The Law and Geopolitics of Green Development

Addressing climate change will require the countries of the world to transition to low-carbon forms of energy and transportation at adequate speed and scale. Environmental lawyers will play an essential role in this transition and will need to grapple with a wide range of issue areas beyond traditional environmental regulation and energy law. 

An increasingly important, and woefully understudied, area concerns the law and geopolitics of clean technology supply chains. The production and deployment of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and battery storage facilities involve complex, global supply chains that over the last two decades have come to be dominated by Chinese companies supported by industrial policies and financing from the Chinese state. This includes mining and processing of critical minerals and raw materials, manufacturing intermediate and finished products, and deployment of renewable energy and electric vehicles at home and abroad. This Chinese dominance has in turn raised economic and security concerns in developed countries (particularly the US and EU) that are increasingly being addressed through a range of legal countermeasures, including industrial policy, tariffs and export bans, national security measures, human rights sanctions, and reconfigured diplomatic alliances.

This seminar seeks to help students understand the legal and political aspects of this global competition over clean technology supply chains. It will cover China’s path to clean technology dominance; US and European measures to compete with China and moderate China’s rise; and the ways in which the rest of the world (particularly the Global South) is attempting to navigate this green development clash of the titans. Supply chains are typically treated primarily as economic phenomenon, but our seminar will center legal regimes and norms and examine the role of law in making clean technologies available, governing their environmental and social impacts, and otherwise distributing their benefits and costs across geographies and populations. 

The seminar grade is based on a final paper (SAW eligible), brief weekly reflection pieces, and class participation.