Unintended consequences in lithium batteries

The electric-hybrid cars with lithium batteries that we are constantly told should be built and marketed to the public come with an environmental and social cost. Not only is lithium a finite resource, but the people of the communities in Bolivia where the world's largest reserves of lithium lie have great reservations of mining the resource due to environmental concerns and also simple resistance to having, as they say, industrialized countries exploit them for the lithium. In this case it seems that as the Western world tries to move away from oil, in some respects due to the hostility of the nations that have the largest reserves and due to climate change, it also falls into the same sort of trap it desperately wishes to leave behind. It's not easy being green.