POWERING THE JUST GLOBAL ENERGY TRANSITION: A LITHIUM TRILOGY

The mandate to stop burning fossil fuels and to find alternative energy sources in order to act on climate change is driving technological innovation worldwide. However, finding sustainable solutions that work at scale will take time if we are to address global consumption demands without perpetuating a business-as-usual approach. In recent years, lithium, via its many technological applications, has emerged as a critical metal driving the energy transition. With lithium reserves, production capacities, and consumer markets spread across many of the planet's geographies, governments and corporations worldwide are seeking new alliances to secure access to the supply chain and their market quotas. The global race to power the green energy transition is ongoing.

Access to all forms of lithium-powered technology and renewable energy enhances humans' everyday lives. As sustainability-minded consumers grow their market demands, lithium is the ubiquitous resource that powers electric vehicles, solar and wind farms, data access, and urban mobility, helping decrease the environmental footprint of human activities. Behind the scenes of this green transition, a massive system of planetary operational geographies, manufacturing processes, distribution logics, and emerging spatial typologies is taking shape under diffused governing structures and lean public policies.

In the remote territories that have historically provided the resources our cities need to prosper, extraction continues to disrupt ecosystems and livelihoods. At the same time, billions of dollars in investments are activating distant territories to accommodate technology fabrication, energy generation, transmission, distribution, consumption, recycling, and waste management, further disturbing habitats and resulting in biodiversity loss. Advancing a just global energy transition requires intentionally addressing these processes' disruptive nature and building more equitable means of planetary resilience.

"Powering A Just Global Energy Transition: A Lithium Trilogy" is a three-panel symposium organized around the lithium life cycle: extraction–processing // manufacturing–distribution // consumption–recycling. By scrutinizing the socio-spatial transformations, temporalities, and actors involved in each process, panelists will help us untangle the instrumentality of lithium in powering the green energy transition from outdated extractivist logics. What does technological innovation, from extraction to reuse, look like? What is the carbon footprint of a lithium-ion battery up until the time it is discarded, and how do recycling and reuse occur? How are the spatial transformations enabling green energy generation, distribution, storage, and consumption regulated? How can we address the inequity in labor practices and the redistribution of gains and losses across the lithium life cycle? With the massive investments underway, how can we cultivate the imagination of more just and equitable urbanisms and urbanities to heal our wounded planet?