To start with the us, where the shifts have been most drastic. The grand bargain of Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act aimed to combine green technological prowess with anti-China rivalry to produce an antidote to deindustrialization, which in the Democrats’ view was the cause of Trump’s shock success in 2016. This simplistic analysis, of course, exculpated their own role in nurturing the political conditions for Trumpism through the K-shaped recovery after 2008. However, in liberal-mainstream strategy, anti-China sentiment, reindustrialization, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were all oriented towards green technology as a panacea. Important fractions of capital and the us security state aligned around a policy that would secure Federal funding and governmental coordination for new arenas of capital accumulation and geopolitical power. The expectation was that this would produce positive feedback loops: by expanding government support for green industries, the us would become more competitive against China and also create a booming domestic economy—a win-win-win for everybody.
The aim was not only to attract liberal voters but to convert Republicans to this vision. To that end, most of the financial benefits of the ira—the tax breaks, loans, subsidies—flowed to so-called red states and localities. This was part of the design, to create a durable bipartisan coalition, but also speaks to the fact that the us South has become the manufacturing centre of the country, despite broader deindustrialization, due to lax labour laws and a deregulatory atmosphere. There were similar developments in Europe, where eu commissioners also saw green technology as a solution to deindustrialization—and perhaps to securing greater strategic autonomy as well. With the 2019 European Green Deal and the 2020 ngeu, Brussels saw itself forging a path towards a greener, more resilient and digital economy to shore up its geostrategic status. I’ve called this the security-sustainability nexus, a fusion of security, geostrategic and industrial-policy goals on the one hand and, on the other, discourses and policies that claim certain industries are green, sustainable or ethical.
It took different forms. In the us, direct-action protests against the expanding infrastructure of fossil capitalism were building during Obama’s second term. The first target was the Keystone xl Pipeline, running from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. Then came the 2016 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, where a range of groups—indigenous organizations, environmentalists, ranchers and farmers—combined in a movement that’s been called ‘pipeline populism’.footnote2 This dovetailed with other instances of radical activism—the student revolt, the first waves of Black Lives Matter, democratic-socialist organizing around and beyond the 2016 Sanders campaign—and with the launch of the Sunrise Movement in 2017, which helped to bring the idea of a Green New Deal to the fore. After the 2018 mid-terms, those alliances with left-wing members of Congress—aoc and the so-called ‘Squad’—were important in taking up the banner of a Green New Deal, in particular as a way of matching worries about climate change to young people’s concerns about their economic future, which took the form of demands for a jobs guarantee. Early on, aoc and the Sunrise Movement staged an occupation of Pelosi’s office. That combined with a new international wave of youth climate activism in 2019, symbolized by Greta Thunberg and the schoolkids’ Fridays for Future protests, which captured the popular imagination, gaining extensive media coverage. These elements became a ferment through the late 2010s. By the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, climate policy had become a key axis of competition; Sanders’s plan, promising $16.3 trillion in public investment in a green transformation of the us economy, was by far the most comprehensive.
The critical moment for the climate left came in January 2021, when Biden entered office. To take their demands further required policy support, raising the question of who benefits from the green future. In effect, the movements that had arisen in opposition to the fossil-fuel industry and for a fairer economic structure were largely co-opted into the Democrats’ grand bargain: an elite geopolitical and industrial strategy, hinging on competition with China. Sanders endorsed Biden and brought Sunrise Movement people and others onto the task forces that drafted background reports for the ambitious legislative project that was whittled down into the ira. Though I criticized hitching green policy to the security state at the time, it did seem potentially durable.footnote3 That was the major surprise: that America’s green-capitalist moment turned out to be so fleeting.
No, not just Trump. The ira was already fraying before he was elected. The reasons it did not work according to plan are instructive. First, as many have pointed out, the consumer rebates—for buying an electric vehicle or installing a heat pump in your house—were, unsurprisingly, captured by the rich; all the more so, since their roll-out coincided with spiking inflation, caused by the pandemic trade crunch and the energy-price shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of the ballooning 2022–23 cost-of-living crisis, these incentives to invest in expensive assets felt very out of touch—conforming to the American culture-wars stereotype of environmental politics as a fad of the well-to-do.
