Extractivism and Green Hypocrisy Pt. 1

Facing the ongoing climate crisis, the global bourgeoisie has made countless speeches and hosted numerous conferences, promising to tackle the negative effects of global warming. Eying new opportunities for profit, they have promoted and invested in the so-called „green transition.” This apparently represents a shift toward more „sustainable” methods of extraction, production, and consumption. A key example is the push away from gas-combustion engines in favor of electric alternatives, with the use of lithium-ion batteries.

One of the companies that have recently latched onto this project is the ominously named Rio Tinto (“Dark River”), an Australian-based international mining company with an appropriately dark history. Its latest project is the planned lithium mine in the west of Serbia, which is supposed to become Europe’s main supplier of lithium. Paradoxically, this project faces immense local opposition over its projected ecological damage, which the Serbian government, the EU, and Rio Tinto are all trying to minimize.

In the first part of this article, we will cover the Jadar project in Serbia—the hypocrisy of capitalist “green” solutions. In the second, we will focus on the history of Rio Tinto’s activity worldwide, marked both by tremendous exploitation and ecological disasters. This is a perfect example of how the very same proponents of the “green revolution” are, more often than not, the ones responsible for this devastating climate crisis.

The Jadar Project in Serbia: The Binding of Isaac

One of Rio Tinto’s most recent and most controversial ventures is in Serbia—where, despite massive protests, a lithium mine is being opened in the watershed region of Jadar, next to the river Drina, which marks Serbia’s western border.

Lithium mining is incredibly damaging to local ecosystems, which is why it’s rarely done outside of arid areas. Even there, it tends to face extreme backlash, despite the usual bourgeois promises of “sustainable development” brought on the wings of capital investment.

Jadar is an exception, however. The fertile area is a major agricultural producer with several zones of ecological importance and pockets of rare, critically endangered endemic species located in its immediate vicinity. While Rio Tinto is cynically promising that an underground lithium mine shouldn’t cause any surface-level damage to the environment, the projected damage that could happen to the hilly region’s underground water streams—making up the majority of Drina’s watershed—may permanently destroy the region’s ecosystem as we know it, as well as risk the country’s water supply.

While the latter may initially sound like alarmism, Serbia’s plentiful rivers are not immune to the effects of climate change. This summer, severe country-wide water shortages were caused by droughts. Climatologists project that, if current trends continue, the entire central Balkans and the Pannonian basin may face semi-desertification by the second half of this century.

Jadar’s lithium deposits aren’t an entirely new discovery—the first surveys into the region’s lithium mining potential and the first pre-contracts with Rio Tinto were made as early as 2006. Still, neither the mining conglomerate nor the Serbian government was ready to start the invasive mining process: profit margins in the sector were deemed uncompetitive, and this remained the case until the plans for a full transition to electric vehicles as part of the “European Green Deal” were drafted and ratified.

The concrete environmental benefits of electric vehicles over traditional vehicles powered by gas-combustion engines are hotly debated, mostly due to the often environmentally damaging processes involved in the extraction of resources associated with the former. If we include the industrial processes required for the production of components (and those necessary for disposal), it’s easy to see that the only „green” thing is the color of the almighty dollar. We communists don’t have, and can’t have, any preference in the „traditional vs electric” debate, but the same cannot be said for the bosses and their wallets. The European Commission has clearly stated that it fully supports the energy transition plan, proposing to completely phase out internal combustion engines by 2050.

With its powerful car industry, this is aimed especially at Germany, which is therefore trying to make the transition as smooth as possible for its auto conglomerates. For Germany, a lithium mine in Serbia, which does the majority of its foreign trade with EU countries and is under preferential trading agreements, is bound to make the manufacturing of lithium car batteries cheaper and less dependent on China—currently the main lithium exporter worldwide. Indeed, one of the main sponsors of the project is Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who has been working hard to strong-arm the Serbian government into going through with the project. When push came to shove, the German Greens quickly tossed aside their environmentalist mask and started to speak plainly. The secretary for Economic Affairs in Scholz’s government, Green party member Franziska Brantner, explicitly called the Jadar mine an opportunity to reduce China’s economic influence over Europe. Similarly, the European Greens never actually explicitly opposed the project, except after their party’s collapse in the German federal elections in September, and the ensuing crisis in leadership.

It’d be foolish to see the mining project as something solely in the interest of the German or European industry, however. Rio Tinto is an Australian company that was historically founded by British investors in Spain. It is currently headed by a Canadian chairman and Danish CEO, with the Aluminum Corporation of China as its largest stockbroker. A true testimony to the international nature of big Capital, a network of interests that today increasingly transcends national borders.

In 2017, Rio Tinto and the government of Serbia signed a memorandum signaling the beginning of prospection and started setting up the infrastructure, aiming to begin mining operations in 2023. There was immediate backlash. A broad ecological front broke out in the form of local protests and ecological demonstrations, merging the anti-lithium movement with efforts against building micro-hydro power plants in protected areas. In 2022, the government seemed to have folded and canceled the Jadar mining project.

This move was likely a bluff, as in summer 2024 the Constitutional Court (where the majority of judges are appointed by the legislative and executive branches) declared the cancellation of the project illegal, promptly returning the project into public discourse. This time, the response was even stronger than before, as the brazen acts of the Constitutional Court stirred the ire of public opinion (which is always petit-bourgeois). While the government was resuming negotiations with Rio Tinto, experts and academics started making warnings against the project. Notable examples are a study published in Nature by a group of Serbian researchers from the University of Belgrade, warning against the project’s catastrophic ecological impact—which the Rio Tinto management unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw from the journal—and an economic feasibility study by the economist Aleksandar Matković, who was targeted with anonymous death threats in German.

The August 10th Demonstration

A major protest against the Constitutional Court’s decision happened on the 10^th of August 2024 in Belgrade. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, demanding a blanket ban on lithium exploitation. This protest culminated in the occupation and blockade of major traffic ways and the central rail station. It was mostly organized by grassroots ecological organizations, youth activist groups (marked by their usual political inconsistency) and factions of concerned scientific experts.

On the other hand, there was an obvious reluctance of oppositional political parties to substantially involve themselves in the rally. This was most likely due to a fear of going against the European Union and its strategic plans, as most of the opposition parties are oriented towards the EU.

The initial spark quickly petered out, following police action against several protest leaders. The streets and square are now empty. The future of the Jadar mine remains a topic of discussion among Europe’s bourgeoisie, leaving the region’s fate to their machinations and cost-benefit analyses