Access to raw materials may be a fundamental blocker there.
I had seen stats putting China's control of certain rare earth minerals as high as 80% and products like lithium batteries as high as 97%. I don't know the industry well enough to validate that, but I couldn't find anything refuting or disproving those numbers either. If true, we very well may not be able to make them here if China were to cut off those resources long term.
That will be a rude awakening for a lot of people if we have to start mining that heavily here. We were able to have our cake and eat it too as long as we could talk green while outsourcing our environmental damage due to mining overseas.
No one can do anything in the west because you can’t mine or process anything. Countries like China have no regulations preventing the processing of raw materials.
Oh, you can, generally, it's just not fine to poison the whole region's water supply doing it, which less rich countries care less about, and which makes it expensive.
I had seen stats putting China's control of certain rare earth minerals as high as 80% and products like lithium batteries as high as 97%. I don't know the industry well enough to validate that, but I couldn't find anything refuting or disproving those numbers either. If true, we very well may not be able to make them here if China were to cut off those resources long term.