Tangential to oil, the US government tracks the availability of "strategic resources" ("critical minerals") via the USGS [1] For example, the US produces no ra

Tangential to oil, the US government tracks the availability of "strategic resources" ("critical minerals") via the USGS [1] For example, the US produces no rare earths, mostly because the process of extracting those is enfironmentally-unfriendly and we've closed all our mines that produced them, preferring to outsource production to places that don't care about the environmental impact, like China. From what I remember from the USGS talk many years ago, a lot of the critical minerals required for our modern technology comes from unstable regimes. The US could produce mine many of those locally, but of course it'd take many years to ramp up production (not even mentioning the local environmental impact) [1] https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/science/critical-mineral-resources https://www.usgs.gov/programs/mineral-resources-program/scie...