That's the thing with unsustainability, dude. No individual cares. It's about the aggregate.

I'm aware. Renewables and electric cars are on a tear. Don't force density when you can use technology instead to lower your impact. It's clear the city is too expensive for many, and folks are going to filter out of urban cores until a density equilibrium is reached.

Do you care if I live in the middle of nowhere in the mountains if all of my power is clean solar, our cars are electric, I work from home, and pay for carbon offsets for anything I need shipped to the home (until UPS, Fedex, and USPS electrify)? Personally, I'll pay whatever it costs to not have a neighbor within a 15 minute walk of my property, but still have national parks within a 30 minutes drive.

I don't care because I like to live like that myself for other reasons (city people like authoritarianism too much for me). I don't even care that you live like that now.

That doesn't change the sustainability argument.

We don’t have enough lithium on the planet for everybody to have their own electric car. Just because something is on paper sustainable, doesn’t make it actually sustainable.

Lithium is absurdly abundant. It can be recycled. Lithium concentrations in electrolytes are constantly being lowered. Finally it is possible to manufacture batteries without cobalt. Cobalt is a bigger problem than lithium because most production facilities extract cobalt as a byproduct of other mining activities. Dedicated cobalt mines are possible but it would result in higher costs.

That's wildly incorrect. Proven reserves of lithium only are a few decades of consumption, because why would you keep looking and measuring now when you already have so much available?