But the larger, structural reason for the ira’s failure was that its policy of tax credits for green re-industrialization didn’t address the concrete reality of the American economy, which is overwhelmingly financialized and services-based. The Biden government didn’t seem to understand the composition of the us working class. The vast majority of workers today are in healthcare, the education sector, food and retail, as well as the low-wage domestic and personal services that extreme income inequality helps to expand, because the wealthy can afford more servants. Aside from ai data centres and their infrastructure, the main driver of us growth is the rising consumption of the well-off. These social relations were untouched by the ira. It was a fantasy to think that jump-starting economic revitalization with a few clusters of highly automated lithium-battery plants and solar farms in the South and Midwest was the best way to address the concerns of the American working class.
Finally, there was a contradiction between the Biden administration’s desire to out-compete China and its desire to reduce carbon emissions. Its hostility to China meant that us manufacturers were unable to collaborate with or learn from Chinese engineers and chemists, while American consumers were denied access to cheap electric vehicles; they were only getting the most expensive evs, which even with subsidies only the wealthiest could afford. All of this led to a weak political-economic configuration that was already falling apart before the 2024 election. Since then, the Trump administration has gutted the capacities of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions and dismantled many of the inducements to buy or produce evs.
What remains is lithium-ion battery production, grounded in geostrategic competition and what I call the ‘critical minerals’ consensus—the perception that minerals such as lithium, crucial for rechargeable batteries, along with nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite, are central to the race with China and so merit tremendous state support. Batteries are a very malleable technology; as well as reducing carbon emissions, their end uses include military applications and data centres for ai. So while us-state backing for green capitalism has fallen away, support for critical minerals and battery production endures. Regardless of maga’s anti-green messaging, lithium mining and energy storage are getting, under Trump, more policy support than ever. The difference is that while Biden’s ira mainly incentivized the build-out of battery plants linked to the electric-vehicle industry, under the Trump administration they are being retooled to produce batteries for data centres to support ai Large Language Models.footnote4 That shows distinct, competing hegemonic priorities, but it also illuminates the common ground between them—the determination to take control of the lithium-battery supply chain, currently dominated by China, as a geo-economic strategy that endures despite shifts in ideology.
In fact, the second Trump administration has been more interventionist than the Democrats, who shied away from state ownership and primarily used the tax code to incentivize investors. Over the past year, Trump has directed a number of government agencies—the Department of War, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce—to take equity-stake positions in a variety of critical-minerals companies. The first Trump administration had already expanded the list of ‘critical minerals’, defined as essential for national security and/or economic functioning, and subject to concerns about supply—a category that dates back to World War Two. The designation usually means a better regulatory environment for private companies: fast-tracking of permits, reduced public hearings and more access to concessional financing and subsidies. The ‘critical minerals’ designation is a window into the political economy of state capitalism around extractive sectors. Lithium was added to the list by the first Trump administration.
The East Asian side of the story really begins with Japanese deployment of the lithium battery. Sony made the breakthrough in 1991 with its handheld camcorders. The initial research into lightweight batteries had been pioneered in Exxon’s labs in New Jersey during the 1970s energy crisis. Amid skyrocketing oil prices, the fossil giant was hedging its bets. Once oil prices fell, Exxon pulled its funding, but meanwhile the baton had passed to a British lab, then to a Japanese one.footnote5 That collaboration produced the different components of the rechargeable battery: the use of the lithium ion for energy storage, the development of cathode and anode technologies, advances in safety and stability—lithium’s high reactivity led early batteries to explode. Once Sony had successfully engineered its commercial mass production, the lithium battery enabled a massive expansion of the personal-electronics sector, then dominated by Japan and South Korea.
At this stage, China was still dependent on imported Korean and Japanese technology. But by 1995 Wang Chuanfu, the founder of byd, was reverse-engineering Japanese batteries to understand how they were built. He replaced the capital-intensive imported model with a labour-intensive approach, mobilizing the legions of low-paid workers in Shenzhen to produce batteries far cheaper than Japan’s. By the early 2000s, byd had become an international leader in cell phone batteries and was branching out into automobiles. By this point, the Chinese Communist Party had decided to include electric vehicles in its Five-Year Plan. Part of its industrial strategy was to enhance the production of batteries, the most expensive and technologically complex element of an electric vehicle. This opened up the frontier for a massive growth in lithium-battery development. Today, China hosts 85 per cent of global battery-production capacity. That’s astounding. Capacity is not the same as output, of course, but it’s a precondition for it. The same goes for the solar-panel industry, which took off thanks to state incentives.
