Abstract

Energy law as a discipline has a role to play in proactively engendering or contributing to the necessary legal architecture for preventing future energy-centric tragedies. Adopting conventional legal analysis and theoretical exploration in this piece, we draw on the established concepts of restorative justice and energy life-cycle sustainability, and coin pro-ratality from the familiar practice of prorationing from the early days of oil and gas production as some ways through which energy law can avert the tragedy of the commons in a low-carbon future. Operationalising and optimising these concepts in legal and policy processes can contribute towards addressing some of the known and yet-to-be-known environmental problems and inequities associated with the extraction of critical minerals and materials for a low-carbon energy era.