The Green Transition Needs More Mining. The Governance Has Not Kept Up.

The energy transition has a materials problem. Wind turbines, electric vehicles, and grid-scale batteries require cobalt, lithium, nickel, and copper extracted from the ground. The demand trajectory is steep.

And the governance architecture sitting between the mine and the finished product is, in most supply chains, structurally incomplete.

Two initiatives attracting attention in 2025, CDOP and the Science Based Targets initiative, represent attempts to give carbon accountability sharper teeth. The question this episode of The Responsible Edge presses underneath them is whether frameworks, however well-designed, produce change when the people making day-to-day sourcing decisions are appraised on cost, quality, and timeliness, and nothing else.

From a Tobacco Lobbying Firm to Field Work in Over a Hundred Countries

J.J. Messner was expected to become a lawyer in Australia. He started down that road. An early position at a corporate antitrust firm with a sideline in tobacco lobbying settled the question quickly. It was not the right road.

He moved into the security and stability space, eventually joining the Fund for Peace, where he directed the Fragile States Index, an annual assessment of social, economic, and governance indicators across 178 countries, and led field assessments in the oil, mining, hydroelectric, and agribusiness sectors across more than a hundred countries. From there he moved to Microsoft, building and leading its responsible sourcing programme for minerals integrity, before joining IRMA, where he now leads downstream purchaser engagement from Mauritius.

The through-line is consistent. JJ has spent two decades in the space between what companies commit to and what actually happens at the extractive end of their supply chains.

One Hundred and Three Mines, Fifty-Three Minerals, and a Very Long Supply Chain

IRMA is a multi-stakeholder mining standard with 103 mining companies currently in its system spanning 53 minerals. Most entered at the request of downstream purchasers: the automotive, consumer electronics, and renewable energy companies whose products depend on minerals they do not directly source.

That indirection is the structural problem. A company making laptops does not buy cobalt from a mine. It buys components from a tier one supplier, which buys from a smelter, which sources from a trader, which sources from a mine. The due diligence obligation sits at one end. The operational reality sits at the other.

“The thing about supply chains is they’re long and complex. For many of the companies that we work with, most of them indirectly source these raw materials.”

Excluding Risky Suppliers Moves the Problem. It Does Not Solve It.

The conventional response to supply chain risk is exclusion. If a supplier presents reputational or legal risk, remove them quickly. JJ’s critique is direct.

“They just then become somebody else’s problem and the issue doesn’t go away.”

Supply chains are not siloed. A mine serving one electronics company is probably serving several others. Exclusion displaces the risk without reducing it. His alternative is supplier capacity investment: working with suppliers to bring them into conformance rather than cutting them out. The financial case is not immediate.

But the ecosystem logic is hard to dismiss. Your problem is my problem. My problem is your problem.

The Sourcing Engineer Nobody Asked About Scope Three

The most precise observation in the episode is also the most uncomfortable. JJ asks what sourcing engineers are actually appraised on. The answer is cost, quality, and timeliness. Not Scope 3 emissions. Not legal exposure from high-risk sourcing locations. Not human rights due diligence.

“You’re looking at people who have the responsibility without the accountability and people who have the accountability without the responsibility. Not particularly well joined up thinking.”

Until the metrics used to evaluate daily sourcing decisions include the full range of material risks, responsible sourcing frameworks will sit adjacent to operations rather than inside them. JJ draws an analogy to occupational health and safety, which shifted from bolt-on obligation to core business function over several decades. The difference is that the health and safety shift was driven partly by liability landing directly on the decision-makers. That liability structure, in responsible sourcing, does not yet exist in the same form.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

The episode’s deepest tension is ecological. Decarbonisation requires minerals that require mining. Recycling currently recovers perhaps ten percent of the minerals in circulation. The gap will not close through circularity alone.

“You’re still going to have to mine. How do we make sure that society is having its needs met but we’re not disadvantaging those who are being impacted?”

Whether the governance frameworks being built today can reach far enough down the supply chain, and change the right incentive structures, before the extraction volumes required by net zero arrive in full is, as of now, genuinely open.