It's not just a case of them being happy to dig nasty stuff out of the ground without care. If anything it's because they lack a specific type of nasty stuff to dig out of the ground and so their government hasn't been totally captured by fossil fuel interests.
The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
China still produces plenty of coal, so I'm not sure what your point is. I guess you mean oil, and their move into EVs totally makes sense from that context even if they can get it cheaply from Iran and Russia these days.
But the cost is huge. Even the Chinese central government is pragmatic enough to admit that they have a huge unsustainable problem; e.g. https://time.com/6258519/china-lithium-mining-environmental-...
> The crackdown in Yichun, Jiangxi province, follows a local lithium frenzy over the past year as miners raced to feed rampant demand for the battery material — and to benefit from record global prices. Now, they’re grappling with a close-up inspection by environment officials sent from Beijing.
You can tour the Chinese countryside and find tons of places like this.
> The west actively abdicated their early lead on all these technologies.
The west could not keep up Chinese refiners because Chinese refiners have little regard for their environment. As the Chinese central government cracks down and the west worries more about their resource security, the Chinese will simply lose that advantage.
China being the “main supplier” has more to do with them undercutting everyone else in refining by not paying attention enough to their environment, it isn’t sustainable. All of these raw materials have ample reserves outside of China. Some of battery economy comes from that, but not most of it.
There are other ways to store energy than batteries. The Pacific Northwest and even California has a lot of pumped storage hydro capacity. Hydro is a renewable that can be used on demand, and can be combined with other renewables to move water back up to reservoirs.