It is a lot more complex than “Europe is actually following America more than China in this”.

Europe have very limited lithium deposits compared to China. Europe is trying to be as self sustaining as possible, especially now that the US have shown themselves to be a highly unreliable partner.

So exchanging one dependency for another is a poor lateral move at best.

You can’t just start digging up the entire ground and make car batteries out of all lithium you find.

European universities all over are researching alternative battery technology that doesn’t rely as much on lithium.

There’s this really neat thing called nuclear reactors that produce an enormous amount of energy. It’s only been around for ~70 years but they look promising.