Green Transition v. the Environment: The Race for Lithium in Latin America

• In Event: Beyond the Resource Curse: The Politics of Extraction in MENA and Latin America

Abstract

The transition to a decarbonized global economy has created a global race to acquire critical minerals such as copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt, which are essential for large scale production of “green” technologies such as batteries for electric vehicles. Although Western countries are vying for access to these raw materials, most of the processing and production of minerals for batteries and other green technologies now occurs in China. At the same time, the green transition creates important intertemporal and distributional dilemmas: While the benefits of mining for resources essential to long-term decarbonization accrue globally, the environmental costs of such are mostly borne by vulnerable communities in developing countries, and in the short term. The result has been that environmentalists seeking to minimize local costs and impacts of mining for critical minerals are pitted against efforts to mine these resources in service of longer-term and global environmental benefits. Such environmental protests have succeeded recently in halting large-scale mineral extraction projects, including a major Panamanian copper mine that was considered a key input for green technology.

We examine how developing countries navigate these political, environmental, and distributional dilemmas. Specifically, we test how different factors shape the way in which urban populations who may favor longer-term environmental goals and affordable electronic vehicles, may process the economic and political costs and benefits of critical mineral mining, compared to rural communities, in which the extraction of critical minerals often occurs. The case of lithium mining in Argentina provides an ideal window through which to explore these questions. Although natural resource extraction in Argentina has been long established, the importance of lithium, and its rich endowment in Argentina, has only recently become an issue of national importance, and the geographic distribution of costs and benefits is stark. We expect that in addition to domestic urban and rural cleavages over the benefits and compensation for mining, that geopolitical alignments (Western versus Chinese companies operating the mines) will shape citizens’ support or rejection of such projects.

We conduct a pre-registered survey experiment that varies the country of origin of the mining companies, government control over mining investments, compensation to local communities, the global long-term environmental benefits, and the local short-term environmental costs. Our results shed light on the largely-overlooked domestic distributional and environmental conflicts and consequences of the green energy transition in developing countries.

Authors

• Sarah M. Brooks, Ohio State University

• Santiago Thomas Lacroix Eussler, Ohio State University

• Erik Voeten, Georgetown University