Lithium Mining, Like All Mining, Is a Place Based Activity, Right?

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In northern portugal, there's been an enormous amount of conflict over plans to minlithium in a community called covas doba rosandcuse my bad portuguese pronunciation. The people that remain there are very dependent on the land and on the water and the soil for their livelihoods. And so there's a real fear among the people that i talk to that basically, their ivelihoods are at stake, like, it's very exitential for them.

Paris Marx is joined by Thea Riofrancos to discuss how the push for electric vehicles is driving governments in the United States and Europe to onshore mining after decades of doing the reverse, what that means for companies in the sector, and how movements are pushing back against this resource-intensive vision for a green transition.

Thea Riofrancos is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and a member of the Climate + Community Project. She’s also the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Follow Thea on Twitter at @triofrancos.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Thea wrote about the push to onshore mining activities and what it means for climate justice, and recently published an academic article on the “security-sustainability nexus” relating to lithium onshoring.
EV raw material costs doubled during the pandemic, forcing many automakers to raise prices.
A lithium mine in Portugal was scrapped after local opposition, but other projects continue to move ahead.
The US Inflation Reduction Act included many benefits for mining companies and tied EV tax credits to mineral supply chains.

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