Extracting the Future

In my bread and cheese job managing product regulatory compliance, these is not a workday that passes that I am not called upon to address the need to test, document, or provide evidence of these previous two activities in regard to my employer’s very small-scale use of lithium batteries in a selection of the products sold by the company. In fact, some days the focus on the ever-growing and increasingly complex regulatory structure related to lithium batteries, their use, their structure, and their transportation requires my absolute attention for the entire day.

Once a very unusual type of battery, lithium cells in their many different forms have become more than just common, they have become essential to technology-dependent societies in such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and electric motor vehicles. Without their ability to contain significant amounts of stored charge in a small space and be able to accept repeated recharging, life in many nations as it is now known would be impossible. They have also been widely proclaimed to be a cornerstone in the new “green” – at least, non-fossil fuel powered – economy. Unfortunately, this makes the demand for lithium ever greater, which is a significant problem as lithium is a scarce, non-renewable element; qualities that make the mining and trading of it rife with problems that too often bring out the very worst human qualities.

In his new book Extracting the Future; Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition, Prof. Mark Goodale examines the technological, economic, ecological, and political aspects of the new lithium economy by focusing on Bolivia’s lithium mining industry. The source of a significant amount of the planet’s known lithium content, Bolivia has become the global hot-spot for lithium economy, and by such an examination, Prof. Goodale is able to show how this economy’s rapid development and exponential growth “is deeply embedded in a global capitalist system that continues to rely on resource extraction, unsustainable economic growth, and geopolitical violence.”

As lithium batteries and technologies associated with lithium have become so central to daily modern life, short of going “off the grid” it is effectively impossible to avoid them, therefore it is well worth the while of all who seek to live a life more respectful of the idea that there is no Planet B to understand the environmental and socio-economic effects of the lithium economy in order to understand it and make any adjustments – ever so small they may be – accordingly.