<waves hands at literally every strip mine on the planet and the insane amounts of pollution and environmental devastation they wreaked>
Because we care about the environment a bit more in Europe and Scandinavia than we used to. Part of responsible planet ownership is foregoing short term gain for a nice planet to live on long term.
Mining lots of various minerals is necessary to transition the world to a net-neutral climate gas economy that has similar standard of living as today. Huge increases in production of batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, synthetic fuel production and so on.
And this is necessary because the people of the world are not willing to reduce their standard of living to a level where net neutral climate gas emissions are possible without a similarly huge economic development. Some dream that this is possible, but it's plainly politically impossible. (Or in so many words, the people of less developed nations will kill their leaders if they try to force it on them, democracies will vote their politicians out).
So essentially, the choice is between some local environmental damage due to mining and new industry, or indefinitely continuing climate gas emissions and the corresponding climate change, which will hit poorer people disproportionately and continue causing war and mass extinction.
With that attitude, I really hope Sweden goes "that's not our problem" and leaves it where it found it. Heaven forbid we might want to use it for infinitely better things, say, 300 years from now. When we're no longer a shit species destroying the planet. If we're lucky.
Personally, I'd prefer not to condemn 2 billion people to war, famine and poverty due to avoidable consequences of human nature. Sweden ostensibly has a similar political climate, but I wonder if it's still true when push comes to shove.
