A cradle-to-grave infrastructure project tracker

Willow Latham-Proenca: Maybe more Calvino than Borges, but I’d like to be looking at a constellation of new papers following a huge geographic and sectoral expansion of (something like) the Critical Mineral Project dataset, a cradle-to-grave project tracker. Unlike most public data, this version not only shows how long a project spent in permitting, but time spent in pre-permitting discussions and/or litigation (two common ways a project can end up dead by attrition). With the grunt work of compiling datasets out of the way, future researchers can focus on parsing out which provisions really drive up time and costs (like this and this), and investigating which are most cost-effective in protecting public welfare (like this) – a roadmap for evidence-based future policy.