Nowhere, really. The weight of the fossil-fuel lobby—and of the automobile industry, which wanted to keep its incumbent technology in production—stymied the development of evs both in the us and in Europe. Instead, from around 2000, hybrids like Toyota’s Prius tried to fill the gap—embodied in the culture wars as the car of the latte-sipping liberal. Hybrids are also a maladaptive technology. They don’t make sense from a climate or an industrial-policy perspective because they keep you trapped mid-transition, with both a fossil sector and a renewable-energy and battery sector producing a Frankenstein technology of both. Fossil-fuel extraction continues for the gasoline, and the gas tank’s emissions continue to contribute to the climate crisis. But they were seen as a bridge to the green future. That was the direction of American auto-makers—though the Prius was made by Toyota it sold a lot in the us. At the start of the 2010s, electric vehicle sales in the us were still dominated by overseas models, led by the Nissan Leaf. It was not until 2015 that the Tesla Model S became the best-selling us plug-in car, with annual sales of around 25,000 units, compared to 17 million combustion-engine vehicles.
They had always wanted to produce their own automobiles, a manufacturing goal for all developmental states, because of the technological complexity and vertically integrated supply chains involved. In the 1980s they also needed to close a growing trade deficit, caused in part by importing so many cars. But by the 1990s, this was married to increasing concern about the political impact of pollution, primarily produced by power plants and industrial run-off, but worsened by the arrival of tens of millions of combustion engines that swathed the big cities in smog. Major protests erupted against pollution, for which the Party was held responsible. Authoritarian states are often cast as not caring about popular support, but that is fundamentally untrue; they are extremely aware of their dependence on a modicum of social consensus and stability. For the Chinese leadership, electric vehicles offered a way to get ahead of a mounting social problem while also exploiting an unoccupied niche in global supply chains—Western auto-makers were not really electrifying their fleets. By making evs one of China’s core technologies, they could leap-frog the combustion engine through value-added, innovation-driven production. Through a number of policies, they made that a reality in just twenty years, in ways that are quite astonishing.
The crucial point is that inclusion in a Five-Year Plan opens the floodgates for loans from Chinese state development banks, which can channel capital to companies in priority sectors. But the companies still have to compete ferociously with each other. Instead of reducing competition, these loans and subsidies set off a race to see which firm is the most efficient manufacturer, which has the right relationships with a province-level government, to access cheap land and the subsidies that come with it. This produces extreme levels of subsidy but not at the expense of cut-throat competition. That’s the key. This combination of state support and capitalist animal spirits produced a level of competition in battery, solar-panel, ev and wind-turbine development so intense that it burned up profit margins—they call it ‘involution’. Beyond this, the Five-Year Plan involved a multi-scalar set of industrial policies, combining subsidies, loans and state-sponsored competitions, such as which city could deploy the most evs the fastest. There were regulations to nudge drivers towards evs and subsidies for consumers, although those have now been scaled back because they’re no longer necessary. Manufacturing efficiencies and economies of scale have taken off to such a degree that the technologies are now quite cheap. You can buy a nice ev in China for $5,000 or $10,000.
Yes, absolutely. Air pollution is one of the greatest killers worldwide—a silent assassin, shortening lifespans and lowering quality of life. There are tremendous benefits in alleviating the particulate matter that causes lung and respiratory problems. Plus, at the atmospheric level, these vehicles avoid the emissions that internal-combustion engines counterfactually would have produced.
Yes. But coal consumption for electricity generation has likely peaked in China. 2025 marked the first time in the country’s history that coal power output fell as a result of clean energy growth, rather than economic contraction. For the past few years, overall carbon emissions have flatlined, due to a mix of renewable energy deployment, a slowdown in the carbon-heavy construction sector and massive ev adoption. Last year, the majority of new energy demand was met by solar and wind; in the first half of 2025, those renewable sources actually exceeded demand growth, which itself evidences much discussed overcapacity tendencies.
There used to be a real concern that climate-related technologies were going to remain out of reach financially for Global South societies. There were really tricky trade-offs between development and emissions mitigation. Those have been significantly softened by the dramatic reduction in the per-unit cost of battery-cell technologies. Brazil, the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia have become important markets for electric transportation—electric mopeds in India, electric vehicles in Nepal and Brazil, electric bicycles everywhere. Solar panels, too, are now extremely cheap. The equation has changed: there are now developmental benefits to switching to electric or renewable-energy technologies because they are cheaper, in some cases faster to deploy—and super available, thanks to Chinese overcapacity. Diplomatically, they connect the domestic economy to a country that is emerging as a world power. Beijing also offers infrastructure credit through the Belt and Road Initiative, which helps the deployment of these technologies across the Global South. So this is the other side of the new era of environmental politics: battery technologies are opening pathways towards aligning green goals and developmental goals, affordable energy access with low emissions, which no one expected just a decade ago.
