> Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust.

Sure, and rare earth metals aren't really all that rare. The problem is that the processing cost is well beyond economical for most of it.

Markets disagree: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium

"Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust."

Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.

Same was true of oil. People predicted peak oil multiple times over, thinking we’d found all the easy oil, and drilling for the expensive oil was gonna lower production. That never happened, instead people found ways to get the hard oil cheaper, e.g. by fracking, and peak oil has yet to happen. Lithium mining is sure to go through similar story. Maybe after the third failed prediction of “peak lithium” they will find ways to harvest it from the ocean or something.

It is well possible, but there are factors other than price in play. Fracking seems to be fairly dangerous for the environment, and current methods of lithium production have this problem as well (a lot of water is consumed in dry Bolivia to produce lithium).

In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.

This is a good point. I certainly hope this history doesn’t repeat. However if we keep our current economic incentives, it probably will.

In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.