CHARGING FORWARD
Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future
CHRIS BENNER and MANUEL PASTOR
© 2024 by Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor
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Photography credits: Figure 1.2 courtesy of Juan de Lara, Figure 3.5 courtesy of Manuel Pastor.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2024 Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution
ISBN 978-1- 62097-874-0 (hc)
ISBN 978-1- 62097-907-5 (ebook)
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Introduction
In the late 1890s, Jefferson County in southeast Texas was a sleepy backwater region, rooted in subsistence agriculture, cattle ranching, and lumber. That all changed with the discovery of the Spindletop oil field, a finding that marked the birth of the modern petroleum sector, accelerated the growth of a nascent automotive industry, triggered a long-lasting revolution in America’s economy and urban form, and hastened a warming of the planet whose consequences we are living through today.
It was Pattillo Higgins—a quixotic figure who had lost an arm in a gunfight with a sheriff before turning to Christianity and oil exploration—who first suspected petroleum lay beneath an underground salt dome at Spindletop, south of Beaumont and not far from the Gulf of Mexico. To pursue his hunch, Higgins helped organize the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company, but his first drilling efforts came up dry. Desperate for success, he enlisted an Austrian immigrant and mechanical engineer named Anthony Lucas to complete the task.1
Lucas and his team had their own frustrations drilling through sand, gravel, and rocks, but on January 10, 1901, with their well more than a thousand feet in the earth, they hit pay dirt: mud began bubbling up, followed by bursts of broken drilling pipe, and then a gusher of oil that reached a height of more than 150 feet. With an estimated flow of 100,000 barrels a day, it took nine days to cap the black geyser. Five new wells were quickly drilled and the Spindletop fields were
soon producing “more oil in one day than the rest of the world’s oil wells combined!”2
This wasn’t the first discovery of petroleum—the Chinese were drilling for oil and transporting it in bamboo pipelines as early as AD 347, and Native Americans in the Texas region had long used the area’s sticky black tar for crafting baskets and pottery.3 However, the sheer quantity of oil gushing to the surface attracted the modern-day equivalent of billions from investors seeking to explore and exploit even more sources of petroleum in the Lone Star State, and later in Oklahoma and Louisiana. The stampede gave rise to many major players in the modern fossil fuel industry: Lucas teamed with Andrew Mellon to become Gulf Oil (later absorbed by Chevron), while the era also saw the emergence of the Texas Fuel Company (later Texaco), Sun Oil (Sunoco), and the Humble Oil Company, which would eventually be reborn as the not-so-humble (and major funder of climate denial) Exxon.4
Nearby Houston became the oil capital of Texas and later the energy capital of the world; Beaumont itself suffered a “resource curse” as wild swings in petroleum prices and the uncertain fortunes of welldrillers led to a constant rocking between boom and bust.5 The automotive sector—with only about a fifth of the nation’s fleet powered by gasoline in 1900—found itself literally fueled in a new direction by this now abundant and cheap energy source.6 Car manufacturing grew rapidly, providing high-quality jobs (at least once unionization took hold) even as it transformed our metropolitan landscapes by shattering public transit and scattering private suburbs.7 In the background, the time bomb of global climate change, first started by the Industrial Revolution’s harnessing of coal, began ticking louder and faster.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century—and head about 1,500 miles from southeastern Texas to southeastern California—and you find a similarly desolate terrain. Like Beaumont and its environs
more than 120 years ago, California’s Imperial Valley is a struggling region with an economy dependent on agriculture; it is also racked by extensive environmental damage from the nearby, oft-neglected Salton Sea and wounded by decades of racism that have kept local Latino residents mired in poverty and far from power. And it has enough lithium lurking beneath its surface to become the epicenter of this era’s reworking of global energy and transportation systems.
Oil may have been the black gold powering prosperity in the last century, but there is a new white gold seeking to take its place today. Recognizing the ravages and risks of climate change, the United States and other nations have set upon a path to rework the automotive industry from its embrace of internal combustion power trains to the widespread adoption of all-electric propulsion systems. Already straining from a tenfold increase in sales between 2017 and 2022, the total electric vehicle (EV) fleet is expected to grow by another factor of eight by 2030.8 Critical to this widespread adoption: batteries that can hold enough charge to overcome the “range anxiety” of drivers worried that they will be stuck within sight of a gas station they can’t actually use. And crucial to meeting that priority is a key element used in modern EV batteries: lithium.
While there are other sources of lithium currently supplying the market, the Salton Sea region promises to provide the world’s greenest method of lithium extraction. Unlike hard-rock mining or extraction via large evaporation ponds, the process here involves surfacing brine from geothermal reserves, pulling lithium and other valuable minerals from the resulting hot soup, and then reinjecting what’s left back into the ground. The companies eager to make this happen promise a closed loop that will protect the earth even as it spills out win-win benefits to local authorities, workers, and communities. The excitement is such that a place with a perfectly fine (and even elegant) name— Imperial Valley—is being rechristened as Lithium Valley. Sounds great, right? After all, pulling oil from under the ground
worked out so well. . . . Oh yeah, maybe that whole last century or so didn’t always meet the needs of communities, workers, and the planet. While auto-based mobility and the commercialization of fossil fuels contributed to economic and industrial growth in the nation and the globe, it also reified segregation by race and class, poisoned the air in neighborhoods saturated with refineries and highways, led to a geopolitics characterized by oil wars, human rights violations, and corrupt petrostates, and polluted the earth to a scale completely unimaginable at the beginning of the fossil fuel era.
