Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how the replacement of fossil fuel transport with electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries is triggering the non-scalability of microbial carbon fixation in the places from which lithium is being extracted.

Paper long abstract:

In this work we explore divergent decarbonising practices and logics taking place in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. The paper examines a paradigmatic climate 'strategy' aimed to stabilize the planet's temperature, emissions reductions, particularly by exploring how the replacement of fossil fuel transport with electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries is triggering the non-scalability of microbial carbon fixation in the places from which lithium is being extracted. Building upon ethnographic work with microbiologists and indigenous peoples in Atacama, we discuss how infra-decarbonisation in microbiology -a fundamental immanent process of biotic and abiotic 'becoming with'- clashes with the modern territory of the infra-decarbonisation of the capitalist economy at stake in low-carbon transitions concerned with the decarbonisation of transport. Crafting contrasts between these divergent decarbonizing techniques, we wonder how to better conceptualize a unit of survival which is always changing, enacting and disrupting scales and temporalities while the temperature of the Earth continues to raise.