I don't know about this specifically, but that sounds surprising: isn't lithium one of the most common elements in the universe?

This was a minor point in Watchmen, which is where I first heard of it, so this has been the popular perception for why EVs didn't happen for at least 30 years. It appears to be a somewhat serious concern, but as our experience with oil shows, provable known reserves track price to a degree that pessimistic calculations rarely take into account. (Lithium ion batteries also appear to be easily but expensively recyclable, meaning that once the price gets high enough, the total amount of active lithium is the issue, not the demand for new lithium each year.)