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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the new books network. Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast of the second Cold War Observatory. I'm Jessica DeCarlo coming to you from Salt Lake City, Utah and I'm joined with my co host Seth, who's in Manchester, Seth Hutchinson. How's it going?
- [00:27]
B
Well, it's all right. It's the end of the semester, so I'm just trying to make it make it to the end. It's been a busy one, but I'm all right. How are you?
- [00:35]
A
It's going really well here. I can't believe it's December. I've been on research leave all semester, so I've had a lot of time to write and work on projects and go to various conferences and workshops which I think if I remember correctly, you're organizing a few this coming year.
- [00:49]
B
Yeah. And just hearing you talk about research leave makes me so jealous. But yeah. So next semester there are going to be two that we'll have here in Manchester in March. There's one about urbanization and the second Cold War, that's the 13th and 14th and we will have one event open to the public. And then in April we'll have a conference at the Global Development Institute, my department, about development and geopolitics. So I'm looking forward to those things but quite a bit of work to organize and so yeah. Tell me, what is it like to be on Research League? What have you been up to?
- [01:24]
A
Oh, it's a joy. I've been traveling a lot and going to various workshops and conferences and I do hope I can get to yours in April on development. You are a master conference workshop organizer and they're always such a good time. But actually recently, just two days ago, I returned home from New York City. I was at the Carnegie Corporation for a workshop on navigating the complexities of the clean Energy era. So we were talking about everything from geopolitical dynamics of clean energy to material requirements, critical minerals, models for energy transition and community strategies as well, and resistance. So it was really fascinating to be with this group of people, of academics, non academics. And you probably won't be surprised that the group was actually talking about the book that we are going to discuss today. There was a lot of praise for the the book we are discussing called Extraction by Thea Rio Francos. So I'm really excited we get to actually sit down and talk with her about this and unpack it a bit more.
- [02:23]
B
Me too. Without further ado, why don't you go ahead and introduce her.
- [02:28]
A
Thea is an associate professor of Political Science at Providence College, co director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a Fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, energy transition, specifically the lithium sector, as well as green technologies and social movements as well as the Latin American left. She is a fascinating expert across these fields and her book really showcases that. She's also the Author of the 2020 book Resource Radicals From Petro Nationalism to Post Extractivism in Ecuador, as well as the book we'll be discussing today that came out this year, the Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Welcome Thea, and thank you for joining us.
- [03:09]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [03:11]
A
This book was absolutely fascinating. The themes are wide ranging. They're really relevant to everything we're talking about today with critical minerals, energy transition, green capitalism. So I want to kind of step back though and ask about your story. How did you become interested in writing this book and addressing these themes and kind of a second tag on to that question. This book is really gripping, accessible, it's public facing. Tell us more about why you chose to write in this style as well.
- [03:42]
C
Thanks. Yeah, this book really came out of an unexpected intersection in my academic interests and my policy and kind of organizing and advocacy commitments, which is not unrelated to why I tried took a stab or at least had the idea to write this as a more public facing book because it wasn't a purely research driven book. It also had from the get go a political and kind of values based component for me. And so I'll walk us through that a little bit. My prior research had all been on the topic of extractive sectors, which are fascinating to me, as I know they are to you, in terms of how politically contentious they are, how economically challenging they are in terms of the basics of economic governance as well as the kind of environmental questions and social questions that they raise. And so I've really been interested in extractive sectors since my dissertation and my first book, Resource Radicals. But as I continued to work on those topics and was thinking about a next project after the first one, which had really focused on dilemmas of resource extraction in a global south and specifically Latin American political context, I was starting to get really involved in the US on advocating for a just energy transition, for a rapid energy transition and and as the idea kind of gained public salience for Green New Deals specifically, which is a term I know this podcast has listeners elsewhere in the world, but is a policy framework that became popular on the progressive side of the US political spectrum in the kind of late 2010s, early 2020s and so I was doing this organizing and advocacy locally where I live, nationally with other groups, and at the same time kind of thinking through what is my next academic project. And I sort of came to realize that the very types of energy systems that I was advocating