This seminar will examine the findings from a four-year ethnographic study of Bolivia’s contested efforts to industrialize the country's massive lithium reserves, which are destined for use in lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles, key technologies of the green energy transition. In framing the ethnography of this fraught project within longer histories of extractivism and resource utopianism, I hope to show how the anthropology of energy brings much-needed nuance to wider debates over the contradictions and ultimate limitations of energy transition and climate crisis mitigation.