Assistant Professor Oliver Hailes has co-edited a new symposium in the Journal of International Economic Law (JIEL), a leading journal in the field, on the stakes of the renewable energy transition amid the war in Ukraine and a dangerously changing climate.
As the Introduction explains, ‘this symposium returns matters of global energy governance from the fringes to the centre of debates in international legal scholarship. […] To map the international law of energy is critical for all international lawyers and others working in the field, given the choices we face as a world society and the profound implications if we fail to achieve the necessary energy transition.’
The table of contents, comprising 12 articles, is available here.
Oliver contributed a framing article (The Energy Transition at a Critical Juncture, with co-editor Jorge Viñuales), which maps the contradictory roles of international law both in entrenching a socio-technical matrix based on fossil fuels, on one hand, and in promoting the transition towards renewable energy sources, on the other. Oliver’s solo article (From Guano to Green Hydrogen: Food Security and Fertilizer Disputes in International Energy Law) shows how international rules governing the fossil economy were inherited from 19th- and early 20th-century disputes over access to fertilizer resources for the production of dietary energy. This long history of international energy law offers possible insights for distributive conflicts affecting food security in the present transition from natural gas towards green hydrogen as a dual-use industrial fuel and fertilizer feedstock.
Oliver’s other research has also addressed international law in the energy transition, including a new chapter on the Valuation of Compensation in Fossil Fuel Phase-Out Disputes in an edited volume on Investment Arbitration and Climate Change.