In the future we just described, we’d live in fully electrified affordable housing, reduce our energy demand with democratic algorithms, and use free no-carbon transit to travel for (less) work and (more) leisure, enjoying lovely parks, theaters, and landscapes. We’ll need muscular social movements and insurgent policymakers to make this happen.
We’ll also need minerals extracted from the earth. Like the fossil energy system, renewable energy requires natural resources from around the world: cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and a host of rare earth minerals used to produce solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage, and electric vehicles. But their extraction and refinement can cause intense social and environmental harm—costs that don’t show up on companies’ bottom lines. And as clean-tech capitalists increasingly worry about securing these crucial inputs, their extractive frontiers are emerging as new battlefields in trade wars and global power politics.
If capitalists undertake yet another race to the bottom, the global economy of renewable energy could echo the violence and degradations of fossil capital while also slowing global decarbonization. A Green New Deal could both help prevent a brutally exploitative expansion of mining and begin to construct a global energy economy that’s more sustainable and more just.
The United States has a crucial role to play. Today, it’s the greatest obstacle to global climate justice. It’s one of the world’s top carbon emitters, both overall and per capita; and it’s growing its fossil fuel exports faster than any other country. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States blocked global climate agreements while shoving through global trade deals, helping write the rules of trade to favor corporate power above all else. Here, we argue that the way forward on global climate action isn’t just through more international negotiations—it also requires tackling the places where the institutions of the global economy meet the climate crisis.
The domestic legislation and mobilization we’ve described so far would make a huge difference to global climate politics. But the boundaries of the nation-state can’t be the boundaries of our political imagination. For a Green New Deal to confront the planetary dimensions of climate change, it needs to be internationalist in scope, forging new solidarities and partnerships with social movements and governments around the world. That will involve diplomacy between states and the renegotiation of trade rules, as well as international coordination by social movements, to force governments and companies to comply with democratic values.
But meetings and summits alone aren’t enough to change economic structures. We also have to engage directly with the supply chains where the essential minerals of the renewable energy sector are mined, manufactured, and eventually deployed. The rapid and comprehensive energy transition we’ve laid out is already plunging us into the ethical, economic, and ecological challenges that come with a renewable energy economy.
We should always follow the money: Capitalists and their political accomplices are scrambling for dominance over resources and primacy in battery and electric vehicle manufacturing. As one analyst told the Financial Times, “whoever controls these supply chains controls industrial power in the twenty-first century.”1 We need to engage on this emergent terrain. The state and capitalist competition shaping these supply chains threatens to deepen the power imbalances that structure global affairs—but the flipside is that restructuring them offers an opportunity to strengthen global cooperation around rapid, egalitarian decarbonization.
The Extractive Frontiers of 100 Percent Renewable
A renewable energy transition means less coal mining and less oil drilling. That’s a good thing—we’d be doomed otherwise. But renewable energy requires increases in other forms of extraction. Some of this will mean the expansion of already enormous mining sectors, like copper, which is essential for electrical wiring. Other new mineral sectors will grow explosively, like lithium, cobalt, and a bevy of rare earth minerals.
Take rechargeable batteries, essential to electrifying transit and storing intermittent solar and wind power. Cobalt is a key ingredient. More than half the world’s supply is currently sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, from hand-dug mines worked by children, with scant protection of workers’ safety. Mining and refining of graphite, another battery component, causes air and water pollution in northeastern China. Nickel mines and smelters, mostly in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Russia, contaminate air and water. (The Philippines recently closed several mines because of their environmental and health impacts.) The batteries themselves are often manufactured in Chinese factories still powered by coal. And there’s not much battery-recycling infrastructure, so at the end of their lives they become toxic waste.
Another element essential to rechargeable batteries is lithium. Chemical compounds of lithium—hydroxide and carbonate—are needed to make the energy-dense, lightweight, mobile batteries that power phones, laptops, cars, scooters, buses, and e-bikes, as well as the stationary batteries that store energy for renewable grids.
Lithium is too reactive and unstable to occur freely in nature. It either exists in compounds with other minerals in hard rock formations, or is found dissolved as an ion in brine—water with a high concentration of salt. Over half of the world’s lithium reserves are contained in the brine wells below the surface of the Andean salt flats of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile—high-altitude, rugged expanses of bright white and gray dotted with lagoons tinted red from the interaction of algae, sun, and wind.
