Closing the Infrastructure Gap for Decarbonization: The Case for an Integrated Mineral Supply Agreement.

Significant amounts of feedstock metals will be required to build the infrastructure for the green energy transition. It is currently estimated, however, that the world may be facing an "infrastructure gap" that could prevent us from meeting United Nations Sustainable Development Goal targets. Prior investigations have focused on the extractive aspects of the mining industry to meet these targets and on looming bottlenecks and regional challenges in these upstream market segments. Scant attention has been paid to the downstream processing segments of the raw materials value chain, which also has a high degree of market concentration. Growing international tensions and geopolitical events have resulted in a shift toward "reshoring" and "near-shoring" of mining processing capabilities as regional powers attempt to make metal supply chains more secure. While increasing resilience, these shifts can also dilute the overall effectiveness of the global mining supply network and subsequently hamper the world's ability to close the green energy infrastructure gap. We argue that broadening the remit of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) to include coordinating these mission-critical metal processing functions can mitigate these issues. The G20 is one potential forum for enabling an integrated mineral processing agreement under the auspices of IRENA.

Assessing the damage caused by Deepwater Horizon: not just another Exxon Valdez.

In light of the high stakes of the Deepwater Horizon civil trial and the important precedent-setting role that the case will have on the assessment of future marine disasters, the methodologies underpinning the calculations of damage on both sides will be subjected to considerable scrutiny. Despite the importance of the case, however, there seems to be a pronounced lack of convergence about it in the academic literature. Contributions from scientific journals frequently make comparisons to the Ixtoc I oil spill off the coast of Mexico in 1979; the legal literature, by stark contrast, seems to be much more focused on the Exxon Valdez spill that occurred off the shores of Alaska in 1989. This paper accordingly calls for a more thorough consideration of other analogs beyond the Exxon Valdez spill-most notably, the Ixtoc I incident-in arriving at an assessment of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.