Chile has lots of lithium, which is essential to the world’s transition to green energy. But anger over powerful mining interests, a water crisis and inequality has driven Chile to rethink how it defines itself.
Summary
- SALAR DE ATACAMA, Chile — Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself.
- Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role.
- That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway.
- It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
- And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand — and prices — are soaring.