Like oil in the twentieth century, lithium is the “white gold” of the twenty-first. Demand for this key element is driving economic growth based on the “renewable” energy provided by lithium-ion batteries. Such batteries are necessary for storing energy from solar photovoltaics in order to make that electricity readily available. A lightweight metal, lithium is generally processed into a white powder after being extracted from brines or salty water ponds and from underground deposits.
The political economy of lithium has gained global attention due to variations in political positions, technical developments, and geography, though with weak to non-existent public deliberation and with no expected effect on reducing fossil fuel dependency. Fossil fuel use has increased every year since the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Over the past century, only war, pandemic, and economic collapse showed any real reduction, though only temporarily.
With fossil fuel use increasing and governments, corporations, and investment houses in varying stages of implementation of “decarbonization” schemes, a mineral rush has resulted in a drive to extract important minerals for economic growth. For lithium, resource-rich geographies such as the Lithium Triangle in South America (between Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile) and the Triangle of Death near Manono in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are highly sought after. The Congo has one of the largest and highest-grade hard-rock lithium deposits in the world.
In the DRC, deposits of lithium are found in pegmatites, a kind of igneous rock that has large crystals such as quartz. The largest pegmatite near Manono is the Carriere de l’Este , which is 5.5 kilometers long. The substance that is extracted is a mixture of lithium-aluminum called spodumene, and the processing involves mechanical crushing followed by chemical treatments such as with sulfuric acid to eventually arrive at the highly refined white, crystalline powder of lithium. Democratic Republic of the Congo The Congo is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. There, in the Congolian Rainforest and river, the peoples of the Mbuti and Twa have lived for perhaps 90,000 years. In the modern era, Congo has been subjected to colonial rule and seemingly endless war. Most recently, in January 2025, the M23 rebel group made significant territorial gains, killing thousands of people in the Rare Earth Mining Areas (REMA).
The current increase of conflict is due to the great powers vying for lithium and other key minerals deemed necessary for both a “sustainability economy” and “national security.” This conflict is exacerbating intracontinental tensions that could expand the war to the entirety of Central Africa and then globally in a trade war over lithium. If war does occur, then South Africa, the United States, China, Europe, and others could become directly involved, and the climate consequences would be considerable. Environmental and civil society advocates, activists, and importantly the land and forest protectors in the region are already facing heightened threats and displacement amplified by powerful mining interests and armed conflict.
Today, the long shadow of the “resource curse ” is spreading in countries that either cannot defend themselves or are not favored in the international order. But as a framework to understand the DRC and other nations facing the mineral rush, the resource curse discourse is oversimplified because it neglects the issue of power and posits economic development along the Western liberal model as a universal good. Furthermore, the resource curse hypothesis fails to show the DRC’s subordinate position in global mineral supply chains, which originates in European colonialism and is reinforced under neocolonialism. Unequal exchange between the DRC and other nations leads to a net outflow of both materials and labor such that the DRC fails to benefit from mineral extraction or domestic labor. This unequal exchange is also tightly linked to environmental destruction, as Zoran Steinman writes , with material use accounting for “more than 90 percent of variation in environmental damage indicators,” and more than 90 percent of biodiversity loss and water stress. Lithium Boom After the turn of the millennium, world production of lithium increased significantly to more than 30,000 metric tons and an average annual growth rate of 5.3 percent. Between 2015 and 2023, world production increased to more than 180,000 metric tons, an average annual growth rate of 21 percent. By 2040, consumption is expected to reach 1.3 million metric tons, an eight-fold increase from 2023. Although this represents a lower growth rate of 11.6 percent annually, the absolute growth is equivalent to adding more than 62,200 metric tons of production annually.
Roughly 90 percent of this production is expected to be used in electric vehicles (EVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS), with the remaining 10 percent going to the nuclear power industry, weapons, rocket fuel, battery powered tools, laptops and cellular phones, vacuum cleaners and other home appliances, portable speakers, personal battery storage packs, paint, ceramics, and other products.
As of 2025, the largest lithium-producing nations are Australia (36 percent), Chile (20 percent), China (17 percent), Zimbabwe (9 percent), and Argentina (7 percent). China dominates battery production, where most lithium ends up, accounting for nearly 80 percent of global capacity as well as consumption. In 2023, more electric vehicles were sold in China (8.1 million) than the rest of the world (5.7 million).
