Exxon knew of climate change in the 70s and hid it.
Electric cars aren’t any better for the environment given all the mining that goes into the batteries right?
There are certainly issues with the mining of rare earth and other minerals required to build all the batteries, but a) they are not, by and large, carbon issues, and b) there are some promising new battery technologies that would use fewer of these resources coming along within the next decade or so.
Don’t make the mistake of seeing it as a binary thing: electric cars are not perfect, all-natural devices that cause no environmental issues from conception to disposal, but they are, on balance, much better than internal-combustion engines, especially for climate change, which is the really big environmental issue most likely to cause problems for human civilization.
Imagine for a moment that coal, oil, gas, metals, rare earth elements, lithium, etc etc were all simply an interchangeable concept of "bad mass". Meaning, we need the mass to do something, but the process of mining/extracting/producing it has bad side affects.
One way of doing things, the bad mass is produced and consumed on a constant basis. The gas in your tank is used exactly once.
The other way of doing things the bad mass is produced and re-used for roughly a decade, after which it can be recycled. The lithium in your EV battery will get used several thousand times in its first life, a few hundred more in a secondary application, and then recycled for who knows how many more uses.
So simply from a "consumed" vs. "re-used" basis the process of mining lithium (and cobalt etc) would have to be thousands and thousands of times worse than the process of drilling/extracting/refining oil just for them to break even.
It is good and important to recognize that simply replacing ICEs with EVs is closer to harm reduction than problem-solving, but it is a very very large harm reduction so statements like "electric cars aren't any better for the environment given all the mining" retard that harm reduction.