So you’re saying we should continue to burn fossil fuels in our cars because lithium mining is dirty?

It's okay to point out problems with a path to the future. It's also okay to still take that path even though it's not perfect. Eyes wide open. Lesser of two evils.

I'd promote it to essential.

The problem is that in open conversation like this a simple statement like 'Yet here we are talking about a lithium mine, which is not clean' is insufficiently contextualized to know where the commenter is coming from. Are they just trying to be transparent and realistic? Are they someone that has no dynamic range in their understanding of ecological harm? Are they long in petroleum and want to throw interference up at any point where electrification of transport comes up? Are they just being a contrarian troll?

I'm saying "lithium recycling" isn't yet such a benefit that we don't need to keep mining additional lithium.

Not to suggest OP was doing this, but it seems a bit weird to start your mouth watering at the notion of "I can't wait to strip 11 million tons of rock out of the side of this mountain, melt it down and refine it, so that we can start being clean with it by recycling."

A big factor there is that demand for Lithium is growing drastically and we don't really have that amount of Lithium pre-mined and ready to be recycled in the first place.

Can you go into detail as to how specifically it is not clean, and how it compares to the resource extraction of other things like steel, aluminum, oil, etc.