The Socialist Win in Bolivia and the New Era of Lithium Extraction
An apparent victory for Evo Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism shows that
tomorrow’s green energy won’t look much like the old oil empires.
Just under a year after Evo Morales’s government was ousted by U.S.-backed
far-right forces, his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party looks
almost certain to take back power after Sunday’s election. Morales, the
country’s first Indigenous president, remains in exile in Argentina. His
election in 2019 remains hotly debated: While the Electoral Observation
Mission of the Organization of American States challenged the result due
to a gap between preliminary and final results, subsequent analyses have
argued that the gap was explainable and legitimate and that the OAS
assessment was “flawed” and highly political. Now, with an estimated 52.4
percent of the vote, Morales’s former finance minister, Luis Arce, is on
track to become the country’s new leader after a deadly year of racist
state repression under interim President Jeanine Añez Chávez.
Bolivia’s tumultuous past year also features a powdery white subplot with
worldwide implications. Not long after being forced out of the country,
Morales and many of his supporters argued that he was ousted in part as a
response to his attempts to nationalize the country’s lithium—a mineral
used in batteries that power various clean energy technologies, including
electric cars. “My crime, my sin, is to be an Indian,” he told American
journalist Glenn Greenwald in an interview, “and to have nationalized our
natural resources, removed the transnational corporations from the
hydrocarbon sector and mining.” Morales had hoped that state-owned
Yacimientos de Litio Boliviano, or YLB, would be able not just to mine
lithium but refine it into lithium hydroxide and other compounds used in
battery manufacturing. Tesla executive Elon Musk—whose renewables empire
sources lithium mostly from Australia, not Bolivia—added to theories about
a potential lithium coup this summer by tweeting, “We will coup whoever we
want! Deal with it.”
While CIA documents 30 years on will certainly prove otherwise, there is
much evidence as of now to suggest that Musk or other U.S. clean energy
titans were actually involved in the plot to overthrow Morales’s
government. For one, political scientist and Resource Radicals author Thea
Riofrancos explains, lithium isn’t scarce, and supplies of it weren’t
being cut off from foreign investors. “Although Morales was pushed out in
a coup, it wasn’t because of lithium. There was no real obstacle facing
capital investment in Bolivia, and Morales had never been opposed to
that,” she told me. Arce’s platform on lithium is broadly similar to
Morales’s, including the creation of some 130,000 jobs, with an openness
to working with foreign companies. But the fact that people are talking
about a “lithium coup” at all could preview a new era of extractive
geopolitics.
Given its history of dealing with resource wealth abroad, it’s not
irrational to think the United States might leverage its foreign
intelligence apparatus to corner the lithium market. The modern fossil
fuel economy was built in no small part on imperial might, including that
of the U.S., which backed myriad challenges to governments that tried to
nationalize their resources both in Latin America and around the world.
CIA meddling in foreign governments has been one of the many forms of
invaluable state support offered to extractive industries, including tax
breaks and cheap leases. There are plenty of ways in which minerals needed
for clean energy development could be bound up in the same sort of rank
extractive politics that have defined the fossil fuel economy, and in some
ways already are; it’s why groups like Amnesty International have raised
alarm bells about labor abuses in mineral mining, and called for the
creation of an “ethical battery.”
There are some important specifics, however, that distinguish clean energy
supply chains from those created around fossil fuels. Lithium isn’t nearly
as geographically concentrated, for one. And it isn’t currently scarce.
But the International Energy Agency projects lithium production will grow
twice as fast in lower-emissions scenarios as a result of policies to
scale up the production and use of cars and clean energy. “The fact that
it’s abundant doesn’t tell you very much about how quickly that lithium
can get to market and become an input in another industrial process.
What’s scarce is not lithium in the earth’s crust. It’s financing for
lithium projects that will quickly produce battery-grade lithium
chemicals,” Riofrancos said.
For now, the technology minerals critical to clean energy production—like
nickel and cobalt—are mined largely by non-U.S. companies, with China
producing an estimated 80 percent of so-called rare-earth minerals
overall, according to the U.S. Geological Service. The threat of being
outcompeted has led U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle to revive
calls for “energy independence” reminiscent of the rhetoric that sprang up
during the 1970s oil crisis.
Trump hopes to get an edge over China on critical minerals. And while he
hasn’t said much about lithium yet, Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan
features a prodigious expansion of “American Made” electric vehicle
production that would entail massively scaling up U.S. consumption of
technology metals. Democrats have also put forward proposals to increase
mineral recycling, which could greatly dampen clean energy’s extractive
footprint. Developing U.S. lithium and minerals recycling and extractive
capacity could be good, as long as it doesn’t come at the cost of
international collaboration. “Trying to do it all yourself,” Riofrancos
said, “isn’t actually efficient to get the technology scaled, and creates
a lot of parallel tracks of countries trying to develop the same
resources.”
Even if the coup MAS fought back may not have been rooted in lithium, the
exit polling in Bolivia this week gave a new and enthusiastic mandate to
developing lithium reserves in the public interest, not narrowly for
corporate gain. Attempts to recreate old oil industry dynamics with clean
energy resources won’t go unchallenged.