Or fossil fuels. We do a lot of damage to our planet to extract coal, gas, and oil. And that's before you consider the damage we then do by burning it. Most of

Or fossil fuels. We do a lot of damage to our planet to extract coal, gas, and oil. And that's before you consider the damage we then do by burning it. Most of that becomes redundant if we scale renewable energy production enough. The impact of Lithium mining is absolutely tiny in comparison to all that. And it kind of is really important as a resource to complete that transition. The good news is that lithium is really common. The bad news is it's mostly not found in high concentrations. For example, ocean water contains about 180 billion tonnes of lithium. But in a concentration of 0.2 parts per million, you'd need to process about five million tonnes of ocean water to get 1 tonne of lithium. Extracting lithium and other minerals from sea water is something we can do nevertheless. It's just not very economical to do it. But the good news is that we are aware of quite a few natural deposits with much higher concentrations of lithium in either brines or different kinds of mineral deposits. That's nature taking its course over billions of years concentrating the lithium for us. And we've barely scratched the surface (quite literally) looking for that stuff as the interest in large scale lithium mining did not exist until about 10-20 years ago. In short, we're not going to run out of lithium. There's plenty of it. Extracting it is indeed costly and depending on how it's done can be a bit nasty. But the good news is that the damage is typically highly localized. And we have ways to mitigate that. And once extracted we can use the lithium over and over again. It's not destroyed by using it. Unlike fossil fuels.