How will the renewable transition affect the market for lithium? If we continue consuming energy as we do now, the global appetite will be voracious. Electric vehicles would be by far the biggest driver. Unless transportation patterns change, the vast majority of these vehicles will be individual passenger cars. The longer the cars’ range, the bigger the batteries must be—and the more lithium (and cobalt, and nickel, and graphite) they would need.
According to the forecasts of the Institute for Sustainable Futures, if the world transitions to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050, lithium demand would amount to 280 percent of global reserves (the amount of a given mineral that’s economically viable to extract) and 85 percent of global resources (the amount of that mineral that’s technically feasible to extract).2
While demand for electric vehicles is projected to skyrocket, financing for new lithium projects is hard to come by—in part because it can take years before long-term investments pay off. Cathode, battery, and electric vehicle manufacturers are now scrambling to make deals that guarantee their access to the mineral. To wit: On April 5, 2019, Volkswagen AG partnered with Chinese lithium company Ganfeng to supply its electric vehicle line, which will launch seventy new models next year.3 The partnership is part of what they call their “electric offensive” strategy. Ganfeng also has signed supply agreements with LG Chemicals, Tesla, and BMW.4
And it’s not just corporations that are jockeying. The projected electric vehicle supply chain is becoming a new geopolitical battlefield. In May 2019, the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on a range of exports from China, including electric cars and parts, thus seriously limiting their penetration of US markets. President Xi Jinping threatened to restrict rare earth mineral exports, which would hamper US manufacturing of electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels.
China’s grip on the lithium supply is just as important. Two-thirds of lithium batteries are produced in China, and Chinese companies are owners of, or investors in, most of the world’s largest lithium projects, primarily in Chile or Australia.
The US government is countering with its own moves to secure access to lithium and other minerals, often speaking the bellicose language of national security and “energy dominance.” In December 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13817, establishing a “Federal Strategy to Ensure Secure and Reliable Supplies of Critical Minerals.” In May 2019, Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced the American Mineral Security Act, which would streamline the permitting process for US-based lithium mines, easing environmental requirements for proposed brine projects across Southern California and Nevada.5
Lost in these struggles to control these newly valuable minerals is a simple fact: the less energy we use, the fewer such minerals we’ll need. There’s no iron (or copper, or lithium) law that states that the electric vehicle future must be dominated by cars. Buses and vans could transport just as many people just as effectively, while using a fraction as much lithium. As we argued in the previous chapter, a clean energy transition focused on shrinking energy demand would make it easier to hit zero carbon faster—and require less stuff to be dug out of the earth. That agenda pairs remarkably well with the demands of many communities on the frontlines of the new mineral extraction.
From Brine to Batteries
At present, about 30 percent of global lithium production originates in Chile. The country contains the world’s largest reserves, with particularly profitable production conditions and several new projects in the exploration phase. What would a global renewable energy transition mean for the communities affected by the extraction of this newly essential mineral?
In a working class neighborhood of Santiago, Chile’s capital, a mural proclaims a resource nationalist vision—“El litio para Chile” (lithium for Chile).6 This demand draws on a long history in Latin America of claiming natural resources—in many cases oil—for the people.
A thousand miles away in northern Chile, the message is different. On the side of a road between the tourist hub of San Pedro and the Indigenous community of Toconao—one of eighteen Indigenous communities affected by lithium extraction—graffiti declares outright opposition to the mining of both lithium and copper.
In January 2018, communities blockaded that road to protest lithium extraction. The government had recently signed a contract with the multinational firm SQM, which tripled the firm’s lithium extraction quota and extended its lease until 2030, even though the company owes the state millions in taxes and was caught illegally financing politicians and political parties. One of the world’s largest lithium companies, SQM was a state-owned enterprise before Augosto Pinochet’s dictatorship privatized it. Corporate exploitation is obviously bad, but it’s not yet clear what the best alternative is.
