How best can environmentalists burn carbon?

We have a debate on the co2 costs of building out a lithium battery infrastructure.

This is mainly about lithium mines and huge city sized battery packs so folks can drive at night. Environmental optimists tell us that the huge investment in released co2 can be recovered over a few decades.  The ice we melt today we can freeze again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is 15 years away. What happens to the fundamentals of battery technology and liquid fuels technology? The reduction of free co2 from the atmosphere into liquid fuels is extremely inefficient, but it uses the existing liquid fuels infrastructure, we are not building lithium cities.

Making battery electrodes better at containing charge is the same problem, at the quantum level, as reducing co2.  They both benefit from science at the equal rate. We are better off keeping both methods at the pilot stage; improve the fundamental process first, deploy widely second.