In June of 2021, President Joe Biden announced that his administration would mount a “whole of government” effort to secure U.S. supplies and supply chains related to a raft of critical energy minerals.

Biden was responding to the then-dawning reality that the glorious “energy transition” from fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal to wind, solar and electric vehicles he hoped to force could possibly take place without massive new supplies of minerals like lithium, cobalt, antimony, copper, silver and the array of rare earths that are integral to the manufacture of batteries, solar arrays and wind turbines and towers.

In his speech that June, Biden, reading from his ever-present teleprompter, detailed the need for the U.S. and other western nations to free supply chains for these important minerals from Chinese dominance. His assessment of the situation and the dangers it presented to U.S. national security was spot on. Unfortunately, his administration made very little progress over the final 3 1/2 years of his autopen presidency to do much about it.

That has all changed since Donald Trump took the oath of office for his second term in office in........

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