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Comment by warmblood | Hacker News Reader

There is a large difference in power and knowledge between these two sides, which is the heart of the ethics argument.

The people living on top of the resources may have legally relinquished their rights to it and the intact land it's buried beneath, but the drafters of those contracts have a lot of room and leverage to act in bad faith in order to exploit them. This can prevent these people from escaping a cycle of subjugation because they are given mere subsistence instead of wealth in return for their resources.

Legality of things like this are often just procedural facades to release mineral extraction companies from accusations that they are doing something wrong, harming someone or, sadly, indirectly enslaving vulnerable people.

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   There is a large difference in power and knowledge
   between these two sides, which is the heart of the
   ethics argument.

This is exactly the point where these conversations break down. The natives negotiated a contract for fixed rates, not proportional rates of payment. The advantage of fixed rates is that you know what you are going to get, the advantage of proportional rates are that you get more if they get more.

Had the Lithium extraction here turned out to be really really hard and the payment to the communities was nearly all of the profit the mining companies were making after extraction, the natives would not complain. But when it is a small fraction of the profit, it is "unfair".

So what is the right answer? Well in one view of the world the correct answer is to build a mining company with the indigenous population so that they can start providing a commodity that the rest of the world wants to buy. That creates a local boost to the economy and employs as many native people as want to be employed.

That seems great until the lithium runs out. Then you end up with a derelict mining town.

I think people who clap back like this assume the indigenous groups were able to negotiate with full, symmetrical information and legal leverage. The article reflects history in this regard, suggesting that they did not.

I don't know if you can draw that conclusion from the article. The questions I would look into would be whether or not the agreements were negotiated pre-Tesla or post-Tesla. If they were negotiated pre-Tesla I could see both sides with a very different picture of lithium demand than has emerged in the post-Tesla market place. The other question I would look into was the legal leverage. Generally these contracts are negotiated at the governmental level (which is pretty much all the legal leverage you can get) and while there are cases where the government negotiations might be questioned (like alleged Copper rights in Africa going to China[1]) it isn't clear that there is a ethical lapse in the Lithium case.

Finally of course there is the "So what" aspect of it, I don't think anyone seriously argues that the US or other strong powers simply mow down the sovereignty of countries because they abuse their own citizens. If you want to advocate for a single world government that is another issue entirely.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Chinas-...

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