Nearly all. The export of these technologies helps solve some of China’s own involution and overcapacity problems and offers profitable market opportunities to Chinese solar, battery and ev manufacturers. But there’s also a growing fdi element, distinct from trade. Increasingly, Chinese companies have been setting up shop at some level, from assembly to more technical manufacturing processes, in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is in large part the result of Global South governments’ concern about ‘premature deindustrialization’, as Dani Rodrik has defined it. Global South governments have taken heed and put ‘local-content requirements’ on Chinese investment: China can’t just dump its solar panels in a country, but has to assemble or manufacture them there to access to the local market. There is also a reputational aspect: China doesn’t want to be seen as the agent of premature deindustrialization in the Global South. But perhaps more important, these are major markets with millions of potential consumers—and relatively young societies, where the world’s future consumers will be. If accessing them requires relocating some assembly work, or setting up a refinery, then they’ll do it. To close the loop, the same goes for access to raw materials. Governments in Southeast Asia or Africa are telling China: if you want to mine our minerals, you’ll have to do some downstream processing here.
Lithium is a really interesting element. Its atoms are very lightweight, so it has tremendous energy density relative to its mass. It can store a lot of energy, which makes it amazing for battery technology. It’s an alkali metal, which means it’s very reactive—in nature, it’s never found in a pure state but bound into chemical compounds, in salt-flats or brine, as in Chile or Nevada, or hard-rock deposits, as in Australia; even in clay. Historically, small quantities of lithium were used during World War Two for specialized industrial and military purposes—de-icing planes, air purification in submarines, lubricating machinery—and it was developed as a fusion component in nuclear weapons during the Cold War. In the us, wartime lithium mining and production was centred in South Dakota and North Carolina. The prc developed its first lithium mine in Xinjiang in the 1950s, as an icon of Sino-Soviet collaboration; the lithium flowed to the ussr, perhaps for industrial purposes, likely also for nuclear weapons. From the 1990s, with the take-off of lightweight, high-storage, disposable or rechargeable lithium batteries—used in everything from smartphones, laptops and electric toothbrushes to solar-energy storage systems, e-bikes and e-scooters, evs, drones, satellites and space craft—the incentives to hunt for new deposits and explore novel extraction methods have proliferated.
Lithium itself is abundant, but the heterogeneity of its compounds means that no two deposits are alike, even between different salt flats. The engineering and chemistry of lithium-extraction processes are entering an experimental phase, testing deposits that have never been mined before, which will require new technologies to bring them to market. For the time being, the main locations are Australia, Chile, China, in that order—though China doesn’t export its lithium but uses it domestically, and is also the number one importer of lithium. Argentina is fourth, sharing a similar deposit type to Chile in the same Andean plateau region. Zimbabwe and Brazil are growing rapidly; Canada, too. There are several projects under construction in the us and Europe.
The us and Chile share a long and intertwined history of extractive capitalism, with us copper companies playing a role in Chilean copper development. The Pinochet dictatorship, despite its avowed commitment to free-market capitalism, was quite adept at a sort of capitalist-friendly industrial policy where state tools were used to create new ‘strategic sectors’, including lithium. A big us company—Foote Minerals, now known as Albemarle—with experience in brine deposits sent its geologists to Chile to explore the possibilities of exporting their extraction and evaporation technology there. Another company was a previously state-owned saltpetre enterprise that Pinochet privatized and gave to his son-in-law, who named it sqm. Albemarle and sqm are still the two main lithium companies in Chile, with enormous operations on the Atacama salt flat.
On the other hand, the take-off of Australia, today’s number one producer, is tightly linked to Chinese development. Almost 100 per cent of Australian lithium is sent to China, in a relatively unprocessed form, despite the Australian government sometimes making noises about wanting to decouple from China or reorient towards Europe or the us. In Argentina there’s a kind of Wild West scenario, where all mining is governed at the province level, meaning a rural governor conducts negotiations with multinational mining companies. This has led to an unregulated frontier of mining, with Chinese, American, Canadian and European mining companies all active there, making Argentina the fourth largest producer. Fifth is Zimbabwe, a relatively recent phenomenon closely linked to Chinese investment in Africa.
