>>14266732>>14266741>>14266745The US is a net oil producer and making plastics is a chemically simple process. The barrier to entry is building the actual reaction vessels and facilities to make the plastic feedstock. The idea that the US is somehow beholden to China because that's where we get a shitload of our disposable consumer garbage is a myth, those industries are not vital to an economy, they're only useful for minmaxing economic throughput. Would massive chinese sanctions on the US hurt the US? Yes. Would it be something that would kill the US economy and lead to empty shelves and rampant industrial/military/civil collapse? Zero percent chance.
It's similar to the US and its reliance on Russian titanium. The reason we had been buying titanium this whole time is because the Soviets figured out how to produce industrially significant quantities before the US did, and it was cheaper and faster for the US to set up a shell company network to buy Soviet titanium than it would be to build domestic production, especially since titanium is a very niche material that wouldn't be required in quantities approaching that of other metals like aluminum or copper or zinc etc.
When the soviet union collapsed the US started openly buying titanium from Russia as a means of economic diplomacy (exactly like the US buying launches on Russian vehicles to keep affiliated engineers employed in russia instead of being scooped up by north korea or wherever else). We continued this up until the past few days when the US halted basically all trade with russia. Depending on how long this is going to last, at some point the US would have enough unsatisfied demand for titanium that they would put up a contract to develop and build a titanium smelting operation in the continental states and put it up for competitive bidding.
We are already seeing analogous industry spin-up with semiconductors due to recent disruption of supply chains.
