Chile Writes Its Constitution, Confronting Climate Change Head On
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/climate/chile-constitution-climate-change.htmlAfter months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”
Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
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Mining companies in Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country’s very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people
And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?
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Anger boiled over into huge protests starting in 2019. A national referendum followed, electing a diverse panel to rewrite the constitution.
On Dec. 19 came another turning point. Voters elected Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student activist, as president. He had campaigned to expand the social safety net, increase mining royalties and taxes, and create a national lithium company.
The morning after his victory, the stock price of the country’s biggest lithium producer, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile, or SQM, fell 15 percent.
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Joaquin Villarino, president of the Mining Council, the industry lobby, said both could diminish Chile’s appeal to investors. He voiced particular worry that some of the Convention members appeared to be against mining altogether, though he didn’t name any. “I hope this is not what we will have in our Constitution,” he said, “because Chile is a mining country.”
The Convention is also likely to make water a public good. But another question will bear on the industry even more: Is brine — the saltwater beneath the desert — technically water? Mining companies assert it is not, because it is fit for neither human nor animal consumption.
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Dr. Dorador is vying to be the convention’s president. She wants the constitution to recognize that “humans are part of nature.” She bristles when asked if lithium extraction is necessary to pivot away from fossil fuel extraction. Of course the world should stop burning oil and gas, she says, but not by ignoring yet unknown ecological costs. “Someone buys an electric car and feels very good because they’re saving the planet,” she says. “At the same time an entire ecosystem is damaged. It’s a big paradox.”
Indeed the questions facing this Convention aren’t Chile’s alone. The world faces the same reckoning as it confronts climate change and biodiversity loss, amid widening social inequities: Does the search for climate fixes require re-examining humanity’s relationship to nature itself?
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“We have to face some very complex 21st century problems,” said Maisa Rojas, a climate scientist at the University of Chile. “Our institutions are, in many respects, not ready.”