For those who speak French, I recommend talks and books by Philippe Bihouix, in which he explains the environmental and societal challenges associated with our new thirst for rare earths and metals.
Lithium is extracted from water which is pumped to the surface and allowed to evaporate. What's left is a salt that has a high concentration of lithium and is further refined.
I'm not saying it's a process without environmental impact, but it seems like there should be some sound way of domestically extracting this resource that reduces our carbon output.
On the bright side, it's pumping salty water out of the ground and making clouds out of it.
I think now we should look for better alternatives to the current way wreck with the environment, eletric cars are better than the ones moved by oil -- by a wide margin, even taking in account that you need to mine lithium. Just check the environmental implications of fracking, yet -- people still do it.
There is always a way. What governments and police makers should care is to understand the environment implications and create a good legal framework and there is law enforcement, so companies do it correctly.
We can either let this fear aside and believe humanity will need this step to perhaps takes other and find more efficient ways of creating energy. Or we can die in fear by keeping this dependency in oil, which btw, we will run out soon.
Earth itself is a timebomb with 7bi people, with the current way we do things. We should be definitely pushing for changes and figure out what we could do in order to get rid of this problem. Also invest more into fusion energy. Develop new shit, basically. We have had much progress in history because people were bold and tried new things. If nowadays humanity is ruined by fear of doing things and press, earth is going to become nothing and humanity will collapse. Don't get triggered by this fear.
Sometime after we stop mining fossil fuels, I hope.