How do we get it right this time? Clean energy sounds hopeful, but the supply chains for the minerals used in batteries and electric motors are often rife with environmental destruction and abusive labor practices. Green jobs in EV assembly sound enticing, but autoworkers are rightly concerned that the growth in battery manufacturing is occurring in states where unions are discouraged, regulations are ignored, and climate change is denied. The win-win outcome promised by new entrepreneurs and empire-builders sounds appealing, but making that happen in a United States long scarred by income inequality and racial disparities is hard political work.
As longtime research collaborators, we became interested in Lithium Valley several years ago. We’d love to pretend that it was because we were prescient enough to see it as a microcosm of everything at stake in the transition to a clean energy economy. Here, you have companies interested in the extraction of a mineral in a place where nearby communities have long felt the damage of extractive processes. Here, private actors are resisting efforts to share the spoils from their investments with a public sector that has actually mandated climate action and thus made those investments valuable. And, here, corporations are promising a future of environmental purity after a history of environmental degradation and injustice that has led to rightful suspicions about yet another bait and switch.
But to be honest, like so many other times in our research partnership over the last twenty-five years, we were called into the topic by
community actors. As authors, we first met while providing research for a living-wage campaign, and then found ourselves pushed by labor allies to study temp agencies.9 We were later encouraged by organizers promoting “regional equity”—a set of strategies to confront racism and heal the city-suburb split—to produce a series of books on how to make that aspiration real.10 Our most recent joint production, an effort to promote a new understanding of economics based on mutual gains and social solidarity, emerged from conversations with progressive advocates who wanted to get beyond simply running through a laundry list of policies for justice.11
It was that work that led us to one of Imperial Valley’s nearest neighbors, the Coachella Valley. Made world-famous by a music festival that actually occurs not in the Valley’s namesake city but rather on the polo grounds of an entirely different (and richer) town, this is a region that, like Imperial, is overwhelmingly Latino, overwhelmingly poor, and overwhelmingly disconnected from the drivers of California’s high-tech economy. One of the leading community organizations in this neglected backwater asked us to collaborate on developing a vision of an inclusive and sustainable economy that could animate an alternative to the “more of the (exploitative) same” being proposed by local and state officials.
What researchers could turn that down? What we did not fully realize was the path that this would set us on, not just in working with partners in Coachella and longtime and newfound allies in Imperial County, but also in trying to grapple with the broader possibilities in a moment where the threat of global climate change is making daily headlines. After all, 2023 marked the first time that the vocabulary about a “phase-down” of fossil fuel use finally made it into the language of agreements signed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28).12 Just a year earlier, the United States passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest down payment on addressing climate in our nation’s history.
Yet what has become clear to us as all this new attention to climate
has rolled out is that it is not just the climate crisis that is besetting us. The United States is also plagued by a crisis of democracy, in which some are so fearful of the nation’s shifting demographics that they seek to rewrite the country’s racist past and restrict the hard-earned right to vote. We are likewise racked by levels of income inequality that have created a starkly divided set of winners and losers—some enjoying VIP seats at the Coachella Music and Arts Festival while others struggle to meet basic needs in Coachella itself. Getting it right is not just about ending our reliance on fossil fuels but ending our disconnection from each other—and using this moment to wrest some elements of green justice.
Justice was far from anyone’s mind when the oil revolution began. Adding an intriguing dash of racism to that era’s origin story: the sheriff’s bullet that took the arm of Spindletop pioneer Pattillo Higgins flew through the air as he and his friends were running away after having bombed a Black church—and the massive job opportunities in drilling that sprang up after Higgins’s Spindletop discovery were almost entirely confined to white men.13 The modern refineries that made oil processing possible have often been located in communities of color, with the constellation in Louisiana acquiring the unfortunate but accurate nickname “Cancer Alley.”14 The broader pattern of sprawl and segregation that autos helped fuel fit into a racialized spatial regime that two eminent sociologists appropriately labeled “American Apartheid.”15
It’s a legacy to overcome—and the hope is that a greener economy could help us do better by our planet and our people. The path there is sometimes labeled “just transition,” a term that too frequently devolves into a consideration of how to soften the impacts on those who may lose their jobs in dirty energy, often because of concerns about political blowback. But the task is more complex, we think: How do we include employment access for those who have never had a chance? How do we calculate climate reparations owed for decades
of pollution? How do we overcome the profound alienation from self and separation from others that threatens democracy, feeds into inequality, and detaches us from the fate of Mother Earth?
Green justice—a frame that lifts up how this clean energy moment is important for making a transition to inclusion and not just sustainability—can help us begin to address these questions. It reminds us that not everything that is green is good—that the excitement about a new source of energy should not obscure the real environmental and social concerns of local communities up and down the supply chain. It insists that such communities have a real role in the decision-making process, stressing the need to repair democracy as well as the need to check corporate power. And it points out clearly that those who have been on the wrong side of the “climate gap”—the persistent disparities by race and income that have characterized the nation’s environmental risk-scape—are the natural constituencies for a robust movement to address the climate crisis.16
These are big topics, so we range widely in what follows, highlighting the complex steps involved in producing batteries and assembling electric vehicles, emphasizing the important role of the auto industry and its unions in forming the social compacts of the past and the social possibilities of tomorrow, and exploring the struggles over the impending transition taking place in local communities, the workplaces and boardrooms of global corporations, and the halls of political power. But befitting who brought us to this analytical party, we start and end in the overheated desert and complex dynamics of Imperial County, arguing that, as historian Mike Davis once noted about Los Angeles, this is a key site to “excavate”—or in the case of lithium, extract—the future.17
