“The irony is that sustainability and greenness or even ethical lithium, right? Responsible lithium, all of these different adjectives itself now has become a financial product … you have a price premium for green. You have a separate trading floor for quote unquote green lithium.”
Drilled · Climate & Energy · October 2026
Riofrancos describes how lithium producers resisted their product becoming an interchangeable commodity, and how "sustainable" lithium became the way to stand out. She adds that the green label does not mean a mine causes no environmental or social harm.
Transcript
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…bit, just how the kind of, and this touches on some of what we were talking about before with narratives and stories and ideas, but the idea of lithium and green lithium or green mining, as you talk about in the book, kind of becomes, again, as we were talking about before, an end unto itself.
…this moment of lithium slowly becoming more commoditized, more homogenous, more tradable, having clearer pricing benchmarks, was that lithium companies needed a new way to stand out beyond just saying, oh, we have our specialty chemical or we have our specialty formula or we sell to this downstream company or that. And one of the key ways to stand out was to produce, quote, sustainable lithium. The irony is that sustainability and greenness or even ethical lithium, right? Responsible lithium, all of these different adjectives itself now has become a financial product, as you say, to the point that in the commodity trading houses that exist, the Chicago Metals Exchange and the London Metals Exchange, where there is some early stage trading of lithium, you have a price premium for green. You have a separate trading floor for quote unquote green lithium. And so this is lithium that's both been thoroughly financialized, yet is still segmented out by whether it's…
You spend a lot of time in the book reporting on communities in the United States, in Chile and elsewhere, that are trying to engage and, in some cases, trying to resist the imposition of these extractive industries in a lot of cases. And I think the vast majority of cases, these are Indigenous…
Yes. And I love that question because there's a lot of social scientific literature on anti-extractive protest, what causes it, and what the consequences of it are in terms of its success or different outcomes. And this is not always the case, but I did actually find that my experiences on the…
Yeah. And as you noted there, there are lots of opportunities for alliance and also lots of points of leverage over the industry that I think are good for folks to keep in mind because it is not an insurmountable opponent.