"It seems like a strange position to say that we're going to mine our way out of the climate crisis, because we're programmed to think that mining is bad, and green is good," Professor Mavrogenes says. "But we're in this quandary where we're going to need a lot of magnets and batteries if we're going to do this, and that's going to take a lot of lithium and rare earths, and we're going to have to get them from somewhere."