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In the face of successive climate policy failures, and as the goal of staying below the 1.5°C threshold becomes ever more distant, we are also witnessing the danger of a complete misuse of the so-called “energy transition”. Obeying the interests of highly concentrated capital, in alliance with the state apparatuses of the world’s major powers, the expansion of “renewable energies” is becoming the device for a new wave of extractivism. The race to exploit lithium is not helping to alleviate the climate crisis—quite the contrary. An emblematic form of green neocolonialism, it revives the already senile socio-metabolism of capital. Its large-scale extraction threatens the extinction of living hydro-communal systems in the Andean regions of north-west Argentina. In the upper Abaucán basin (west of Catamarca province), the exploitation of the Tres Quebradas project (under the control of the international Chinese company Zijin) is causing serious socio-metabolic disruption to the water, agricultural and food systems of the rural communities of Bolsón de Fiambalá.