The supposed lithium shortage has always been a red herring used by oil supporters. The theory goes something like this "if we rely too much on electric vehicle

The supposed lithium shortage has always been a red herring used by oil supporters. The theory goes something like this "if we rely too much on electric vehicles and hybrids we will switch from reliance on oil exporting countries to reliance on lithium exporting countries, which will be just as bad or even worse." Then the oil supporter starts drawing a scary picture of evil socialist Bolivia which is poised to take over the US economy with its vast lithium deposits. Of course this ignores a couple of things -- (i) lithium is not that rare, and is not only found in Bolivia and most importantly (ii) lithium is not used up or destroyed in batteries. It can be recycled. So it is very unlikely that we will get into the situation of progressively using up all the lithium supply and having a lithium crisis and so on.