Anyway you slice it, the overwhelming scientific consensus
is that humans are causing climate change with carbon dioxide emissions.
The vast majority of human energy use is fossil fuel driven transport,
and electricity generated from the very same source.
That is where the problem lies.
But fossil fuels are just so damn convenient.
Aside from sourcing them by just digging them out of the ground,
anyone can burn them with Stone Age technology.
They're also really easy to store, either in a pipe under your house,
overnight in your car, or literally in a pile on the ground.
Storage is a vital component of energy.
So if we want green energy, we have to overcome the storage issue,
as you can't store solar energy in a tank, and we don't have piles of wind.
That's why we need batteries.
South America is perhaps the most peaceful continent, at least in terms of international conflict.
The last significant wars between nations were about a century ago,
and since then, the internal squabbles have kept the militaries significantly busy.
Since the continent was bypassed by the Panama Canal,
South Americans have been sitting in the corner of the map minding their own business.
It's not been completely devoid of conflict, but if there were any opportunities to
conquer a neighbour's natural resources by brute force,
the time has long since passed.
One South American region was so rich in fertile phosphates,
that it was the area of one of the only territorial wars.
The War of the Pacific.
This war is the reason that Bolivia is landlocked today.
And is still bitter about it.
You might even say that they're salty, which isn't necessarily a bad thing,
because this is salt lake country.
And some of those salts have the main ingredient of lithium.
Lithium is the lightest metal, and batteries made from it carry a lot of potential energy in a small amount of material.
If you want portable electricity storage, it has to be light.
So for the purposes of handheld devices and even vehicles, lithium is about as good as it gets.
Over half of the world's known deposits of this valuable metal are dissolved in brine, beneath salt flats,
high in the Andes, between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile.
The Lithium Triangle.
And since demand is currently outstripping supply, prices are skyrocketing, and there's somewhat of a boom.
There are plenty of pesos to be made.
One fortunate thing about brine deposits of lithium, is that once you've extracted it from the ground,
It's a pretty simple process to remove the water.
You just leave it in the sun.
Considering most of the Lithium Triangle is desert, that should be no problem.
And it's a process that scales quite well, small businesses and transnational corporations
both have the available technology, but it does take a while.
Meaning there is a long period before profits start rolling in.
So you need capital.
For capital, you need business loans.
And you need much more, besides.
From police and legal protection, to access to labor and equipment,
Every country deals with these with different levels of success.
Out of these three countries, where do lithium-based businesses find it easiest to operate?
If only we had some sort of index for how easy it is to do business.
The Ease of Doing Business Index is a World Bank ranking of nations,
combining measures of corruption, trust in government, credit access, legal safety,
and much, much more.
Every nation has a position, between New Zealand at the top, and Somalia at the bottom.
This isn't only a rating for where foreign businesses will find it easy to invest,
but it also shows how easy it is for domestic citizens to make money.
And where governments are going wrong.
From a business perspective.
The peaceful end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship was good news for everyone.
Not even Pinochet lost his head over his crimes, but not for want of trying.
Chile avoided the expensive transition costs that often come at the end of a dictatorship.
And there's nothing more attractive to business than predictability and stability.
Due to the low levels of risk involved, Chilean banks are willing to lend money.
Capital is readily available.
Skilled labor costs are just high enough to retain talent, and investments are protected by a strong legal system
from the whims of the ruling class.
This fosters a healthy mining industry, one of the main industries of Chile.
Which when they're not extracting people,
produces the world's most iodine and copper, also.
Surprisingly, for anyone viewing this situation from the past,
this country benefits with the highest quality of life in South America.
Today, Chile sits high, between Belgium and Luxembourg in the Ease of Doing Business Index.
Argentina hasn't had nearly that stability.
Since the Roaring Twenties when Argentina was a Top 10 economy,
the country has swung from military dictatorship to democratic Peronism:
an Argentine populist movement.
Since Juan Perón, the Argentine military man come president came into office,
he married that hard power with the public image of the actress,
radio announcer, media darling, and First Lady, Evita.
Coming from humble beginnings, she became the symbol of the president's devotion to the common people.
Although the movement's eponymous president sheltered notable nazis,
he also took in many thousands of displaced jews.
Such are the contradictions of Argentina.
Peronism began with aspects of socialism, social justice and such authoritarianism,
that it was often compared to fascism.
But since then, self-identified Peronists have sold national assets and then bought them back.
Allied with foreign businesses and then with labor unions.
Supported Boca, then River.
Mixed policies of free-market reform with damn near mafioso actions,
and protectionist elements have littered it with criticisms of indirection,
and labels of an ill-defined movement.
It can be everything to everyone.
Perhaps "cult of personality" is more apt.
If there's a problem in the country, often the Yanqui imperialist is the Boogeyman.
But these problems may have actually come from the Peronist himself.
Safe to say, that Peronism is Argentine through and through.
Normally, someone or something could be voted out of office,
but the ghost of Juan Perón is everywhere.
There has never been an elected non-Peronist president to see out a full term.
