Extracting the Future (eBook)

Lithium in an Era of Energy Transition

Mark Goodale (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
304 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-40280-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Bolivia's troubled efforts to develop a commercial lithium industry.
 
Bolivia's lithium accounts for a significant percentage of the world's known reserve. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Mark Goodale traces the development of Bolivia's closely guarded lithium project through the perspectives of a wide array of people and institutions, including workers at the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat; the state lithium company in La Paz; Latin America's first electric vehicle company; and energy entrepreneurs in Bolivia, the United States, and Germany. He points to a fundamental contradiction: a so-called green energy transition dependent on the ever-greater extraction of yet another nonrenewable resource.  
 
But without access to Bolivia's lithium, and at megaindustrial scales that far outstrip current production, there won't be sufficient lithium supply to make the batteries needed for a truly global EV revolution. Extracting the Future shows how the lithium economy is deeply embedded in a global capitalist system that continues to rely on resource extraction, unsustainable economic growth, and geopolitical violence. 

Inhalt

Contents
 
List of Illustrations
 
Introduction: Locating Lithium
1 • Tracing the Prelives of Lithium
2 • “The Fuel That Will Power the World”
3 • Flexible Extractivism and Historical Reckoning
4 • The Cathode Chronicles
5 • Electric Ambitions, Made in Cocha
6 • Green Energy Renegades and Lithium Futures
Conclusion: Thinking through Brine
Afterword
 
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
 

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.10.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Ökologie / Naturschutz
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Öffentliches Recht ► Umweltrecht
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Schlagworte: battery production • climate change • Economic Development • Energy Transition • Environmental Degradation • geopolitical tensions • Global demand • lithium extraction • mineral reserves • renewable energy • resource nationalism • Social Impact • sustainable mining • technological dependence • water scarcity
• ISBN-10: 0-520-40280-4 / 0520402804
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-40280-5 / 9780520402805