Lithium is the essential element for the still theoretical and largely hyped “Green transition” that has few significant human rights and ecology-based regulations in place. In the DRC, a virtually pure free market is a euphemism for a total war economy with mining impacts including habitat destruction, pollution, local extinction of wildlife, carbon emissions, aquifer drawdown, violence, corruption, and forced migration. The war for lithium and “sustainability” will create catastrophic extraction on orders of magnitudes greater than the previous rush for the legacy minerals from the region and worldwide.
By 2021, the Tesla Corporation required more lithium than its four closest competitors combined. Today, by comparison, both Tesla and BYD have increased consumption, and BYD’s total sales are more than double those of Tesla.
U.S. contractor Eric Prince, former CEO of Blackwater, says pointedly that “it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, we’re going to govern those countries … ’cause enough is enough, we’re done being invaded. … You can say that about pretty much all of Africa, they’re incapable of governing themselves.”
Prince is an advisor to the Trump administration, which is involved in a planetary resource grab, complete with thinly veiled and sometimes openly expressed threats to invade Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Like the ur-colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who wanted to paint Africa “British Red,” the United States is preparing for a reconquest of Africa in order to ensure access to its mineral wealth. United States, Fortress Europe, and a Metallic NATO Although this new imperialism is clearly a threat to Africans, the formation of various mineral pacts for the purpose of maximum extraction threatens the entire planet. As German philosopher and artist Fabian Scheidler points out in his book The End of the Megamachine : The list of ravages caused by mining is almost endless. Whether gold mining in Ghana, coltan in the Congo, aluminum in Brazil, copper in Chile, tin in Indonesia or uranium in Niger; wherever mining giants like Rio Tinto, Anglo-American, BHP Billiton and the like set foot, landscapes and societies become desolated. Mining—including coal, oil and gas production—is by far the most aggressive and destructive economic sector on Earth. At one point in the early history of the New World, the streets of Potosi, Bolivia were “paved” with silver. Today, Wall Street will reap stellar profits; those on Main Street will continue with consumerism and status-seeking while complaining at times on social media; and those who live on dirt roads or in the forests or on remote islands hardly merit a thought. The war on nature has become the modus operandi for civilization and its urbanist ideology.
Technological progress through industrialism and financial capital, shaped by an authoritarian technics, distracts consumers with fantasies of renewable energy and sustainability or regular citizens accept the “magnificent bribe” to get what they can from the system and look the other way when it comes to how destructive the system really is for the modern way of life. Similar to the hyping of previous technologies with environmentalist, humanitarian, and pro-poor rhetoric, the narrative of a green transition and its justifications for mining the DRC’s lithium resources and the exploitation of its people and land obscures a massive acceleration in extraction that has had devastating impact on climate and the planet.
Such a system has benefited powerful countries, where perhaps 80 percent of the population lives in cities, hence the Magnificent Bribe. The consumption of this urban population, controlled by investors and corporations, is devastating local communities along with the natural or biotic communities on which they depend. As China, India, Russia, and Brazil increase their GDP based on industrialization, rich countries demand greater energy for AI and other needs. The imperative to cut every tree yesterday has become a call to extract every last mineral today.
The modern history of the DRC serves as a stark reminder that the current frame of the “green transition” is not just or sustainable. By combining a fundamental shift in consumption patterns and politics with a truly sustainable and innovative economy, then the pursuit of renewable energy and electric storage capacity would be a great step towards a better future. Toward that end, there should be a moratorium on many forms of mining and a commitment by scientists and engineers to develop a new ecotechnics that ensures that technological innovation obeys an ecological principle of “do no harm.”
Politically, such a project could be accomplished with a planetary Green New Deal that the United States and China could lead together. An Open Source Bell Labs Model could provide training in STEM and ecology and art (STEAM’N) to anyone who wants to participate in further discovery, invention, and innovation. The open source community is already well established to take on such an endeavor of education and innovation and could be an excellent complement to the sophisticated and effective expert systems in the sciences. Such a planetary-scale project would include comprehensive education for the general population and the prioritization and codification of effective legislation to uphold ecological integrity and justice. It would encourage reasonable changes in personal lifestyle, starting with continuing education and deliberation concerning a less extractive economy and culture. A better world is indeed possible, one that protects wild nature and puts bioregional integrity at the heart of a flourishing culture.
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