There are more locations in Europe then that. Britain used to get Lithium from Cornwall and there are companies trying to revive that. But Europe simply hasn't put much effort into finding them.

If need be plenty more could found in Europe.

When I read that something is being shipped to China for processing, it makes me mentally add "Where there are no environmental laws, and processing in a very polluting way is OK".

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.

I think people are to quick to just talk away any success China has as 'don't care for the environment' and 'don't care for people'. This might be sometimes true bit also more often isn't.

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.

That's the thing with people promoting communism, they always see themselves assigned to do something similar to what they do now. No one ever expects to be the person sent to the lithium smelting plant.

its also funny how the most committed communists are those who wants others to fund it. Their exact level of "take home money" to spend on what they want, is the EXACT amount that "should be allowed". Similar to how bernie sanders were giving his "millionaires and billionaires" spiel, when he then became a millionaire himself, the tune changed, and his speeches became "billionaires!". And suddenly "you too can become a millionaire if you write a book"

That shows none in the vast majority of European countries. Im sure there is more than that diagram shows but its not what the diagram shows.