But even as the Trump administration shoots down emerging clean-energy technology, it has rushed to secure critical minerals – the raw materials that are crucial to renewable energy and emerging military technology – and the United States has spearheaded a number of actions meant to break China’s hold over the critical-mineral supply chain. Some experts say that the administration’s emphasis on national security is the likely point of its rush for critical minerals. But if the Trump administration stockpiles more of the minerals than the Pentagon uses, or if the mining industries don’t come together in the course of Trump’s second term, others believe that the president’s efforts could ultimately support renewable energy under a future administration.

“Currently, [critical mineral policy is] being deployed to advance a bellicose nationalism,” says Lorah Steichen, research manager at the Transition Security Project, a non-profit that investigates the U.S. and U.K. military industrial complexes as climate and economic threats. “Which is clearly in opposition to a just energy transition.”

On February 2, President Trump and the U.S. Export-Import Bank, or EXIM, announced an initiative called Project Vault – a $12-billion public–private partnership to stockpile critical minerals, meant to insulate the United States from supply shocks. It will consist of $2 billion in private capital and a $10-billion EXIM loan: companies such as Boeing, General Motors and Alphabet are expected to participate in the program and will be able to draw from the stockpile, provided they replenish the material they use.

“In theory, the project can already be used for clean energy,” says Bryan Bille, a policy and geopolitical principal at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Even if the current administration focuses on directing much of the stockpile toward the military, Bille explains, it will still be focused on ramping up U.S. battery capacity to serve the data centre boom.

A few days after the stockpile was announced, the administration held a “Critical Minerals Ministerial” in D.C. with representatives from more than 50 countries, where Vice President JD Vance proposed a special trade zone that would use tariffs to determine price floors and allow participating countries more stable access to critical minerals. The administration recently announced that it would also use AI to set price floors in some cases, specifically when dealing with minerals like gallium – 95% of which the United States imports from China. Because the market is currently so distorted by its single supplier, Peter Cook, a climate and energy analyst at The Breakthrough Institute, explains, AI could help determine the actual cost of producing gallium, which is essential to semiconductors and other electronics.

But whether any of this lasts is dependent on critical mineral policy being codified into legislation, Cook says, pointing to the Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply Act, which is currently in the Senate. “The key is if something like Project Vault is going to be durable beyond a single administration,” Cook says. “I think there’s certainly a possibility for [clean energy and national security stockpiling] to complement each other, instead of cannibalizing each other.”

Currently about 80% of rare-earth imports in the United States come from China, and the Trump administration has worked aggressively to break this market stranglehold through trade deals, taking equity stakes in several mining companies (which have been called into question by Democrats in the House and Senate), holding a summit to secure the AI supply chain, and even defying international law by exploring deep-sea mining in international waters.

But securing minerals alone is not enough to oust China as the world’s rare-earth and critical-minerals heavyweight. The United States still lacks the processing power to mould those minerals from raw materials, and killing the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies squashed a stream of demand, making it difficult to diversify the mineral supply chain, explains Tom Moerenhout, a professor at Columbia University who leads the Critical Materials Initiative at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.

“The short-term bottleneck is getting these [processing facilities built],” Cook says. “But the real bottleneck is going to be just overall supply from a geologic perspective.” In other words, even if mines were to be up and running tomorrow, the United States might not have access to a sufficient supply of critical minerals.

To complicate matters, there isn’t an absolute overlap between the minerals needed for green energy and those needed for defence production. Antimony, for example, which the administration has made a point of seeking out, is used in military technology but not solar panels or EV batteries. And, in recent weeks, conservatives appear to have made an abrupt about-face on clean technology, likely spurred by the extreme energy demands of data centres. How this will play out in the long run remains unclear.

Experts agree that building up resilient supply chains and infrastructure could be helpful, should a future administration return the country’s focus to a clean transition. But a robust, domestic network of mining and mineral processing will require a fundamental shift in how we think about and plan for mineral extraction and extractive zones as well.

“Everybody is criticizing China for this dominance, but it was created by the West,” says Raphaël Deberdt, a postdoctoral fellow at Copenhagen Business School who studies mining anthropology. “We offshored industries that we thought were too polluting. The dominance of China in terms of processing is the result of basically 40 years of the West not wanting that done in their countries.”

Nevertheless, an effective green industrial policy, Steichen, of the Transition Security Project, explains, is not just about reducing risk in the supply chain or providing the right incentives, but also minimizing the volume of extraction. “None of that is possible as long as critical-mineral strategy is premised on national security and mineral military expansion,” she says. The data centre explosion has put the need for increased mineral recycling into sharp relief, as the chips and servers required for operation need to be replaced every few years – creating tons upon tons of e-waste, much of which is not recycled.

A 2024 report in Nature Computational Science estimated that the rapid adoption of large language models will generate 2.5 million tons of e-waste a year by 2030. “If we’re using public money, there should also be attention to labour, environmental and community standards,” Steichen says. “As well as some of the potential problems around reinforcing U.S. resource nationalism.” The United States disposes of an enormous amount of critical minerals in mine wastewater, and the Energy Department’s research arm, ARPA-E, is currently working on ways to recover usable material from that waste. But regardless of how many solar panels the United States is able to build domestically, Steichen underscores that a truly effective green industrial policy will require global climate cooperation.

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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It was a grim start to the industry, and although wind energy has faced the normal uphill battle for any emerging technology, advancing peripatetically against financial and regulatory roadblocks, some of the old NIMBY superstition still seems to remain.

Last week, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, issued a stop-work order on the Revolution Wind project, which was 80% complete and expected to come online next year – bringing 704 megawatts of electricity to Connecticut and Rhode Island. In a letter to Ørsted, the company behind the project, BOEM cited national security concerns, without specifying what those concerns might be. On Saturday, the Trump administration cancelled US$679 million in funds that were meant to create manufacturing and logistics hubs for offshore wind at U.S. ports.

These are the latest in the Trump administration’s onslaught against renewables. On his first day in office, Trump paused new leasing and permitting of wind energy on federal land. The administration has gone on to end Biden-era tax credits for renewables, shut down the Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho, introduce byzantine regulations for projects on public land that will make renewables all but impossible to build, and announce plans to cancel an already-approved project off the coast of Maryland.

To some experts, the Trump administration’s latest actions against offshore wind look like a kill shot for the industry, one that will set it back decades. “International investors . . . look at the U.S. like a third-world country in terms of investment risk,” because it’s considered so politically unstable, said Hannes Pfeifenberger, principal at the economic consulting firm the Brattle Group. Pulling a project right before completion could scare off investors for years, even if a Democrat is elected in 2028.

“If you’re the next developer with a proposal for an offshore wind farm, the risk premium that you [would need] is going to be so much greater than it was for the existing facility,” Alexander Heil, a senior economist at the business think tank The Conference Board, told Grist. “That additional cost is going to find its way into utility bills, there’s no question about that. If the goal is ultimately cheap and available electricity, this is not the way to get there.” A recent study from Daymark Energy Advisors found that if contracted wind projects off the coast of New England had been in operation over the past winter, it could have saved ratepayers $400 million.

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