Who bears the cost of mining the minerals for a green future?
Copper, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements - the periodic table of the clean energy transition reads like a geopolitical chessboard. Governments and corporations know they need these minerals for wind turbines, electric vehicles, and semiconductors. They also know that supply chains are dangerously concentrated, with China dominating rare earth mining and refining. So the United States and European Union are racing to diversify: producing more domestically, bringing manufacturing back from abroad, or shifting operations to allied nations.
But a commentary published in Nature Energy by researchers led by Jessica DiCarlo of the University of Utah asks an uncomfortable question: does it matter where the mining happens if the rules of extraction stay the same?
On-shoring, re-shoring, friend-shoring - and their blind spots
The three dominant strategies for securing critical raw materials (CRMs) each have a geographic logic. On-shoring develops new domestic operations. Re-shoring brings back previously offshored industries. Friend-shoring relocates supply chains to geopolitically aligned countries. All three aim to reduce dependence on adversarial suppliers.
None of them, the authors argue, automatically makes extraction more ethical or sustainable. More than half of proposed new CRM facilities are located on or near agrarian or Indigenous land. The environmental toll - damage to air, water, biodiversity, and livelihoods - remains whether the mine sits in the Congo, Australia, or Nevada.
Just-shoring as a framework
DiCarlo and colleagues propose just-shoring, a framework built around three questions: Who benefits? Whose risks are amplified? How much material extraction is actually necessary for a just transition?
The framework goes beyond voluntary best practices. Existing international agreements, including the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, recommend a shift to local resource control but leave compliance voluntary. Just-shoring argues for enforceable mechanisms that give communities a legal right to co-govern throughout the entire mineral lifecycle - from initial exploration and permitting through closure, cleanup, and recycling.
This is a significant departure from current practice. Mining permits are typically granted by national or regional governments, with community input relegated to comment periods that carry no binding authority. Just-shoring would embed affected communities as legal stakeholders with veto power or co-decision rights at every stage.
The urgency trap
The authors acknowledge that decarbonization is urgent. Global temperatures are rising. Electrification timelines are tight. But they argue that urgency cannot justify extraction that deepens inequality or damages the very ecosystems the energy transition is supposed to protect.
There is a practical dimension here too. Communities that feel exploited resist projects - through lawsuits, protests, political action - creating delays that undermine the speed advocates claim to need. Building consent into the process from the start may ultimately be faster than bulldozing through opposition.
What the commentary does not provide
This is a framework proposal, not an implementation plan. The commentary does not specify which legal mechanisms would enforce community governance rights, how conflicts between national energy policy and local objections would be resolved, or how the framework would apply in countries with weak rule of law. A longer article expanding the framework is reportedly in review.
The authors include researchers from the University of Utah, Copenhagen Business School, Colorado School of Mines, MIT, George Washington University, and Dartmouth College - a multidisciplinary team, but one largely based in Western academic institutions. The perspectives of communities currently bearing extraction costs are referenced but not directly represented as co-authors.
Still, the core argument is pointed. If the clean energy transition simply moves environmental damage from one vulnerable community to another while calling it progress, the moral case for decarbonization loses credibility with exactly the populations it claims to serve.