Global EV expansion masks neocolonial battery supply chains: Stellantis-Leapmotor joint venture in Europe prioritises profit over planetary and worker justice
Original framing: “Stellantis, China's Leapmotor to expand EV partnership to joint manufacturing in Europe - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Life-cycle assessments show that EV batteries’ environmental costs—from lithium mining’s water footprint (2 million litres per tonne) to cobalt’s toxic tailings—often negate their climate benefits over 10-15 years. Peer-reviewed studies highlight how lithium brine extraction in the Atacama has depleted aquifers by 30% since 2000, while DRC cobalt mines rely on child labour documented by Amnesty International. The scientific consensus warns that without circular economy reforms (e.g., battery recycling mandates, urban mining), the EV boom will create a new waste crisis. Yet corporate PR and policy briefs omit these data in favour of optimistic projections.
The Stellantis-Leapmotor partnership exemplifies how 'green transitions' can replicate colonial extraction under new guises, with China’s state-backed capitalism and Europe’s regulatory gaps creating a perfect storm of neocolonial resource plunder.
Historical parallels to 19th-century rubber and copper booms are stark, yet the framing ignores Indigenous cosmovisions (e.g., Andean *Pachamama*) that resist commodification, and scientific warnings about lithium’s ecological debt. Marginalised voices—from Congolese miners to Chilean Indigenous activists—are systematically excluded, while corporate narratives frame the deal as a win-win, ignoring the trickster’s irony: the more 'sustainable' the EV, the deeper the extraction. Solution pathways must centre Indigenous sovereignty, circular economies, and degrowth, ensuring that climate action does not become a new form of imperialism. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act, if reformed, could set a precedent, but only if it confronts its own complicity in outsourcing harm to the Global South.