The two positions signaled by these different graffiti—resource nationalism and frontline opposition—are distinct critiques of extraction from the Left. The first sees the problem as the domination of foreign capital; the second focuses on the destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods. The main difference between the two visions is how they answer core questions: who decides whether, and how much, to extract—and who benefits? A national majority, or local communities?
The potent contradiction at the heart of the energy transition is that switching from dirty oil, coal, and gas is necessary to avert climate chaos, but the extractive processes necessary to realize a world powered by wind and sun entail their own devastating social and environmental consequences. The latter might not be as threatening to the global climate as carbon pollution. But should the same communities exploited by 500 years of capitalist and colonial violence be asked to bear the brunt of the clean energy transition just to make the shift a tiny bit easier for affluent suburbanites who love their SUVs?
This analysis drives the work of Sergio Cubillos, the twenty-nine-year-old president of the Council of Atacama Communities, the association of the eighteen Indigenous communities that ring the Salar de Atacama from which all of Chile’s lithium exports are extracted. In the Salar, Cubillos reports, lithium mining is sucking up water, diminishing biodiversity, and violating Indigenous territorial rights.
Cubillos argues that the Salar is in danger of becoming a “hydrological sacrifice zone.”7 After Antarctica, the region is the second-driest place on earth, and it is becoming drier by the minute thanks to both the lithium and copper sectors. Across the Puna de Atacama, the high Andean plateau traversing Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia, lithium is extracted from brine underneath the salt flats. Mining lithium essentially means mining water.
One lithium mining company alone removes brine at a rate of 1,700 liters a second, transporting it to enormous evaporation ponds that let solar radiation do the work of further concentrating the valuable mineral. Removing brine from the Salar’s complex watershed has the twofold effect of endangering species in this high-altitude wetland, such as the Andean flamingos that feed on brine shrimp, and of lowering the water table, reducing access to freshwater for Indigenous Atacameño communities. This is on top of the astounding rates of freshwater extraction required by nearby copper mines, which use water for processing. One of the two major copper companies holding water rights in the Salar extracts 1,800 liters of freshwater a second.
Both industries combined have created a grave hydrological imbalance. About 2,000 more liters per second of water leave the Salar than enter it. In this context, the council has declared its opposition to any new lithium extraction in the Salar de Atacama or in the dozens of other salt flats in northern Chile. As Cubillos puts it: “no more companies, no more extraction.”
The council is engaged in various forms of legal action. The broader resistance is less polite. Atacameño communities are likely to continue the kinds of roadblocks and direct actions they’ve organized before. Meanwhile, the council’s stance is already beginning to rattle investors: In February 2019, the Canadian-based Lico Energy pulled out of an exploration project in the Salar de Atacama because, in their words, “opposition from the local indigenous community is both immense and widespread and the Company does not see any way in which this project or property can be realistically explored or developed in the future by any corporate entity.”8
Lithium extraction is also generating new forms of transnational movement-building. The recently founded Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (El observatorio plurinacional de salares andinos) is stitching together a network of affected communities, environmental activists, and scientists in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. The observatory is a unique organizational form: plurinational both because it includes members from these three countries, and also in recognition of the multiple Indigenous nationalities within each of the countries’ borders.
Co-founder Ramón Balcazar explains that instead of framing itself in negative terms as an “anti-lithium mining” organization, members choose to center a positive vision of the salt flats as complex and environmentally vulnerable socio-natural systems with cultural, scientific, and economic value. Through a series of activist convergences, beginning in Chile and then moving elsewhere in the Altiplano, the observatory hopes to promote ecologically sound, democratically articulated forms of development in the region.
Crucially, this is an internationalism from below. Members share information and strategies and may one day coordinate actions, traversing national boundaries and overcoming the logistical odds of organizing in underserved rural spaces. For hundreds of years, elites have fragmented the Indigenous peoples of the Andes and subjected them (as well as non-Indigenous campesinos) to rapacious forms of capitalist development: salt nitrate mining, copper mining, and now lithium mining. Now, the observatory, and the broader web of environmental and Indigenous organizations that it links together, offers a vision of a world in which ecosystems and territories are not sacrificed in the name of mitigating climate change. What they are fighting for is an alternative to what observatory member and social work professor Barbara Jerez calls “eco-coloniality”: deepening extractivism in the name of preventing climate change.9
Alongside the Indigenous and environmental grievances are labor struggles. Miguel Soto worked for SQM before it was privatized, and he was imprisoned for a year after the 1973 coup. Through a glitch in the regime, he was able to return to his job after he was released and, despite widespread repression targeting leftists, worked as a union organizer. His union, Industrial Chile, organizes workers in metallurgy, textiles, manufacturing, forestry, and more; they began organizing workers in the lithium plants in 2000. Workers at the installation are fragmented across thirty-three unions—a result of regressive Chilean labor law. And labor organizers work in a risky environment: SQM has fired numerous organizers as part of a concerted anti-union strategy.
