The world is hungry for more stuff: televisions, phones, motors, container ships, solar panels, satellites. That means the stuff required to make stuff is in high demand, and none more so than what are known as “critical minerals.”

These are a handful of elements and minerals that are particularly important for making the modern devices that run the global economy. But “critical” here doesn’t mean rare so much as it means essential — and alarmingly vulnerable to supply chain shocks.

In the US, the Geological Survey has flagged 50 minerals as critical to our economy and security. And including some among that larger group, the US Department of Energy is focused on 18 materials that are especially important for energy — copper for transmission lines, cobalt for cathodes in batteries, gallium for LEDs, neodymium for magnets in motors, and so on.

For governments, these minerals are more than just industrial components — they’re potential bottlenecks. If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply, companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down.

That’s because these minerals are especially vital for so many clean energy technologies. They’re essential for the tools used to produce, store, transmit, and use electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. They’re vital to building solar panels, batteries, and electric motors. As the worldwide race for cleaner energy speeds up, the demand for these products is surging. According to the International Energy Agency, mineral demands from clean energy deployment will see anywhere from a doubling to a quadrupling from current levels by 2040.

But these minerals aren’t spread evenly across the world, which could leave some countries bearing most of the environmental burdens from mining critical minerals while wealthier nations reap the economic benefits and other countries get left out of the supply chain entirely.

“A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at a panel last year. “For developing countries, critical minerals are a critical opportunity — to create jobs, diversify economies, and dramatically boost revenues. But only if they are managed properly.”

Right now, the US is a major consumer of critical minerals, but not much of a producer — a fact that’s become an obsession for the Trump administration. The president has signed several executive orders aimed at increasing critical mineral production within the US by relaxing regulations and speeding up approvals for new critical mineral extraction projects. In Congress, lawmakers are mulling spending billions of dollars to build up a critical mineral stockpile similar to the........

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