U.S. politics currently allow for vanishingly few areas of bipartisan consensus. But one thing government officials of all kinds tend to agree on is the importance of mining. In particular, they seek “transition minerals,” which are vital to the shift away from fossil fuels. These include lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel (often called critical minerals, essential for rechargeable batteries), as well as rare-earth minerals such as yttrium, scandium, and lanthanides (integral components of green infrastructure). Freedom from dirty energy, it would appear, requires doubling down on the decidedly nonrenewable practice of mineral extraction.

The Biden administration devoted billions of dollars to building a domestic supply chain for critical minerals and called for half of all new cars to be electric or hybrid by 2030. Despite its well-documented hostility toward electric vehicles, the Trump administration recently took the unusual step of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a private company to grow domestic mineral production. Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, craves Ukraine’s mineral wealth; the desire for mining access also partly motivated Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and Canada.

The mass deployment of technologies that these minerals make possible—fleets of electric cars; flocks of wind turbines; a cleaner energy grid—may be imperative if our society is to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and thereby avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. Yet the green transition comes at a significant cost. The mining of minerals such as lithium “often leaves parts of the Earth itself uninhabitable,” the political scientist Thea Riofrancos writes in her astute new book, Extraction. As Riofrancos notes, approximately 69 percent of transition minerals—and a whopping 85 percent of lithium reserves