for in the US like mass deployment of solar panels and of wind turbines and of battery storage to accommodate all of that and the electrification of everything, and thinking about how that could be done equitably and with a role for workers and communities, this kind of Green New Deal paradigm, I became aware that some of the very stuff that I've studied in Latin America in terms of resource extraction, like I've worked on copper before, would be, like, really relevant to an energy transition in the US and in other words, that there were global supply chains to a U.S. energy transition or U.S. green New Deal. And that was very interesting to me on an analytic front, like, I've long been interested in kind of global north, global south relations and thinking about the structure of the world economy. But on a personal level, it was a little bit troubling because what I realized is what I was advocating for in the US would mean a lot more mining in. In lots of other parts of the world, primarily, right? And so this kind of manifested for me as a kind of inner conflict. Am I advocating for something that would create sacrifice zones elsewhere in the world? And so rather than step away from this conflict or kind of ignore it or try to search for just a really simple answer to that question, I decided to make that dilemma the extractive substrate or the extractive foundations of the energy transition. My main topic. You know, what does this mean about the energy transition? Does it mean we shouldn't advocate for one because it might create some harm elsewhere or in the U.S. you know, we'll talk about how, you know, there's also new mining in the US linked to all of this as well as in Europe. Does it mean we should design the energy transition differently? Does it mean we should think about international or transnational solidarity as a way to kind of get ahead of some of these potential inequalities between different parts of the world as they move through energy transitions? Like, what is the implication of this basic fact that new mining will be needed in order to furnish the inputs of a renewable energy system? That's how I arrived at the question. And again, as I mentioned earlier, or I arrived at the book's topic, and as I mentioned earlier, I was already someone that focused on Latin America and that kind of drew me towards lithium because I wanted to Study a sector I hadn't studied before. Lithium, as I mentioned, was already getting into the limelight a bit and Latin America has like over half of the world's lithium reserves. And so that that kind of also solidified my interest in, in looking at it and studying a country I'd never worked on before, which was, or even visited before, which was Chile. And so that, that's how I arrived at the topic. But let me say one other word about why I ended up deciding to make this a trade book rather than a properly like Academ University Press book. As I mentioned, this already was inflected with my political commitments and the dilemmas and trade offs that structured those commitments. And so that, you know, this was always already a book that was immersed in that kind of public dialogue around the energy transition. But I still could have, you know, opted for an academic book. And that was my initial plan. When I first went to do fieldwork in Chile. I had, you know, I had been in conversations with some academic editors for early stages thinking about the book. I plan to do an academic book, but once I was there and also began like actively linking what I was learning in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, where a fifth of the world's lithium comes from, to friends and colleagues that I was involved in advocacy with in the US and I was even co writing at the time a book on the Green New Deal that drew on some of the same research. So I already, you know, once I hit the ground, I realized that the frames of discussion were more informed by policy, political, community organizing conversations as much as they did draw on my background in the political economy of extraction. In a way, the policy conversations pushed me to think even more rigorously about the political economy of extraction because I had to link it to the concerns of different types of audiences and publics. And, and as soon as I realized that's what was already half happening in my head, so to speak, I thought, I'll take a stab at proposing this to a trade press. And I will just say, without talking to this too much, and I'm always happy to talk to academics more and offer them advice on this front, that it was harder than writing an academic book. I've only written one academic book, so it's maybe a small and anecdotal comparison, but it's harder to write without some of the formulae and crutches I would say that we're used to using in academic writing. It's harder to really have to think of a concrete metaphor or like a grabbing anecdote that says a lot in few words, but just using kind of vivid imagery or vivid landscape description, kind of bringing readers in. It's harder to write that way than to write in a dry analytic style. And so it was a challenge that I enjoyed, but was for sure a challenge.
- [10:44]
B
This book was excellent. I found it compelling, gripping, read it from COVID to cover. I learned a lot and it was such an enjoyable read. But for those who haven't read it, can we start with the basics? Would you mind talking about lithium and what makes it so particular? It is different, as you explain in the book, from other resources that are mined and other so called critical minerals or rare earth minerals that we'll get into. So what accounts for its specificity?
