The Critical Raw Materials Act

This paper argues that a successful EU industrial policy in the raw-materials sector should strive for a form of climate justice based on four interrelated pillars: economic reform, public investment, reducing the need to import raw materials (dematerialisation), and the creation of local value in the exporting countries. In the absence of any one of these four pillars, the industrial policy would become unsustainable, either because it would overstress limited natural resources, transfer wealth from the general population to the financial elite, or become a form of green colonialism – or, indeed, all three. Currently, the CRMA does not remotely encompass economic reform, and the three other pillars are inadequately addressed.