Mineral Diplomacy, the Battery Lobby, and Politics of Abandonment in the Atacama Desert, Chile
Abstract Code: 10007

Abstract

The IPCC features electromobility as a key mitigation option for a rapid, systemic transition to cap global warming at 1.5C. Yet replacing the world’s billion cars with EVs requires extracting minerals for these vehicles’ lithium-ion batteries. Underground water extraction by the mining sector has caused multiple environmental alterations in one of the world’s largest lithium reserves, the Atacama Salt Flat, Chile. In response to increasing water demand in this area, Indigenous communities have mounted resistance to livelihood dispossession.

Recently, the Lickanantay People have organized local blockades and protests; manifestations that increasingly permeate into Chile’s political arena. This while the growing global EV industry feeds on green policy and shifts to a vertical integration of production. As they fulfil their own EV markets, Asian and Western industrial conglomerates are securing direct access to key resources—with China and the US competing for lithium contracts across Latin America. I am thus concerned with how the electromobility transition—marketed as a techno-fix towards global decarbonization—is driving narratives that invisibilize the territorial and ecological dispossession of Indigenous communities due to processes of mineral extraction required for manufacturing batteries.

Through the political ecology of lithium extraction and by exploring connections among territorial and geopolitical logics of sovereignty, Indigenous claims, and capitalist logics of expansion, I interrogate what strategies are being used by EV and battery manufacturers to tap into key resources such as lithium, and how the Chilean state is mediating and facilitating access to these resources in the face of socioenvironmental and geopolitical tradeoffs.