- [11:13]
C
In my research in general, I tend to follow the actors, meaning I follow what is of interest to both elite and non elite actors when I think about resource extraction. And what drew me to lithium is honestly that it was already several years ago when I started writing this book, beginning to enter into public policy discussions and discussions of corporate strategies, specifically in the battery and auto and EV sectors. And it, it had attention on it, unlike other minerals. And the reason for that is not per se that it's more important than some of the other so called critical minerals. I mean, we could have a whole discussion of, of copper or cobalt or nickel or rare earths, which are also quite in policy attention as well. But you know, there are a set of reasons that have put lithium in the limelight and maybe also made L a kind of early laboratory for certain relatively novel policy paradigms as well as paradigms, as I said, of corporate investments and supply chain organization. And so that's what drew me to it, in addition to the fact that the place I've done research for a long time, Latin America, is a place where there is a lot of lithium and already a lot of lithium projects. And so that geographic coincidence, we might say, also kind of drew me towards lithium. But maybe I'll say a few words about why lithium is in the policy and corporate limelight, so to speak. Maybe the first thing to say is that the transportation sector is the United States's most carbon polluting sector. And in terms of the kind of world hierarchy or global hierarchy of pollution, it's number two after the energy sector, but and the U.S. the energy sector is number two. So those are swapped for reasons of our extreme levels of car dependence, hence all of the kind of carbon pollution coming out of that sector. But the reason I mention this is that lithium is supremely relevant to Both decarbonizing ground transportation, but also secondarily to decarbonizing our energy grid. And so lithium is the thus far non substituteable ingredient in the eponymous like lithium ion batteries. Right. And those lithium batteries. Batteries are batteries that have been around for a long time. They power our laptops and cell phones and all sorts of personal electronic devices. But for the past several years, their kind of more important historic role, we might say has been in allowing cars and other forms of ground transportation to operate with zero emissions energy stored in those batteries. And the auto industry is a multitrillion dollar global industry. It's also an industry that has more political weight and importance, especially in countries with large auto sectors or who are aspiring to have large auto sectors. Whether we're looking at the kind of incumbent auto sectors of the U.S. germany, Japan, or we're looking at the ways that emerging economies and developmental states for decades have attempted to create auto sectors to varying degrees of success. Of course, China really stands out as a state that was able to whole cloth create a new auto sector that is competitive against incumbents. Right, but that's something that other developmental states have tried in the past and not succeeded at all. Of that is just to say that for reasons that we could or not, you know, not get into, auto sectors are considered by politicians and by the workers and communities that, that labor in those sectors to be politically consequential to the geostrategic position of their countries. Right. So we're trying to decarbonize the auto sector, transportation in general, but the auto sector in particular here, the auto sector has a particular political salience to it, which means that lithium, you know, again, it's a bunch of indirect but quite important connections, which means that lithium is, because it's the, the lithium battery is the way that we're going about this for now. It takes on a special importance as a kind of critical mineral. And then just to add, you know, maybe just one or two other brief points, I mentioned the energy sector, when we transition to zero emissions energy, a lot of that is hopefully renewable energy. I say zero emissions broadly. We could talk about hydro, nuclear, you know, other types of, you know, zero emissions energy. But renewable energy is what we're particularly focused on with an energy transition. Solar and wind, those are variable, which means that you need a way to store them even over a few hours in order to calibrate supply and demand. Because in addition to being intermittent power sources, the moments that they might be in highest supply are actually not the moments of the day necessarily that they're in highest demand. So you need at least to store wind or solar for a few hours to kind of match when consumers or businesses are most likely to be using it. Large scale lithium batteries play a really important role in a stationary, non mobile application on those on renewable energy grids. And so that's why they've been in the political limelight, in the economic limelight. And then we could get into, you know, a whole host of interesting policy questions that this raises around how these supply chains are being organized and what the kind of novel modes of the novel kind of forms of public and like public policy, but namely industrial and trade policies that have been used specifically on lithium. But then we see a bit of a diffusion. Now other sectors are getting this treatment as well. But lithium was kind of early, you know, an early sector to kind of get this level of policy attention. And similarly, as I said for supply chains, we're seeing phenomena such as, just to name it for now, like the reintegration of supply chains to some degree. And lithium likewise, and batteries as well, have been a kind of key venue for experimenting with reintegration after decades of the kind of disintegration of supply chains. So maybe I'll leave it there for now, but that maybe gives listeners a sense of why this is important and why it's politically and economically salient.
- [17:22]
B
Great, thank you. I'd like to start asking you in a moment about the geopolitics of this, but maybe one more question because I think some listeners will just be less interested in the geopolitics and they'll want to hear more about the book. You know, one of the things about this book is that you really get at the complexity of these issues and you overturn some of the assumptions about the green energy transition. And that should be in quotes, right? Because you point out that it's not always a transition necessarily, it's sometimes an addition and so on. But I mean, I guess the basic contradiction as I understand it, or complexity is that on the one hand there's an agreement that there has to be some sort of transition. We have to reduce fossil fuel consumption. In order to do that, we have to, as you pointed out momentarily a few moments ago, we have to figure out how to store electricity. Renewable energy and batteries are necessary for that. Lithium is what we're using to do that, and therefore we have to increase extraction. But doing so, as you point out in the book, comes with tremendous costs, environmental, social, economic, for certain communities and so on and so forth. And so I wonder, you do Address this in the conclusion, of course. But if you could just say a little bit about where your thoughts are now on this really, really vexing problem and what you would suggest for people who, who want to be progressive, want to embrace energy transition, but don't want to create sacrifice zones.