In 2016, Soto, along with leaders from other trade union confederations and left-wing elected officials, launched the Lithium for Chile Movement. They declared Chile’s export-led accumulation model exhausted: It has generated wealth for foreign companies and left poverty in its wake. They are calling for a suspension of any new agreements with lithium companies and for the nationalization of SQM, citing Salvador Allende’s 1971 nationalization of copper. Their position resonates with the findings of a Lithium Commission convened in 2014 by Michelle Bachelet’s center-left government: the commission unanimously recommended that the state enact its role as the “authentic owner of lithium resources,” and nearly every member voted in favor of establishing a state-owned company to develop lithium projects.
The idea of nationalizing lithium is popular with many ordinary Chileans, though unlikely to happen imminently. While Indigenous and environmentalist activists often agree in theory that state ownership would be better than private capital, many are skeptical that a state enterprise would deviate from the extractivist logic of its private equivalents. CODELCO, the state-owned copper company, is not known for respecting Indigenous rights or ecosystems. This is a moment, many believe, to envision new paradigms of ownership, new ways of thinking about the energy transition, and a new system of socio-natural values.
On the ground, the politics of lithium extraction are complex and still evolving. But ultimately, these different grassroots demands aren’t so incompatible. Under Chile’s current right-wing government, nationalization doesn’t seem to be on the near horizon. Meanwhile, some amount of lithium will be necessary for decarbonization. In this context, many activists in Chile, whether from Indigenous organizations or the labor movement, strive for more public control over extraction and strict limitations on mining in environmentally fragile areas. All of this would incentivize recycling existing lithium and pressure companies to develop less ecologically harmful forms of mining—such as extraction that doesn’t require removing any brine from the Salar. We hope for greener mining techniques, but we shouldn’t count on them.
Exactly how much is ultimately extracted will be shaped by many factors, especially firms’ investment decisions, domestic regulations, and local protest. But national politics in the Global North are also decisive. Precisely how will we decarbonize? A world crawling with 300-mile range luxury electric sedans requires a lot more lithium, and mining, than a world flush with electric buses. And US trade policies can support environmental and labor standards—or undercut them.
The Green New Deal Beyond US Borders
Climate change is a global crisis. Preventing the worst outcome will require cooperation between countries to dramatically reduce emissions and transfer carbon-free technology; adapting to its effects will require action to protect the world’s most vulnerable and to welcome migrants displaced by rising sea levels and droughts.
The Green New Deal, however, is typically framed as a domestic process taking place within US borders. Most conversations about the clean energy transition assume that the materials we need to zero out carbon are ready and waiting. But as we’ve seen, it’s not so simple. How can we ensure that a clean energy transition is also a globally just one? And how can action in the United States help ensure decarbonization beyond our borders?
We argue that making global progress starts with the material chains that already link countries: networks of global trade, particularly as they pertain to the minerals necessary for the renewable energy transition. It’s essential that rising energy consumption in huge middle-income countries like India and China be renewable as quickly as possible, and that renewable energy powers electricity for the billion people around the world without reliable access to it. For that to happen without devastating mining communities, the United States must reduce energy demand at home, set new labor and environmental standards in its trade policy, and share technological innovations rather than hoarding patents on them. This will also strengthen our hand in negotiations. Overall, if a US Green New Deal helps accelerate green investment worldwide, everything we do to prioritize equity and democracy across supply chains would bring broader benefits.
