This creates exploitative relationships between unaccountable firms and local populations, in terms of employment contracts, violence and dispossession, biodiversity and agricultural disruption, and polluted water supplies among others.
The majority of the resources we use are finite, and those required for electrifying the transportation sector are often particularly scarce. For example, lithium, cobalt, and manganese are all rare earth minerals used for electric car batteries, with few known reserves around the world. Moreover, these resources are almost exclusively located in the Global South: 50% of cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 58% of lithium in Chile. Multinational mining companies are racing to win ‘ownership’ of the sites. This creates exploitative relationships between unaccountable firms and local populations, in terms of employment contracts, violence and dispossession, biodiversity and agricultural disruption, and polluted water supplies among others. Thus, the finite nature of the resources required for electrifying road transportations combined with the oppressive and destructive nature of extraction make for the argument as to why, aside from cost, we cannot all buy electric cars and alleviate the crisis. We simply do not have enough rare minerals to power all the electric cars around the world.