LETTER: Why protect a flower if the world is going to end?

In July, President Joe Biden declared that climate change is an existential threat. This means that life as we know it will end unless changes are made. The solution he and those on the left advocate is to cease the use of fossil fuels and to instead use renewable energy. Sadly, however we cannot transition to electric car batteries without mining for the minerals, such as lithium, needed to construct the batteries.

Yet I read in the Review-Journal that, due to the existential threat to a flower called Tiehm’s buckwheat in the Nevada desert, a lithium mining project must stop until they can figure out how to save the flower. So, as I understand it, the environmentalists wish to save a flower from extinction rather than mine the materials required to save our planet from extinction.

Won’t the flower be gone, too? Not getting it.