An element of this approach could be the “Geneva Principles for a Global Green New Deal.” Authored by economists Kevin Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright, the principles make clear that the past four decades of neoliberal hegemony have exacerbated financial instability, inequality, and climate change. They call for a new global consensus centered on equitable development, multilateral cooperation, and rapid decarbonization. Efforts to draw attention to environmental damage and human rights violations are also cropping up among international NGOs.10 Citing human rights abuses, Amnesty International has called on manufacturers to produce an “ethical battery” in the next five years.11
These efforts are laudable. But for an energy transition that is democratic and sustainable, we need more than the interventions of professionalized NGOs and technocrats. We need to weave relations of solidarity that cut across the deep asymmetries that structure our globe. Labor unions and climate organizers around the world need to address the injustices of global supply chains in order to build a truly green economy.
The global stakes of energy transitions are high: Previous transitions to coal and oil deepened imperialism and racial capitalism. The advent of coal-powered factories in England dramatically expanded productive capacity—and intensified demand for raw materials, harvested and extracted by slaves and other forms of coerced labor from a vast network of colonies. And in the twentieth-century bid to switch industrial economies to oil, firms enlisted states and their militaries in a scramble for control across the Middle East and North Africa.
This long history of domination also engendered visions of a different planetary order. Between the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1974 launch of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), there was a brief opening to create a more equal world. Across the Third World, much of it recently decolonized, governments aspired to escape the trap of extractive economies through a combination of state planning and coordination across the periphery. They took aim at what dependency theorists called “unequal exchange”: countries that export raw materials and import value-added manufactured goods are always on the losing end of global trade.
But the aspiration of Third World solidarity was replaced by a competitive race to the bottom to offer globe-trotting capital the lowest wages and the least regulation. Neoliberal hegemony, consolidated after the end of the Cold War, reinforced the Global South’s dependence on foreign investment. In some contexts, this took the form of low-wage manufacturing for export. In others, especially in Africa and South America, an extractive model of accumulation intensified around the export of primary commodities like oil, copper, sugar, diamonds, and timber, with multinational firms and local elites capturing most of the profits.
Capitalist extraction is still devastating local communities and ecosystems, causing territorial dispossession and environmental destruction—but directly affected communities are increasingly mobilizing in opposition. Resistance to lithium mining in South America foreshadows the coming social conflicts along the extractive frontiers of renewable energy.
We stand on the precipice of yet another energy revolution and at a fork in the road: solar-powered capitalism with a whole new set of opportunities for profit and pillage; or an internationalist Green New Deal, a historic opportunity to remake global power structures and our relationship to the natural world. We argue that the latter stands a much better chance of actually decarbonizing the planet.
Solidarity Across Supply Chains
Providence, Rhode Island is a long way from Chile’s Atacama Desert. Yet a campaign there by the Democratic Socialists of America has developed a vision of energy democracy in the United States that is strikingly compatible with demands on the ground in the Atacama and fledgling efforts around the world to formulate principles for democratic, just supply chains for essential minerals. Here we adopt that campaign’s principles, with minor modifications, to explore how visions of energy justice in the Global North and South can connect.
As we’ve discussed, private utility companies (and many of their mismanaged public counterparts) are an obstacle to a radical Green New Deal: they resist decarbonization; they have failed to upgrade their infrastructure to be resilient against extreme weather; and their profit model subjects millions of Americans to fuel poverty.12 The solution to these interconnected problems is to decarbonize, decommodify, decolonize, and democratize the grid. Only when energy is governed by inclusive, collective decisions at the points of production, distribution, and consumption, all within planetary limits, will it truly serve human needs.
These principles have emerged in the context of local US grid struggles, but they speak to the energy system in its totality. They’ll no doubt need adapting to reflect campaigns for energy democracy around the world. Here we offer some suggestions.
We’ve already argued for democratizing utilities. In what follows, we argue that democratic control over energy is a global project. Our core premise is that nodes of the vast supply chains of the renewable transition are potential sites of solidarity across borders. We could organize around a new, fair, and sustainable trade regime, where working people at all points in the renewable energy supply chain have a voice in deciding how much to conserve, how much to extract, and how to improve communities’ lives worldwide. How much of a given resource we use shouldn’t depend only on how much of that resource physically exists. Most obviously, we shouldn’t use all the world’s fossil fuels just because they’re there. But when it comes to other resources, we must similarly take into account the decisions made by workers and affected communities at every node of production and distribution. And we must acknowledge that the resources to build a low carbon world need to be shared among all countries. Everyone will be decarbonizing with similar tools. We should be flexible about how much clean energy infrastructure we ultimately build here in the United States. We’re not the only ones making the decisions.