- [18:48]
C
Yeah, you know, this is the vexing dilemma at the heart of the book. And what I try to do in the book is invite the reader into this ethical problem and think about it as an ethical problem. I'm not a philosopher, but you know, when I think about ethics, I think about situational judgment and practical wisdom. Right? Like these are practical problems. They're not moral dilemmas necessarily. It's not like there's a clear right and wrong. Like you know, that like we can just categorize black and white. They're more like, okay, we find ourselves in circumstances not of our own choosing, right? To kind of like bring in the Marx refrain and these. The situation is that we have a whole host of sectors that are super fossil dependent and are polluting our planet and creating existential risk for communities and non human nature around the world. And, and we have to rapidly transition. The kind of scope and breadth and rapidity of the transition that's necessary means like an entirely new build out of material systems around the world, right? Those material systems for the very fact of being material, meaning both that they are like require inputs that are appropriated from nature, but also that they exist in physical space and have a kind of footprint to them, means that there are environmental impacts. And because humans and environments are immersed in one another have social impacts and therefore political and economic ones. Right. And so I guess what I'm getting at here is that there's no way around that fact. That fact is the fact that we need to then ethically orient towards what types of judgments and assessments, what types of understandings of trade offs and tensions. How do we think about the competing constituencies, many of whom might be in some senses on like the right side of history. Right? But it might be that workers don't have the exact same interests as community as affected community members. Or maybe progressive global, you know, excuse me, progressive governments in the global south might have a set of like developmental objectives that don't purely align with like environmental sustainability. Right. And so even ignoring some of the perspectives that I find less valid or that are just like let's trample on nature and who cares? Or like purely profit oriented kind of judgments, even on the side of people who see the issue, there are vastly differing opinions about how to move forward And I want to do justice to that complexity and invite the reader in to really take stock of what these different perspectives are and of the manifold challenges to governance that extraction poses such that different solutions that are valid for the specific problem they pick up on, environmental boom and bust market cycles, geopolitical vulnerabilities might actually be in tension with one another. Like if we overly focus on just one facet of the negative aspects of these sectors, we might design a solution that is counterproductive to another. Right? So keeping that bird's eye view is very important to not have self undermining policy proposals. But maybe just to put this in a totally different frame of reference as just a second way to answer this question, because you asked me also like what am I thinking about this in the present? Or what's my own takeaway from where this book ended up, what I've come to think and this is explored in the conclusion. But I don't think I state directly what I'm about to say there, which is that I think we need to start from the world that we want and work backwards to how we're going to create it materially, politically, economically, in terms of global cooperation or the lack thereof. Like what all of the kind of furnishings and inputs. Again, whether we think of inputs as material inputs or as political or economic, like we want a world of zero emissions, or let's just say we want a transportation sector of zero emissions. Right? We can narrow the goal a little bit. Ideally that would be equitable. It would be just meaning that all manner of humans have access to electricity mobility options and to clean mobility options. Right. This is not just about a few people having access to really expensive EVs, right. We want mass deployment and mass consumption of these things. And you know, in addition, climate science tells us and climate modeling tells us that it's a good idea for in general us to reduce car use. Okay, so maybe we would want this world to have more electric buses versus individual electric vehicles. Right? Maybe we'd want to ensure that people have affordable housing, but that that housing is green and uses the best building materials. Okay, so we're building our little world here and that those designs, those visions for like the zero emissions socially just world that we want to live in has a set of material requirements. Okay, let's like unspool that. How much lithium would it take to build that many electric vehicles? How much copper would it take to wire that social housing and connect it to, you know, a community owned solar grid or something? Right. I mean, again, I'm using the utopian imaginary intentionally because I think that that visionary thinking is very important. We need to be able to visualize what we're going for. But then we need to be real and rigorous with ourselves and a little ruthless with ourselves about what material implications, what the material implications are of building that out. And what we'll come to learn is that there isn't an environmental free lunch. There isn't a cost free way to build like even the best possible world we could imagine. Which I think puts, I'm speaking, you know, kind of to my corner of the political spectrum, but I think puts environmentalists, climate advocates, progressives, whatever we want to call ourselves. Like, it forces us to like be really serious about, okay, how much resource extraction is actually necessary. Some is right. So that means that we can't just like escape this problem by saying no to any mining anywhere at any time. Okay, maybe we could reduce the amount of mining a lot. But what would provide for social need to make sure everyone has energy access, everyone can commute to work, whatever it is. Right. And I think starting with what we want and working backwards towards where we're at grounds us in the materiality and helps us see what the difficult trade offs are and how we might most justly and environmentally sustainably address the trade offs, mitigate them. Maybe we can't eliminate them, but we might soften them or mitigate them.
