Today: A critical minerals trust could fuel green developers; the residential solar industry wants to slash costs; a sacred site is set to become a copper mine.

Welcome back: As global competition to secure critical minerals is ramping up, the UN is proposing an international body to help countries play nice on green tech, Don Nico Forbes writes for WSJ Pro Sustainable Business.

But convincing governments to ditch national interest for international commitments is far from straightforward.

The “global minerals trust” would see nations that produce and consume critical minerals, and the companies that do so within them, jointly manage a stockpile of pooled commodities in an effort to avoid shortages, encourage recycling, support production in developing countries and prioritize minerals for sustainable developers.

Against an increasingly competitive geopolitical backdrop, researchers at the U.N. say a more collaborative and sustainable framework for organizing global resources would lead to a more reliable supply chain with less risk of shortages.

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With President Trump’s tax law putting an early end to solar tax credits, the residential solar industry is now looking to lower prices, the WSJ’s Nicholas G. Miller writes.

The residential industry in particular is looking to slash sky-high sales and marketing costs, according to companies and analysts. Solar manufacturer Enphase said it would double down on SolarLead Factory, a lead-generation business it bought in 2022, and Solargraf, a design platform used in solar sales it bought in 2021, to streamline customer acquisition costs.

After the residential clean-energy tax credit, which covers 30% of a solar system’s cost, expires at the end of the year, total residential demand for solar will fall by 20%, Enphase has estimated.

Some costs are due to the U.S.’s complex permitting systems, but many come from the sales investments required to convince a homeowner to go solar in a country where solar-panel penetration is still in the low-single digits.

A coalition of Native Americans, Christians and environmentalists face a narrowing legal fight to stop the development of a copper mine in Arizona, WSJ’s Jim Carlton reports.

The stunning area has been used as a spiritual refuge in the Western Apache religion for centuries, but its use as a site for tribal prayer and rituals may be nearing an end. After years of legal battles that ultimately reached the Supreme Court, plans made by two of the world’s most valuable mining companies to develop the area into a giant copper mine appear more likely to proceed.

Legal observers see few paths left to stop the mine’s development, which a federal report says will turn the area now on national forest land into a crater nearly 2 miles wide and up to 1,115 feet deep.

In 2021 the coalition filed a lawsuit challenging on religious grounds the constitutionality of a federal land transfer needed for the mining project. But the appeals process upheld the deal and in May the Supreme Court rejected the group’s plea to hear the case.

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