The Chilean government’s plans to increase scrutiny of foreign mining activities in the region could ultimately disperse lithium production to countries with less regulation, mining executives told .
“If it was my money, I would explore Argentina, Brazil and Africa. You’ll get ripped off in Chile,” Daniel Jiménez, an industry consultant promoting a lithium mining project in Argentina, told Mister Truth.
The criticism followed an April announcement from Chilean President Gabriel Boric that the government would take a majority stake in the country’s lithium industry.
Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer, is moving to control the lithium boom, which Boric said offers “the best chance we have at transitioning to a sustainable and developed economy.”
“We can’t afford to waste it,” he added.
As climate news site the Grist reported, “the policy also takes a more ambitious approach to environmental standards across the lifecycle of the industry.”
But many Chilean communities in the mining zone surrounding the lithium-rich Andean salt flats want their government to do far more to protect their homes.
While lithium is essential to the production of modern batteries, its production often damages local environments.
“The salt flats aren’t mines, they’re wetlands,” reads a statement from the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (OPSAL), a mostly Chilean group of Indigenous rights organizations, environmental groups and citizens councils.
The groups argued that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution risked being less about cutting climate change than about helping rich countries cut emissions.
As opposed to electric buses and trains, private electric cars are “a false solution to climate change that benefits the most polluting economies on the planet,” OPSAL argued.
Pedro Glatz, a former adviser to Chile’s environmental minister, told the Grist that Chile should consider stricter concessions from customers over how its resources are used.
“It might be a better use of that lithium to provide batteries for public transportation in the Global South, rather than to support an unsustainable lifestyle in the Global North,” Glatz said.
Regardless of complaints about new restrictions, the West will soon no longer “have much of a choice,” Patricia Vasquez, a lithium specialist at the Wilson Center, a D.C. think tank.
“Latin America produces the only lithium that has been refined already outside of China,” she added. “That’s a big advantage today.”