Europe may've gotten the short end of the stick, but there's plenty
If need be plenty more could found in Europe.
If you process many things in the West, you can't leave toxic chemicals in pools any more, to leak into ground water and cause cancer and other problems for people. So processing costs are going to be way more expensive than in a place where it's still OK to process+pollute and therefore kill and maim your citizens to make money.
The West cannot compete with that.
Do you have actual evidence that lithium refining is a massively dirty industrial process that would cost multiple times more the West? Or are you speculating?
Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas right now, they didn't seem to have massive environmental problems and delays so far.
In reality, the lead china has in these fields is more because of state investment policy and their drive to have an export car market. They saw the EV revolution as being able to make that happen, and it did.
Not every country is going to be self-sufficient in every natural resource, or be efficient producers of every product or service.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/united-kingd...
I've no doubt that a sudden cataclysmic change to international trade would spike food prices and increase poverty-derived food insecurity. But I doubt there would be physical calorie shortages.
If there was a sudden change, there might be calorie shortages. However, I agree that if importing become more expensive over the longer run, or even if there was a quick change, but one that could be predicted years in advance, there would be no calorie shortages.
However, the same is true for lithium: the UK could mine its own lithium, if importing become infeasible. I am not sure though, if it would make commercial sense even then: you can make batteries (and other gadgets) without lithium, and for many applications you can make do without batteries at all.
Eg instead of solely driving electric cars with home-grown lithium batteries, on the margin I would expect more people to take the train.
Whether or not its paranoia is the issue so you can’t presuppose it. Also, there is no reason you cant be concerned about multiple dependencies at the same time. In this case the topic is lithium.
Im sympathetic to the point that its fairly common but cant we overstate it’s abundance? As far as I know its not very evenly distributed and not everyone has good access to it.