Raw Material Justice in Supply Chains as a Condition of Legitimate Decarbonization: A Kantian Account

Climate change threatens human existence, and solving climate change poses far-reaching challenges for humanity. The energy transition, the switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, relies heavily on raw materials to produce energy storage technologies. Significant problems are thus shifted from the life cycle phase of use to the extraction phase. The human rights violations and environmental destruction caused by the mining of critical raw materials, such as the cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are characterised by child and forced labour, but also lithium mining in the Salar de Atacama in Chile, and the water conflicts with indigenous and local populations are subject of prominent debate. Both cobalt and lithium are used in battery technologies and are used extensively in countries of the Global North. Against this background, this article develops an ethical and normative justification for raw material justice based on Kant's legal theory. The article shows that an ethical response to climate change requires a public law order that equally protects the external freedoms of action of all persons and thereby establishes binding obligations for companies and governments. The argument is based on the universal principle of law, according to which what is right is that which can coexist with equal external freedom for all, and on the cosmopolitan dimension of public law, which transcends national borders. Practices that violate human rights along global supply chains directly impede the free choice of other persons and are therefore unjust. Governments and supranational institutions are required to prevent such practices and enforce the conditions of legitimate freedom. This article elaborates on this compatibility with freedom as a test for the energy transition: Which procurement and extraction practices preserve the simultaneous external freedom of all, and which impair it? The focus is on raw material justice, which integrates both distributive and procedural justice: the fair distribution of profits and burdens, the participation of affected communities, and access to redress along transnational supply chains. This transforms raw materials policy from a mere emissions target program into an order of freedom: sustainability requires not only the reduction of greenhouse gases, but also the legal safeguarding of legitimate freedom worldwide. The article concludes with a policy design that combines Kantian-based minimum standards for procurement, due diligence obligations, liability and access rules, and technology path decisions (including circular economy, recycling, substitution of critical raw materials). The article shows that climate and energy policies that focus solely on reducing emissions without considering the legal safeguarding of legitimate freedom worldwide remain normatively deficient. Raw material justice in the sense described above is a prerequisite for a legitimate energy transition: it anchors the transition in a public order that excludes unlawful practices ex ante and guarantees the simultaneous external freedom of all. In this way, the energy transition is outlined as an order of freedom: raw material justice is constitutive for a sustainable transition because it follows from the concept of freedom itself.