Energy Advisor

Javiera Barandiaran, associate professor and graduate director in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara: “The climate crisis is a crisis of consumption and economic activity; today’s lifestyles of the wealthy are simply unsustainable. The obstacle facing the lithium industry is this: treating lithium or electric vehicles as strategic commodities to compete over and sell to those who can afford them reproduces the same extractivist and growth-oriented policies that brought about this existential crisis. The ‘lithium triangle’ concept situates these territories within a violent, unequal and center-periphery geopolitics of the past that further erases from our official records memories of a wilder, more biodiverse planet. Lithium mining’s environmental impacts barely register in official records, such as…”