The most straightforward way to reduce the emissions and environmental destruction caused by the renewable energy transition is to reduce projected demand for the earth’s resources. Fortunately, there’s low-hanging fruit: Our current consumption comes with a lot of waste. The electronics industry, for example, is premised on planned obsolescence, pushing people to buy new gadgets every year and making it hard to repair broken ones. We can follow Sweden and other countries in reclaiming the right to repair our objects, setting new standards for everything from smart phones to washing machines to make them easier to fix instead of throwing broken things away.
There’s also progress to make in recycling battery materials (like cobalt and lithium) as well as reusing electric vehicle batteries in second-life applications, such as the less-intensive work of grid storage. Extraction should be held to stringent environmental regulations, and, in some cases, subjected to moratoria pending holistic impact assessments and improved mining techniques.
More broadly, across the Global North we need to change how we consume. As we’ve argued, attempting to minimize environmental impact one consumer choice at a time is a dead end. The collective changes in consumption we’ve outlined are essential.
Reducing resource demand in the Global North will also transform the power relations that structure the global economy. It’s the responsibility of the Global North to ensure that the energy transition at the core of the Green New Deal doesn’t replicate neocolonial patterns of dispossession and contamination. Dismantling over 500 years of colonial structures is a formidable task—but a major economic and energy transition is a good place to start. In the United States, we can fight to force our government and transnational corporations to respect the rights of workers in cobalt, copper, lithium, and other resource sectors. Decolonizing renewable energy also means respecting the rights of local and national publics to govern resources, honoring Indigenous rights as they’re codified in international conventions, and involving Indigenous peoples in the ownership and governance of mining projects.
Those may sound like abstract principles. But US trade policy is one of the major forces shaping how commodities travel the world and under what conditions. A radical Green New Deal would need to overhaul it.
Currently, trade rules and agreements are written by and for the 1 percent. They protect capital’s mobility and investors’ profits and undermine the power of democratic majorities to prioritize labor rights, ecosystem integrity, and equitable economic development. Restructuring this global architecture, which is embedded in everything from investor arbitration clauses to intellectual property rights, is daunting. But there was nothing inevitable about the victory of the neoliberal project to protect markets from democracy. And this moment of heightened political turbulence presents an opportunity to reimagine the world freed from the imperatives of market fetishism. Across the Atlantic, the deceptively named “free” trade regime has come under attack—most prominently from the revanchist right-wing. The Left needs its own vision for trade. The globally dispersed supply chains of the renewable transition are an important place to start proposing policies that promote the interests of the 99 percent and the planet, rather than those of corporations and financiers.
Reactionary right-wing populists in Europe and the United States have tapped into long-simmering discontent with the free trade projects of the 1990s: the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, and above all the World Trade Organization. Right-wing populists promise to protect labor from competition with lower wage workers in the Global South and to restrict immigration. But nativism is a tool to paper over domestic class conflict. Workers share interests across national boundaries, and dividing the working class only weakens its bargaining position against globe-trotting capital. A Left trade policy would lift environmental and labor standards for workers and their communities wherever American companies, or their suppliers, do business.
The trade policy of a radical Green New Deal could end the race to the bottom logic of global capitalism. Instead, we would race to the top for labor and environmental standards, including “ratcheting mechanisms” to improve standards over time. We would also reverse the logic of trade negotiations: progressive state officials would negotiate so that labor, human rights, and environmental clauses are agreed upon before anything else is addressed, instead of being tacked on as an afterthought (if at all). Deals would require free, prior, and informed consent on the part of Indigenous communities located at the sites of extraction. One of the biggest challenges in holding US corporations accountable for the practices along their broader supply chains is enforcement in the absence of a global state. Historian Erik Loomis argues that labor activists should use a domestic law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, to try US firms for rights violations beyond US borders; Indigenous and environmental activists could, too.13
We would also prioritize mechanisms to transfer funds and technologies to the countries of the Global South to help them cut carbon emissions and adapt to climate change. Strong international intellectual property rights are a key part of the neoliberal project. Addressing them will be an important part of undoing it. Pharmaceutical industry influence on trade policy in the 1980s, for example, allowed US-based corporations to monopolize life-saving drugs like HIV/AIDS antiretrovirals, making them unaffordable for most in the Global South. It is essential that we avoid a repeat for planet- and life-saving clean technology—the tighter the grip of capital on clean technology is, the harder it will be for the world to decarbonize.
