I truly wish Bolivia to raise itself from poverty, but ideally without the destruction of its magical wonders. Damn I miss traveling...
This would despoil the area around the pump, somewhat. But this would be less than 1% of the 10,000km of the salar. Factories aren't very attractive, but enormous dunes of lithium-depleted salt might even be pretty. A matter of taste, let's say, but again, the great majority of the landscape would be untouched.
It would also create some subsidence, I imagine. But this wouldn't be visible.
And this must be balanced against the great good to humanity which is realized by the enormous amount of lithium batteries which could be manufactured with this resource.
I'd say this is worth persuading the Bolivian people to accept, and isn't worth overthrowing their government over. But I don't get to make these decisions, alas.
1) Stealing land rights from indigenous people. 2) Lack of environmental regulations, oversight and rehabilitation. 3) Getting ripped off by big mining corporations from across the world with a strong tendency to corrupt politicians and local police. 4) Ensuring good working conditions and compensation for miners.
But alas, for powerful people "persuasion" is often just a synonym for repression and violence.
edit: clarity.
Does damaging a world heritage site constitute hurting someone else or does it constitute only self harm because it's within sovereign borders?
So unless you can somehow move the worlds' nations to enact sanctions or invade, each state is free to mine what they want.
Sounds like business deal to me. If I am going to not earn money from a resource that is mine because of you, then you need to pay me back for that amount of money I was going to earn.
$1.2B to Brazil: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-amazon-norw...
$150M to Gabon: https://qz.com/africa/1714104/gabon-to-get-150-million-from-...
Indonesia: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/05/indonesia-norway-redd-paym...
Guyana: https://news.mongabay.com/2009/02/norway-to-pay-guyana-to-sa...
All around the world places have parallels or similarities. Patagonia reminds me of Alaska. The Sahara is a bit like the Simpson, white sand beaches in Northern Australia are similar to those in Thailand or the Bahamas.
Not so with Bolvia. I've never seen anything on the planet remotely like the high Altiplano around the Salar and the entire South Western part of Bolivia. It's utterly breathtaking and unique.
[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-uyuni-salt-flats-to-chile-1
Obviously my opinion is subjective, but it's a bit like comparing the mountains and wilderness of central Alaska to that of California. They're not on the same scale.
I would go so far as to say that pumping up lithium enriched brine from underneath it is unlikely to despoil the natural beauty of the entire salt flat. One corner of it, perhaps.
Once that resource is exhausted, the choice could be made to strip-mine the surface. But that would be a choice, the slippery slope argument strikes me as tenuous here.
> The Aral Sea ... was an endorheic lake lying between Kazakhstan (Aktobe and Kyzylorda Regions in the north) and Uzbekistan (Karakalpakstan autonomous region in the south) which began shrinking in the 1960s and had largely dried up by the 2010s.
> Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. By 1997, it had declined to 10% of its original size...
> By 2009, the southeastern lake had disappeared and the southwestern lake had retreated to a thin strip at the western edge of the former southern sea.
That’s incredible. I presume this is because no one has been looking for large reserves of lithium until recently.
There's no salar like Salar de Uyuni, so no, it isn't a simple matter of looking harder. There's plenty of lithium-bearing rock, for some value of 'plenty', but this is both expensive, and entails grinding and leaching ore, which is enormously more environmentally destructive and energy intensive.
Maybe it was an attempt at a joke, but considering he’s one of the richest men in the world who has a vested interest in lithium, and considering there was a Bolivian, quasi-US-backed coup just this past year for reasons which at least partially include these lithium deposits, it’s not at all funny to joke about.
On the other hand, MAS intends to exploit its lithium. It just plans to do that in a way that grows a high tech domestic industry instead of just exporting raw product. They also plan to keep the profits local to fund social programs and such, which rubs the neoliberal free market imperialists like American foreign policy goons the wrong way.