The strategic minerals debate is back-but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.

Turns out lithium isn't found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.



Friends over at the Center for New American Security are taking a fresh and systematic look at the strategic minerals question in their new Natural Security initiative. And we are hearing more and more about it from the advocacy community. For example, ENOUGH has ramped up its Come Clean 4 Congo campaign, which stresses the links between our cell phones, mineral extraction, and continuing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is reminiscent of the "blood diamonds" campaigns that led to the Kimberly Process.

The lithium story and the complex social, economic, and political disputes it could engender in Bolivia should flag for us an important consideration in the fight against climate change: trying to do right by climate change and energy security might trigger unforeseen conflicts. Greening our transportation sector with more powerful batteries is going to create a new set of winners and losers around the material inputs like lithium.

We need to be much more cognizant of these impacts as we move forward in addressing climate change and the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. The Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program will be tackling this specific dimension of the climate and security debates--the potential for conflict induced by climate mitigation efforts--in the months ahead.

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President Evo Morales of Bolivia never shies away from a scuffle. He was elected as Bolivia's first indigenous president after toppling the previous government with massive street protests, and he has since legalized the coca leaf, nationalized the mines, and tossed out the U.S. ambassador.

Bolivian President Evo Morales makes an offering to the "Pachamama" (The Mother Earth) during a ritual at the sacred Aymara site of Tiwanaku, Bolivia. Morales has called for rich nations to take on the problem of global warming, noting that the worst effects fall on poor nations.Photo: Noah Friedman-RudovskyThe one-time coca farmer and llama herder is now wading into the ring of global climate negotiations to embark on his grandest crusade to date. His twenty-point list of demands on international climate policy represents the toughest line taken by any national leader, including a call for developed countries to contribute one percent of GDP -- close to $700 billion per year -- to a compensatory adaptation fund for poor and vulnerable nations.

"Western development has created a deathly wound to our Pachamama," says Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, using the Aymara term for Mother Earth. "Industrialized countries need to assume their responsibilities."

If the United States agreed to finance Bolivia's proposal based on its 2008 GDP, it would owe roughly $146 billion -- over 11,000 times more than America spent on international adaptation in the 2008 fiscal year.

It's just the kind of uphill battle that the Bolivian government likes best.

"We think even this figure is small," says Juan Pablo Ramos, Vice-Minister of the Environment, "when we consider the $700 billion bailout for the U.S. financial crisis."

Bolivia's case rests on an argument that is rapidly gaining ground in poor countries -- that climate change must be addressed as a fundamental threat to development. Economic losses that can ultimately be traced back to industrialized nations' carbon emissions, they maintain, must be compensated with the same urgency that these countries have discovered in confronting their own financial crises.

Instead of talking about the ecological footprint of Bolivian development, Ramos is concerned with "the ecological footprint on our development" -- and worries that his country is getting squashed.

Gisela Ulloa, coordinator of Bolivia's Clean Development Office, says that the nation has "lost a large percentage of GDP in the last couple of years from climatic events" that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has linked to global warming, including flooding disasters in its Amazonian lowlands and the melting of Andean glaciers critical to water supply. Adaptation funding, in Bolivia's view, should address both the costs of these present-day damages and the opportunity costs of foregoing Western style industrialization.

This North-South perception gap about the nature of the threat posed by climate change is widely unrecognized by government and environmental leaders in developed nations.

"In the industrialized countries, climate change is seen as an environmental issue and not a development issue," says Adil Najam, lead author of the sustainable development section of the 2007 IPCC assessment. "For most of the people of the world, it is and will remain a development challenge."

The Bolivian government believes that it can shift the very framework of the global debate on climate change. The nation's "fundamental strategy," says Ramos, is to develop third-world block positions at Copenhagen and beyond to redefine the world's approach to climate policy. At treaty negotiations this April in Bonn, Bolivia had gathered a trio of leftist Latin American allies to demand compensation for the "climate debt" -- Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

Global environmental institutions, he argues, should see their primary obligation as serving the world's poorest nations, who contributed least to the problem and whose chances for development face profound environmental barriers.

The international approach that Bolivia envisions would start with a greater emphasis on adaptation, which they say is the primary challenge facing third-world states. It would reject market mechanisms, which Bolivia claims reward polluters rather than victims of climate change, in favor of aid to developing countries. Governments could access these funds through streamlined procedures instead of submitting formal proposals to the Global Environment Facility, a process that often takes years.

For their part, industrialized nations would cut carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 and 90 percent by 2050. They would eliminate all subsidies for fossil fuels, end patents on green technologies, and directly finance avoided deforestation in the poor world.

"Radical measures are needed to produce massive results," says Vice-Minister Ramos.

Bolivia is facing long odds. The climate adaptation financing proposals Bolivia's leaders want are not only exponentially greater than what Western governments are currently paying, they're well beyond the range of what Western NGOs are recommending. Oxfam, for example, has issued an influential report calling for rich countries to spend $50 billion per year on adaptation - almost fourteen times less than the Bolivian proposal.