Resource sovereignty is one of the most enduring ideologies of the Global South. Latin America was one of the first places to undergo long-term Western colonization, the first to win liberation and the first to grapple with the experience of political independence combined with continuing economic dependence. Latin American governments began to pioneer muscular forms of resource sovereignty in the 1920s, in some cases ripping up contracts and fully expropriating foreign-owned assets with little or no compensation. But by the 2000s, resource sovereignty had grown more cautious. For example, when Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia’s gas industry—to much alarm from the corporate media and business class—what he actually did was take 51 per cent ownership stakes in a variety of gas projects. That is a real diminution of resource sovereignty’s radical horizons: to become a public-private partnership. Of course, capitalists don’t like being forced to do anything, but what usually results from these joint ventures is more stability for the capitalist partner. Even if they kick up a fuss, often the mining or oil company sticks around and continues to operate in those joint-venture conditions, which are now quite common across raw-material sectors. One reason why Global South governments have shied away from expropriation is the rise of new international legal architectures and investor-state dispute mechanisms, with the risk of immediate financial sanctions. Yet they still hold on to the ideology of resource sovereignty, even in this diminished capacity.
The former Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, developed a national lithium strategy during his term in office, from 2022–26. There were different elements, some related to improving the environmental profile of lithium extraction, to indigenous rights and international law, but a big part of it was expanding lithium production. The duopoly of sqm and Albemarle produce 20 per cent of global output, but Chile has dozens more salt flats which could produce much more. Boric wanted Chile to compete in global markets, but also for the state to mediate investment processes and have state-owned companies in the fray. He outlined a set of policies that would require joint ventures with a state-owned company for any future lithium contracts—leaving sqm and Albemarle intact. But it proved hard to create a new state-run company in the space of just a few years, under conditions of divided government, precarious popularity and inflation, that would be technologically proficient in one of the more complicated mining sectors. The grade of lithium needed for a car battery is extremely high—it requires a very high level of technical specificity, with skilled engineers, chemists and lithium-market experts. There was no time to develop this level of expertise while Boric was in office. Instead, his administration used a pre-existing state-owned enterprise, Codelco, the famous Chilean copper company established under Pinochet, to enter into these joint-venture agreements. The first of those has already been signed. sqm now enjoys a much-extended contract and concession for a joint venture where it will operate in tandem with Codelco, which will learn how to be a lithium company. Boric’s ambitions were to transform lithium policy, and some real changes have been made, but the example also illustrates the constraints.
At the same time, this new-model resource sovereignty has become entangled with a rising politics of anti-extractivism. In Latin America that led to fractures within the ‘pink tide’ coalitions—most dramatically in Ecuador, but also in Bolivia, Brazil and elsewhere. Groups that were part of the broader coalition broke away in protest against government plans for mining, oil and mega-agriculture projects, even when these entailed state involvement and social-welfare goals. The anti-extractive militancy was in part a reaction against the pink-tide forms of resource sovereignty, which activists felt were a violation of the promise to break free of the neocolonial model of development. The two approaches have remained locked in struggle. The harms that mining inflicts on habitats and communities constantly trigger militant forms of opposition. In Chile, there have been road blockades, cutting off the main highway that serves the Atacama mining region. The protesters have brought lithium output to a halt for a week or more, at major cost to the industry. There have been similar conflicts in Argentina, particularly in the northwestern province of Jujuy, where the industry-aligned provincial governor tried to deregulate mining governance and eradicate indigenous rights, resulting in major protests; state repression there injured hundreds.
The most advanced attempt so far to suture together resource nationalism and anti-extractivism was in the debates around rewriting the Constitution in Chile. This was part of a broader range of left-wing political activity, which had been bubbling under in the 2010s and exploded in 2019—school students, labour, pensioners, environmentalists—in the streets and in Congress. In 2020 the Pinochet-era Constitution was rejected in a referendum. In 2021 Boric’s left-coalition government was voted into office and a constitutional convention elected, which began a wide-ranging national debate. This was a moment of collaboration between anti-extractive activists and those calling for public ownership and resource sovereignty. They came together around the need for public ownership to meet ecological and social goals—to conserve landscapes, respect indigenous rights, preserve biodiversity and water, ensure inter-generational benefit—to use a democratic state to shape a less extractive economy and get the capitalists out of the equation. We didn’t see that dream play out—the pinochetista José Antonio Kast won the 2025 presidential election and is currently ripping up every environmental accord agreed by the Boric government. But there was a rapprochement of left-wing resource sovereigntists and ecological and indigenous activists, aiming to solidify a broader left strategy, which could have lessons elsewhere.
