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Preventing global temperatures from exceeding the critical two-degree threshold to avoid ecosystem collapse will require a massive renewable energy transition. This shift would require graphite, lithium, and cobalt extraction to rise progressively to 450 percent above their 2018 levels by 2050. In this scenario, demand for 17 key minerals needed to drive the energy transition promoted by major powers would increase from the current 40 million tonnes per year to 165 million in 2050, according to the World Bank. Over almost three decades, this would result in a cumulative 3.1 trillion tonnes, aggravating extractivism and destruction across bodies-territories worldwide.
The European Union’s agenda contains a regulatory package that, along with trade agreements with countries in the Global South, includes twelve memoranda for the extraction of raw materials as well as approval of the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2023. According to a report by Ecologistas en Acción and the Observatorio de Multinacionales en América Latina (Observatory on Multinationals in Latin America, OMAL), we are witnessing a “shift from green and digital capitalism (2019–2024) towards an olive-green military capitalism”. This authoritarian turn is marked by the geopolitical displacement of a declining EU in the face of the geopolitical race between the great powers of the East (China) and the West (the US).
In Latin America, the lithium-extractive frontier is expanding rapidly in the Atacama region, an area located between 2,300 and 4,500 metres above sea level and spanning northwest Argentina, northern Chile, and southwest Bolivia. Today, this region exports 40 percent of the global lithium supply and accounts for 53 percent of global resources. A territory that has been inhabited since ancient times by indigenous and peasant populations (Casabindos, Omahuacas, Cochinocas, Atacamas or Likanantay, Lipez, Collas, Quechuas, and Guaranís, depending on the area) has recently been dubbed the Lithium Triangle. This is an exercise in epistemic violence and historical and cultural erasure that seeks to reconfigure this space based solely on the centrality and valorization of lithium.
The main holders of mining rights in the Lithium Triangle are funded and owned primarily by investors from China, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Three German companies are also present: DEM, whose Carachi Blanco project in the Argentine province of Catamarca is exploring and managing 70,000 hectares; Eusati, part of the Droege Group, which has established an agreement with the Argentine semi-state-owned company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales to develop the “green lithium” value chain; and finally Liverde, part of ACI Systems, which plans to extract lithium in Chile’s Salar de Antofagasta starting in 2027. These German ventures share three characteristics: none has yet commenced exploitation, they are relatively small-scale projects, and all claim to use sustainable and green extraction techniques (despite the fact that no technique currently guarantees environmental protection when extracting the large volumes sought in these cases).
In this region, lithium extraction from brines has destructive socio-environmental impacts and involves a fight over the appropriation and use of common goods: water, land, and salt flats.
In this region, lithium extraction from brines has destructive socio-environmental impacts and involves a fight over the appropriation and use of common goods: water, land, and salt flats. The overutilization of water in endorheic — that is, closed — basins threatens the reproduction of human and non-human life because the brine is extracted at a rate far higher than the natural recharge rate in each basin.
The predominant evaporative extraction technique entails continuously pumping the salt flats, the existence of multiple pools filled with brine — a liquid composed of minerals found under the salt crust — in which water evaporates and lithium is increasingly “pure” until it reaches the battery-grade concentration required, mostly for the electromobility industry. Batteries currently account for 87 percent of global lithium demand and 59 percent of that is used for electromobility.
The evaporative technique consumes enormous quantities of water: depending on the salt flat, this can range from 580,000 to 900,000 — or even up to two million — litres per tonne of lithium carbonate. This produces an accelerated cycle of water extraction in one of the planet’s most arid areas. At the same time, the evaporative technique produces waste consisting of potassium or sodium salts, among other things. For example, a small-scale operation (20,000 tonnes per year) generates waste that, over the course of a decade, would cover an area of 11.5 square kilometres at one metre in height. There are other techniques that use less brine, such as direct extraction, but they do not offer the same technical maturity, cost, or scale as the current technique and are also energy and water intensive, especially in terms of fresh water.
In this context, the imbalances caused by extractive operations endanger the entire local biosphere and threaten the survival of fauna, flora, human populations, and even microorganisms (Earth’s first life forms, which enabled the oxygenation of the planet). The risks include the possibility that riverine meadows and springs could dry up. These are the sources of life for animals and crops, livelihoods for local populations, and sites of customary use and collective land ownership. This could lead to the elimination of the cultures and identities of peoples who have inhabited this region for more than 12,000 years (in stark contrast to the mere 200 years that the nation-state has existed).
The concrete threat of water stress in each of the salt flats (a situation that Chile’s Superintendency of the Environment has already confirmed for the Atacama salt flat) is exacerbated by the lack of public oversight and information on environmental impact as well as lax controls by national, provincial, and local governments, given that there are no baseline studies for comprehensive and cumulative environmental-impact assessments. In addition, the extractive projects controlled by transnational corporations of various origins overlap and draw on the same water sources.
The expansion of extractive projects is accelerating in territories where there are legitimate pre-existing demands for Indigenous territorial self-determination.
The expansion of extractive projects is accelerating in territories where there are legitimate pre-existing demands for Indigenous territorial self-determination. This mining activity violates national and international regulations enshrined in both national constitutions and international agreements, including ILO Convention 169, which establishes Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consultation and consent before projects that affect their territories and communal resources are implemented; the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which recognizes the right to self-determination and collective land ownership; and the Escazú Agreement, which establishes public participation in environmental decisions and access to environmental justice. Additionally, extractive projects expand into nature reserves and species protection zones (such as those for flamingos) and even into high-Andean wetlands recognized as Ramsar sites (wetlands of international importance).
Through irregular mechanisms and/or regulatory flexibilization, political and economic interests promise employment and economic growth for the region in order to promote the establishment of projects, co-opting individual wills and dividing intra- and inter-community social ties within these territories. The speed at which lithium extractivism expands and the degree of capital autonomy varies in each case depending on the capacity of national and subnational oversight, as well as the emergence of processes of Indigenous community struggles and resistance that reject this activity through organizational processes for the defence of their territories and commons. “Water is worth more than lithium”, “We can’t eat batteries”, and “We don’t want to be a sacrifice zone for your electric Tesla” are some of the most illustrative slogans denouncing these false solutions, which perpetuate racist and colonial logic, reproduce historical structural asymmetries between countries and populations, and shift the social and environmental costs onto Latin American countries where the raw material is extracted by overexploiting nature (water and energy resources and human labour) in the name of core countries’ energy transition.
This extreme form of extractivism of “critical minerals for the transition” overlaps in these territories with the extractivism of traditional minerals (such as copper). It takes place in the context of an inter-imperial dispute in which Global North countries reinforce their “energy-security” agendas in their quest to guarantee the resources required for technological upgrading and further capital accumulation along the value chain. This unequal ecological exchange, marked by inequality and concentrated power, destroys local economic activities, alters the social composition of these territories, and ultimately forces population displacement. The populations that resist suffer intimidation, harassment, criminalization, and stigmatization for asymmetrically confronting actors wielding hyper-concentrated economic power.
We currently live in a system that is essentially already saturated. But even considering the inexorable urgency of reducing the fossil emissions creating this “era of global boiling“, it is not possible to sustain — neither with lithium nor with any other element that might replace it — the current state of unbridled productivism or capitalism’s predatory social metabolism, which are what urgently need to be transformed.
Translated by Diego Otero and Joseph Keady for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