Heavy rains caused major flooding in Bolivia in 2007 and 2008, where large portions of the country, like the Beni region, were under water for months. President Evo Morales has called on wealthy nations to shoulder the burden for global warming.Photo by Noah Friedman-RudovskyBolivia's emphasis on the poorest nations, exemplified by its demand to restructure the Clean Development Mechanism to serve least developed states rather than industrializing giants, is also unlikely to be taken kindly by developing world heavyweights such as China, India and Brazil.

All told, Adil Najam isn't holding his breath for a third-world climate policy revolution.

"Part of me wishes that was going to happen, but it ain't going to," he says. "Wake me up when it does."

Nevertheless, the gridlock on adaptation financing has recently given signs of easing. Industrialized nations have pledged to include adaptation assistance in the Copenhagen climate treaty, and U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern has called for "substantial funds" for adaptation in the developing world to be incorporated in a U.S. cap-and-trade bill. Two of the leading climate proposals in the last Congress, the Lieberman-Warner and Markey bills, called for roughly $1 billion and $2-2.5 billion per year, respectively, for adaptation assistance.

This range would represent an increase on the order of a hundredfold in U.S. support for adaptation -- though still about ten times less than Oxfam recommends, and a hundred times less than Bolivia demands.

Adele Morris, an expert on climate change economics at the Brookings Institution, is concerned that a radical stand on financing on could endanger the prospects of a new treaty.

"The challenge will be getting a consensus in Copenhagen that's also ratifiable in Congress," she says. "You would hate to see the U.S.' ability to reach agreement torpedoed by overly ambitious demands from Bolivia."

An official in Bolivia's National Climate Change Program indicates that the country is likely to sign any agreement that emerges from Copenhagen. But the government insists that the current debate on adaptation funding amounts to shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. At the Poznan negotiations last December, delegates from rich and poor nations stalked out unable to reach agreement over a single percentage point in the rate of proceeds from global carbon markets that would be dedicated to adaptation.

"We were fighting for around $80 million for so many countries, but that's not going to save Tuvalu," says Gisela Ulloa, who represented Bolivia as a delegate. "It was a disaster. It was almost a waste of time."

Bolivia is convinced that this can only be resolved when developed nations fundamentally change their understanding of the role of adaptation. And until this occurs, Bolivian officials promise that we'll be hearing a whole lot more from them.

Bolivian officials says they will form a coalition of underdogs, including indigenous groups, social movements, and the world's most vulnerable states, into a pack so large that their case can no longer be denied.

"We are going to make our point more forcefully in the coming months," says Juan Pablo Ramos. "So that it is not an isolated voice, but a global demand of various nations and various peoples that eventually becomes a requirement."

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Bolivia threatens to nationalize its mining industry

Following up on last week's nationalization of its natural-gas industry, Bolivia (that's in South America, in case you don't remember seventh grade) now intends to exert greater state control over its mineral resources as well. President Evo Morales is vowing to nationalize the mining industry, though Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera has said otherwise. Either way, dirt-poor Bolivia intends to raise taxes and royalties on foreign investment. Morales warned that if foreign partners "don't respect these laws, we'll make them respect them with political force." Ominous. The announcement may dampen interest in a deposit of an estimated 44 billion tons of iron ore, being auctioned by Bolivia with the condition that extraction be fueled by natural gas. One gold-mining mogul responded to Morales' announcement by suggesting that Pakistan -- yes, Pakistan -- is suddenly a more attractive option for investment, despite al-Qaeda presence in the country. Ouch.

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Naming rights for monkey species being sold to raise conservation funds

A new species of titi monkey found in 2000 in Bolivia's Madidi National Park will not be named by the monkey's scientific discoverers, but by the highest bidder in an online auction. "To discover a new species of mammal is just incredibly exciting and we decided to use this opportunity to raise the profile of Madidi," said biologist Robert Wallace, who helped make the case that the monkey is a distinct species. Called "Luca, Luca" by locals for the sound it makes, the monkey -- described by Wallace as "quite sort of fluffy looking" -- is covered in gold, orange, and burgundy colored fur, stands about 15 inches high, and weighs about 2 pounds. The auction for naming rights will be hosted by Charityfolks.com from Feb. 24 to March 3, and proceeds will go toward conservation in the park. Wallace says the highest bidder can choose any name for the monkey as long as it conforms to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which doesn't allow for offensive words. Guess that sends us back to the drawing board.

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An international coalition of conservation organizations is seeking protection for a 74 million-acre, species-rich tropical corridor between Peru and Bolivia. Conservation International and Peru's National Institute of Natural Resources are working with local authorities to try to protect the region from mining, oil and gas exploitation, road and dam construction, and logging. The corridor includes 15 pre-existing protected areas and spans the transition zone from the high-mountain ecosystems of the Andes to the tropical forests and waterways of the Amazon. The corridor is part of an area designated an ecological "hotspot" because of its high biodiversity and equally high risk from human encroachment. The project is expected to be something of an administrative headache, as the Bolivian side alone encompasses 57 municipalities and four agencies that play a role in land management. Still, enviros are heartened by letters of support from the presidents of both countries and an increasing worldwide recognition of the importance of cross-border conservation projects.

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