OBELA Analysis

The change in the world energy matrix plays an important role in the trade war and the dispute for hegemony. While the US wants to conserve oil as an energy source, China is pushing the switch to clean energy at lower prices on the world market.

In this context, lithium plays an important role, as the main input for batteries, including those for electric cars.

South America is a disputed territory now fostered by lithium as a strategic resource, as was the saltpeter that led to a war in the nineteenth century.

Throughout the world, the effects of neoliberal policies have exhausted society. Except in Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, since the late 1980s, economic policy in Latin America has been based on the free market.

The economic balances are ambiguous, with successive financial crises, high income concentration and social exclusion along with declining primary export growth, decade by decade since 1990.

Social balances are even worse in terms of privatization of public goods such as education, health, and the deterioration of salaries, quality of employment and pensions. The October protests in Ecuador, Chile, Haiti and Argentina express a general feeling of fed up with the economic policy model.

The energy transition is a process of structural change of energy sources. China transits its energy matrix in electricity generation by means of energy called clean, such as: solar, wind, hydroelectric, cellulose and even nuclear.

Electricity generation in the Asian country is given, still, mainly by coal. However, solar energy has average annual rates of 42% from 1995 to 2004, and from 2006 onwards to 55% average; and the hydraulics presents rates of 8% and 11% respectively.

The growing expansion of the solar panel trade, and investments in the hydroelectric and electrical distribution sectors, to Latin America give the signal that it is interested in the region as a space to dispute the US energy trade and displace gasoline and oil