[astrange]

Lithium is not a rare earth metal (neither is cobalt). There is actually quite a lot of it, but it's evenly distributed so needs a lot of demand to be worth extracting from seawater. On the other hand, if we got a lot of cheap lithium we could use it to improve everyone's mental health like those fluoride conspiracy theories.

Notably people think Tesla gets lithium from Bolivia because Elon made a joke about it once, but I think it actually comes from Australia.