In the case of rechargeable batteries, we could require US-based lithium companies to adopt technology that doesn’t damage sensitive watersheds in the Atacama Desert and to share battery technology with Chilean firms (whether private or public): US companies shouldn’t use patents to monopolize manufacturing technologies, for example, and then sell batteries made with Chilean lithium back to Chileans at exorbitant prices. Government contracts, subsidies, and loans for green technology can also play a role in setting standards. A federal contract to provide lithium for electric buses, for example, could come with a requirement that supplies meet standards jointly negotiated with Chilean labor and Indigenous activists.
The United States has an important role to play, but it can’t act alone. These trade and procurement policies could be part of agreements across countries where political parties have recently committed to a Green New Deal, including the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, Spain’s Socialist Party, and Canada’s New Democratic Party. A “club” of countries pursuing Green New Deal–style legislation—ideally linking member states in the Global North and Global South—could facilitate this process. Members would pursue collective, binding policy goals based on shared principles of aggressive decarbonization and egalitarian social policy—a more concrete approach than previous attempts at global cooperation. Supply chain justice would make an excellent first challenge for such transnational cooperation to tackle.
For instance, since there are limits to how many renewable energy inputs—like lithium, cobalt, copper, and so on—we can safely mine, reining in US demand makes more of those resources available for other countries to use. American efficiency would be ethical—and a key practical step to help other countries decarbonize.
None of this will be easy to achieve. Restrictions on mining would elicit fierce backlash from big companies and their allies in resource-intensive countries, often including local police forces and private security guards. Democratic controls on trade would likewise spur backlash from the multinational corporations, many based in the United States, that benefit from minimal regulation. And governments, no matter how progressive, won’t succeed in reshaping the global economic order without significant pressure from mobilized constituents. Transforming renewable energy supply chains will require social organization, transnational alliances, and disruptive capacity.
Where are the openings for grassroots leverage in the globally interconnected energy system? Right now, that system is dominated by fossil fuels—and protest against fossil fuel infrastructure is increasingly connecting local and global action. The politics around this infrastructure are different from those around renewable energy. But they show that community and worker power is the supply-side complement to demand-side interventions to reduce energy consumption.
The fracking boom and the repeal of the ban on oil exports has made the United States a major fossil fuel exporter. We need to keep oil, coal, and gas in the ground, which means that every local battle against a liquified natural gas (LNG) plant, a pipeline, or a fracking project is part of the fight for a safer climate. From the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf Coast, carbon-spewing and explosive LNG export terminals are disproportionately located in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. These struggles against environmental injustice are also fights against the global fossil fuel sector. And they’re making an impact: In a recent victory for the coalition against the Jordan Cove LNG facility in Oregon, the state’s Department of Energy Quality denied the project’s water permit.14
Protestors have also put their bodies in front of bulldozers and guard dogs to stop oil and gas pipelines. From April 2016 to February 2017, thousands gathered at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers in the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which threatened the reservation’s water supply.
Water Protectors faced brutal state repression, including mass arrests, water cannons, and attack dogs. But despite the violence, they drew on hundreds of years of Oceti Sakowin resistance to build, in Nick Estes’s words, “an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking” of each other and of the land.15 At its height, as many as 15,000 were present, comprising Water Protectors from almost 400 Indigenous nations, as well as many non-Indigenous allies—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who credited the experience with inspiring her to go into politics.16
As noted, we’ll need some minerals from the earth to pull off an energy transition. But when it comes to similar actions at mines linked to renewable energy, community and labor resistance could slow the rate of environmentally damaging extraction, buying time to develop more environmentally sensitive technology and research into recycling and reusing lithium batteries. Lessons from the work of Water Protectors and the ongoing struggles in the Atacama Desert will be vital.17 Supply and demand side restrictions can operate in tandem: When communities set higher labor and environmental standards around extraction, the price goes up, which incentivizes rich countries to build public buses instead of private cars. And when procurement and investment are guided by a democratic state rather than private capital, cutting prices at all costs is no longer the imperative.
