The clean energy transition runs on minerals — copper for wiring, cobalt for batteries, lithium for storage, rare earths for motors. Governments have spent the past few years scrambling to secure those supply chains, variously through on-shoring, re-shoring, and friend-shoring strategies designed to reduce dependence on China and other concentrated suppliers. A new commentary published in Nature Energy argues those strategies are missing the point.
The framework, proposed by researchers including Jessica DiCarlo, an assistant professor in the School of Environment, Society and Sustainability at the University of Utah, goes by the name “just-shoring.” The idea is to embed questions of fairness, community governance, and environmental accountability into critical raw materials policy from the start — not as aspirational language, but as enforceable requirements. More than half of proposed critical resource facilities are located on or near agrarian or Indigenous land, a distribution that makes the question of who governs extraction something more than academic.
“Right now, powerful, often Western, governments and firms are attempting to reshape the geographies of supply chains without changing the rules of extraction,” DiCarlo said in a statement accompanying the research. “If we don’t rethink who benefits and who bears the costs, we risk repeating the same injustices of the fossil fuel era under a ‘green’ label.”
Beyond Geopolitics: The Justice Question
The commentary was published in January 2026 and draws on existing frameworks including the Paris Agreement and UN Sustainable Development Goals, both of which recommend shifts toward local resource control but stop short of making them legally binding. Just-shoring pushes further, calling for affected communities to have a formal right to co-govern the entire mineral lifecycle, from extraction through processing and eventual decommissioning.
The researchers organized their case around three guiding questions: Who benefits? Whose risks are amplified? And how much material extraction is actually necessary for a just transition? That last question is the most pointed, challenging the assumption that demand for minerals is fixed and that the only policy variable is which country or company does the mining.
DiCarlo was direct about what current approaches tend to produce: “We cannot build a low-carbon future on sacrifice zones. Communities are told extraction is necessary for climate action, but too often they are also excluded from decision making or benefits and, instead, left to absorb the costs.”
The comment lands at a moment when the 2026 Critical Minerals Ministerial is mobilizing more than $30 billion in U.S. government resources toward supply chain security, with scant public discussion of community consent or benefit-sharing requirements.
Who Pays the Price for Green Energy?
The just-shoring commentary does not oppose Western governments building out domestic supply chains. It argues that without accountability and justice baked into the architecture of those chains, the clean energy transition will reproduce the same dynamics that defined fossil fuel extraction: wealth flowing out, costs staying put.