topsoil back on top. We don't do that because it's absurdly expensive, not because mining intrinsically requires that we tear the landscape apart. But I am aware that I'm talking about making things literally orders of magnitude more expensive than they are now. We couldn't do it now. I'm just saying that the destruction isn't intrinsic to the resource extraction. Even "fossil fuels" would be no big deal if we had tons more energy. We know how to take CO2 out of the air and turn it back into solid forms for long-term storage right now. We just don't have the energy to do it cost-effectively for any current known technique, and we especially can't do it for thermodynamic reasons by trying to use the energy from burned fossil fuels in the first place.