The organization of the interlinked lithium mining, battery, and electric vehicle sectors also presents opportunities for strategic disruption. Lithium mining is a relatively oligopolistic market: a few firms control most projects. That concentration of ownership means that protests or strikes at any given mine have greater impact. Meanwhile, electric vehicle manufacturers are entering into direct agreements with lithium companies to ensure access to lithium supplies—which means that supply concerns have forced firms into vertical integration. While such agreements assure resource flows, they also create new risks. If the communities and workers at the mines where VW or BMW source their lithium decided to protest or strike, their actions would quickly leapfrog to the electric vehicle factory floor. The effect of that disruption could telescope vast networks and reverse the usual vectors of power. Maybe they would get support from long-distance comrades, like in 1978, when Oakland’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 refused to load ships transporting bombs to Pinochet’s brutal regime in Chile, or from workers currently organizing in Tesla factories.
This kind of organizing is the grassroots counterpart to the trade policies discussed above. Imagine if workers in electric bus factories and urban transit authorities, in solidarity with Water Protectors and workers in lithium mines in Chile and the United States, pushed for corporate accountability, and threatened labor strikes and community direct actions if fleets of buses aren’t produced in union-made supply chains—or if they threaten vulnerable watersheds, whether in the Atacama Desert or Death Valley.
As we’ve argued, addressing the planetary dimensions of climate change will require tackling the global dimensions of contemporary capitalism. We do that by building solidarity across borders, leveraging the choke points of the global economy in alliance with leftists holding state power. An effective Green New Deal is an internationalist one.
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1 Ed Crooks, “US, Canada and Australia Join Forces to Tackle Metal Shortage Risk,” Financial Times, June 11, 2019.
2 Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney, Responsible Minerals Sourcing for Renewable Energy, Earthworks, April 17, 2019, earthworks.org.
3 “Volkswagen Secures Lithium Supplies,” Volkswagen AG, April 4, 2019, volkswagen-newsroom.com.
4 Elena Mazneva, “China Moves Closer to Battery Domination with VW Lithium Deal,” bloomberg.com, April 5, 2019.
5 Louis Sahagun, “A War Is Brewing over Lithium Mining at the Edge of Death Valley,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2019; Ernest Scheyder, “US Senate Moves Forward on Plan to Develop Electric Vehicle Supply Chain,” Reuters, May 14, 2019.
6 This section draws on fieldwork conducted by Thea Riofrancos in Chile, in spring and summer 2019.
7 Interview with Thea Riofrancos, March 13, 2019.
8 “Lico Energy Formally Drops the Purickuta Lithium Property Due to Unworkable Property Conditions,” Lico Energy Metals Inc., February 18, 2019, Licoenergymetals.com.
9 Presentation, Energías Verdes y Extractivismo en Salares, Universidad de Chile, April 12, 2019.
10 Kevin P. Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright, “A New Multilateralism for Shared Prosperity: Geneva Principles for a Global Green New Deal,” Global Development Policy Center, April 10, 2019, bu.edu.
11 “Amnesty Challenges Industry Leaders to Clean Up Their Batteries,” Amnesty International, March 21, 2019, Amnesty.org.
12 Adam Chandler, “Where the Poor Spend More than 10 Percent of Their Income on Energy,” Atlantic, June 8, 2016, atlantic.com.
13 Erik Loomis, “A Left Vision for Trade,” Dissent, Winter 2017.
14 Ted Sickenger, “Oregon DEQ Denies Jordan Cove LNG Water Quality Permit,” Oregonian, May 6, 2019.
15 Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso 2019), p. 58.
16 Nick Bowlin, “Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Path to Becoming Green Hero,” eenews.com, December 5, 2018.
17 Dave Sherwood, “In Chilean Desert, Global Thirst for Lithium Is Fueling a ‘Water War,’” Reuters, August 29, 2018.