This unreliability and unpredictability in every aspect,
from imports, to taxes, to property rights, has not inspired confidence in the business world.
Despite some capricious and obscure trade balance legislation,
President Cristina Kirchner's reign oversaw Argentina's fall from the top of the list
of largest exporters of food and raw materials.
A series of measures designed to prevent capital flight due to rampant inflation
simply encouraged business to invest elsewhere.
According to studies, "Renationalised" is the very first word that Argentine children learn.
On the Ease of Doing Business Index,
Argentina lies below Palestine, and above the Bahamas.
Not to be outdone, here's Bolivia.
Considering they've had fifteen military dictatorships and seventeen constitutions,
you'd think some stability would lend confidence to business.
However, Bolivia has far more pressing matters.
The fall of American-supported dictatorships in Latin America towards the end of the 20th century
opened a door to populist and leftist politics.
This "Pink Tide", as it was known, expressed itself in Bolivia at the same time as
the rise of indigenous empowerment.
In 2006, Evo Morales took power.
And this year, he is their longest ever serving president.
The first indigenous person to take power in the nation,
he extended many of those rights and protections to the natives that they'd been denied for a long, long time.
Since its brutal exploitation by the Incas and the Spanish,
the memory of colonialism is alive and well in this region.
Slavery was the killer of indigenous people, and silver is the glamorous metal that gets all the press.
But for its extraction, there were used many more hazardous materials,
like even mercury.
Yeah, you know, that thing that sent the Mad Hatter insane.
Understandibly, Bolivia has a vigilance, even an over-vigilance
about its natural resources and its territory.
Morales was many of the same barriers that peronists sometimes introduced into Argentina,
but he enshrined them in the Bolivian Constitution.
Limited land ownership and the state's role in business.
One example of anti-imperialism in the document,
is the protections awarded to the native use of the coca plant against the American drug war.
Mining even has its own chapter in the document.
Morales also has a habit of nationalizing and privatizing at will.
It is possible for business to exploit a developing country with natural resources, history has shown that.
But it's absolutely not inevitable, as Chile and others have shown.
With the right systems, your legal and criminal protections will be perfectly sufficient.
But guess which protections Bolivians DON'T have.
The World Bank's assessment of financial legal rights in Bolivia measures at a whopping 0 out of 12.
And it ranks highest out of these three countries in corruption.
Would you invest here, when better conditions exist just a stone's throw away?
Since Morales' election, Bolivia has dropped more than 20 places
in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business ranking.
Now it lies below Pakistan, and only marginally above Zimbabwe.
Bolivia will be facing massive pressure to make the most of its wealthy reserves.
But if nothing changes soon, they aren't going to be doing anything with lithium.
The War of the Pacific sounds so much more earth-encompassing than it actually was.
But for Bolivia, it's still core to their national identity.
A damn obsession.
There is no doubt that Chile benefitted hugely from annexing the resource-rich coastal land
from the poor, mountainous Bolivia, but ever since then,
all of Bolivia's neighbours have made significant effort to help.
It's not like that issue could ever have been ignored
with Bolivia logjamming every possible international forum with incessant complaining.
It may indeed be an injustice, but you can't have a populist president
without being very visible, very annoying and tanking your nation's reputation.
A dozen free ports and actual access to the sea have been offered TO Bolivia by all of its neighbours,
all over the continent.
But Bolivia has made no use of these incredible offers.
Instead, noisily and expensively dragging the Pacific issue through the International Court of Justice for decades.
The issue was close to being solved around 50 years ago.
Secret 1970s negotiations to allow Bolivia a modest Atacama-Pacific corridor were vetoed by Peru.
So only Chile has direct ocean access from here.
But although Chile's coasts and ports are closer to the Lithium Triangle than other paths of export,
it's still high in the mountains.
And all 3 countries have customs agreements and relatively porous borders these days.
So Chile benefits, but not as much as they did in the era in which they waged the War of the Pacific.
Still, Argentina and Bolivia need to overcome hundreds of snaking miles down through the Andes,
both import of equipment and export of material are delayed and impeded by this.
On top of their volatile politics.
Lithium is currently the best metal that we have for battery purposes.
But even in the Lithium Triangle, were we to fully transition to renewable energy today,
there simply isn't enough of it.
Fossil fuels are just too good.
There is more energy in 1 week of fossil fuel usage in the United States,
than could be stored if every lithium atom in every mine in the world were to be made into batteries.
So long-term large-scale storage isn't really feasable.
It will be part of a much larger energy storage picture,
including other chemical batteries with other elements.
Should alternative cells be brought into large-scale production,
and should all of this metal extraction fail,
there's always hydrogen cells.
And hydrogen is everywhere.
Chile is easy to work with.
And if Argentina is underwhelming and difficult, at least you can rely on it to be so.
Bolivia is too busy getting high on its own supply.
The world is already coming to South America for their lithium needs.
Chile are making incredible headway.
Argentina are close in second.
To these two hares, Bolivia is the tortoise.
But the race might be over before it's even begun.