There is an irony at the heart of the clean energy transition that its architects have been reluctant to address: you cannot build a carbon-neutral industrial economy on supply chains that run through adversarial, autocratic, or geopolitically exposed nations.
The rare earth story, China's dominance over the processing of the minerals that go into EV motors and wind turbines, has made this point visible in the last three years. But there is a less-discussed version of the same problem involving a metal that sits at the center of both the hydrogen economy and the emissions compliance infrastructure of the existing vehicle fleet. Palladium. And in February 2026, the U.S. government took a step that makes the supply chain design flaw impossible to ignore any longer: it issued a preliminary 132.83 percent anti-dumping tariff on Russian palladium imports.