The heterogeneity of lithium deposits maps onto a range of environmental impacts. Hard-rock mining produces an enormous volume of physical waste and all the safety hazards that go with it—precarious stacks, basins and sludge piles, threatening an avalanche. In Western Australia, hard-rock mining is powered by diesel-run machinery, which creates a lot of localized and atmospheric pollution. In theory it could operate with battery power, but the mining industry is not yet decarbonized. The container ships that transport Australian lithium to China are powered by bunker fuel, a very polluting form of fossil energy, and processed in coal-powered refineries. That’s probably the most polluting, most carbon-intensive part of the lithium sector.
Brine extraction in Chile is portrayed by the industry as a form of environmentally friendly mining: pumping lithium-rich liquid to the surface and letting the sun do the work. But pulling all this brine water from the centre of the Atacama salt flat, where the lithium concentrations are highest, actually draws down the freshwater aquifers at the perimeter, where human occupation begins. There is mounting evidence that, even though the brine water is not directly used by the local communities, the method reduces access to fresh water in an extremely arid environment. There are impacts on biodiversity; the Atacama flamingo population has been declining, linked to increased mining activity around their habitat. In Europe, the Vulcan brine-extraction project under development in the Upper Rhine Valley is being touted as one of the world’s first net-zero lithium mines, but it’s not clear whether it will actually run on batteries or a renewable-energy grid, or whether they’ll just purchase offsets to claim carbon neutrality.
Solar panels are in many ways a miraculous technology, providing modular, affordable, clean energy that can scale from a rooftop to thousands of acres, simultaneously addressing basic human needs—hundreds of millions of people still lack electricity access—and mitigating the climate crisis by providing emissions-free power. However, there is no free lunch when it comes to environmental impacts, and we can see these across their lifecycle. The production of solar panels begins with a range of mined materials: quartz, the basis of polysilicon, silver, bauxite (for aluminium) and copper—all of which create ecological harm at the points of extraction. Then there is the process of making polysilicon, most of which is produced in China, powered by dirty coal and tainted with allegations of forced Uyghur labour. Once the panels are made, there are issues of ‘siting’: poorly planned solar arrays can threaten natural habitats and the biodiversity they support. Finally there is the concern of waste when panels reach the end of their lifespans (around 30 years, or more). But the piles of discarded panels pale in comparison to the toxic refuse of coal and oil extraction. Unlike fossil fuels, which can only be burned once, the materials embedded in solar panels can be recovered and recycled, although this isn’t currently occurring anywhere near the technically feasible scale.
In terms of emissions, they are small players compared to the gargantuan fossil-fuel economy and the combustion of that fossil fuel in energy production and transportation; it takes 15 million barrels of oil every day to power us cars. It’s not at all that green technologies are worse for the planet than fossil technologies. The worst environmental crisis is global warming, and any fossil fuel-run machinery that can be replaced by one run on a solar-powered battery is for the good. Green-technology supply chains aren’t more extractive than fossil capitalism. Large-scale mining is a different form of extraction, more spatially expansive in footprint and variegated in socio-ecological effects. As the frontiers for new critical minerals expand globally, they encroach on landscapes that were previously untouched, thus raising the stakes of environmental harm. It’s true that solar panels and batteries involve a lot of mining, sometimes more than their fossil-fuel counterparts. An ev requires a lot more metallic mining than an internal-combustion engine vehicle, but on the other hand it doesn’t need the 15 million barrels of oil.
The main environmental harm of lithium mining is the irreversible alteration—the destruction—of the local landscape; and often the relocation of farmers or villagers, and the toxic contamination of soil and water by the chemical agents the companies use. This threat to places of natural beauty and material livelihoods that people are deeply attached to has triggered mass opposition movements. In Serbia there was fierce resistance to Rio Tinto’s lithium project in the Upper Jadar Valley; it seemed the protesters had won, but the eu is now pressing the Serbian government to let Rio Tinto go ahead. In northern Portugal, community organizing against the Barroso mine, owned by Savannah Resources, has blocked its development.
