For electric vehicles (EVs), this issue of critical mineral supplies is the key to everything. The main reason why EVs weigh so much more than gas and diesel powered cars is the prodigious amount of critical energy minerals that go into the making of the lithium-ion batteries that power them. The minerals required include lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and graphite, all of which are recovered via hard rock mining operations.

But the U.S. and other countries in North America and Europe made a collective decision to essentially farm out the business of hard rock mining to developing nations and the processing of them to China in the 1980s as part of the environmental priorities of that time. As a result, most supply chains for these and other key energy minerals are under control of the communist Chinese government.