It was clearly a combative "question", and entirely orthogonal to the topic under discussion, which was the accuracy of the claims about the scarcity of lithium

It was clearly a combative "question", and entirely orthogonal to the topic under discussion, which was the accuracy of the claims about the scarcity of lithium. It would have been entirely within the guidelines of polite discussion (and the site) to point out that scarcity isn't the only deciding factor, but the OP never made any assertions to that effect.