We need to think far more rigorously about the least mining-intensive way to build a new green economy. To think on dual tracks: phasing out the main extractive culprit, which is fossil capitalism, and trying not to repeat that scale of extraction as we enter a greener economy. At the Climate and Community Institute, we’ve modelled the impact of a series of modular shifts that could be achieved through policies like reorienting transport towards good-quality, low-emission mass transit, better land-use and urban planning, smaller cars and batteries, plus properly enforced recycling for these technologies—with batteries, 99 per cent of the minerals can be repurposed. This would be better for household budgets, and it would take much less lithium and other critical minerals to furnish a green transition organized on this basis than one premised on the private ownership of hulking evs that working-class people can’t afford. We don’t have to pit ecology against labour, climate against biodiversity, cost-of-living struggles against a cleaner future. We can develop policies and institutions that articulate the connections and overlaps between these goals, rather than assume that they are in zero-sum conflict with one another.
This is one of the most difficult questions I grapple with, both in my research and in policy work, because ‘green capitalism’ is plainly a contradiction in terms. As Alyssa Battistoni has argued, capitalism fundamentally depends on the despoliation and non-valuation of nature.footnote6 It’s hard to imagine this mode of production treating natural resources as anything other than a source for plunder. Beyond that, green capitalism has won a reputation for hypocrisy, ‘greenwashing’ its accumulation strategies with bogus esg goals and the like. I should say that in the early years of the Biden administration—the moment of the Green New Deal, when there was a sense in the us that the left was one of the principal protagonists of climate policies, because it was due to our activism that state actors were even talking about it—at that time, green capitalists figured in our rhetoric as a powerful adversary. It seemed then as though every Democratic politician wanted to have the biggest Green New Deal, though none could match Sanders’s $16 trillion. But though we were the ones pushing for this political and economic opening, it was clear that green capitalism would be taking advantage of it, getting the subsidies to produce and deploy these clean-energy technologies. In the new future that felt just over the horizon, the conflict would primarily be fought against these new green bosses and financiers. So we started building on prior left-wing critiques of green capitalism from the 1990s—problematics like the commodification of nature, ecosystem services and so forth. In that moment, we were trying to identify our class enemy. We had been battling the fossil-fuel industry, but our expectation was that it might soon be replaced or become co-equal in power with a green-capitalist sector. That just turned out to be wrong.
Though our analysis made some valid points, it was based on a fundamental error. The truth is that green capitalism is a very weak fraction of capital, at least outside China. Green capitalist activity depends on state intervention to attain a modicum of profitability, because it’s competing against a powerful set of incumbent industries that themselves benefit from subsidies and an infrastructure of power plants and highways built to maximize fossil extraction. In order to acquire that state support, green capitalists had to depend on alliances in the political arena with more powerful, interconnected fractions of the capitalist class: tech, fossil, finance, weaponry. That created an all-of-the-above energy strategy, in which green capitalists threw their lot in with fossil-fuel companies, positioned themselves as allies of the military-industrial sector in the battle against China, or promised greenwashing opportunities to the finance sector. It’s not that the critique of green capitalism was wrong; it was thinking that it was going to become a behemoth overnight, and that our class and political struggles would reorient towards that terrain. That’s not what happened. We need to understand why, and maybe even endorse a paradoxical position: that a stronger fraction of green capital would create better terrain for left-wing organizing than the current situation, dominated by the tech oligarchy and the war-making machine.footnote7
The weakness of green capital is a problem for socialists. Rather than engaging in a political struggle with an ascendant green-capitalist sector, in which the conflict could revolve around the terms of this energy transition—who owns green technologies? who benefits from them? who shapes the terms of their deployment?—it leaves the left defending little gains, like closing a data centre here or there, but not battling to shape the future of the economy. Instead, the fossil-fuel industry is expanding year by year, with new projects, new assets and record-breaking profits. Extraction of lithium and other critical minerals for the green economy is then appended to this. In Argentina, for instance, both extractive regimes are expanding simultaneously: there is a massive fracked gas sector, as well as the explosive growth of lithium mining. In terms of capitalist organization and ownership, the two are fusing into one: the fossil-fuel industry is investing in batteries and lithium refining; the Gulf sovereign-wealth funds are doing the same. There’s an increasing interlock between these extractive industries, which creates a juggernaut with many kinds of harm—distinct but cumulative forms of environmental destruction.