- [25:24]
A
Thanks so much for that, Thea. I find it so inspiring to think about where we want to actually be. I think at the moment we're hearing all of these securitization strategies around minerals and I guess to bring us to the present, you mentioned thinking about how much is necessary and that would lead us to the question of, well, okay, how do we get there to, to achieve what's necessary? And the strategies that are on the table at the moment tend to be these array of shoring strategies on shoring, reshoring, friend shoring. So I want to ask you about kind of these shoring strategies and how you're thinking about production. One thing you wrote in the book is that supply chains are much more than geographic routes of material flows. They're vectors of inequality. So in your work, not just in Latin America, but what you did in Nevada and how you're thinking about the American west, how do you see these shoring strategies kind of shaping what we're thinking of as necessary and how we're mining in the present?
- [26:21]
C
Thanks for asking that. I want to start by the kind of global economy as it is for a moment and Then get into these different strategies of changing the geographies of extraction and production or attempts to do so. I'm not going to talk about the whole global economy, not to be too ambitious, but just about the place of extraction in that. Right. I think one of the central facts about resource extraction, particularly of non renewable resources, when we're looking at fossil fuels or metallic minerals or whatever the case may be, is that that extraction is very uneven around the world in terms of what places are our extractive frontiers, we might call them, or our providers of these extractive minerals. And there's a very deep injustice kind of at the heart of, of this map of extraction, which is that the places where extraction happens on the whole are not the same as the kind of beneficiaries of the end use products that those extraction that that extraction provides inputs for. Whether we think of beneficiaries in terms of consumption, like who are the consumers of those final goods or we think about it in terms of profits or revenues like who is actually economically benefiting from the value added different parts of the supply chain, right. And there's just a fundamental gap or almost inverse relationship that if you live in a place that has long been a kind of zone of extraction, you are probably not a beneficiary of the kind of value added supply chains that that extraction feeds into. And likewise we've seen that, you know, the places historically that have been major centers of industrial production tend to have a particular power in the world system. Of course we could complicate that and think about the role of finance as well as even intellectual property and tech and innovation and these other sectors. But it just remains the case that being a kind of somewhat purely attractive economy does not bode well for your developmental prospects or for your kind of position in the world system. Which is why so many governments of Global south countries with extraction want to at least move kind of up the supply chain, if not like actually fully diversify their economies away, away from extraction. And you know, so I've been aware of that, those facts for a long time and have studied Global south countries that are trying to kind of escape the trap of extraction and finding all sorts of difficulties in doing so. And so one of the most surprising developments in the world that then I kind of assimilated into my research project was that Global north governments were wanted to onshore or reshore mining. This made no immediate sense to me and I really grasped it as like a really good example of what we call a puzzle in social science, right? Like why would it Be the case that the governments of the most affluent societies on earth want to reshore or onshore mining sectors that are low value added cause a lot of environmental harm, tend to be contentious at the local level. And just to emphasize, I already said low value added, but are really just not where the profits are concentrated. When we zoom out to the battery and electric vehicle supply chain, the profits are concentrated in the intellectual property, the ownership of battery or electric vehicle technologies, as well as in of course, the ownership of those firms. Right. And so it just doesn't make immediate sense to me for such a long time. Global north governments, with a few exceptions, I guess we could name Canada and Australia as important exceptions to this general rule, but also on the whole have been importers of these mined raw materials and the imports have followed a kind of classic structure of neocolonialism of unequal exchange, both in a monetary sense of how the revenues or monetary surplus is distributed, but also in an ecological sense in terms of who bears the ecological cost and who also bears the kind of fact of resource drain, like your non renewal resources being drained out of your country and environmental impacts left behind. So again, like not at all clear to me why all of a sudden, you know, we're in the first Trump government, right? At this point, Trump really wanted to onshore mining and kind of expand mining in the US of these critical minerals. European governments even more bizarre because Europe is even more dependent than the US on these import flows and has like pretty structured relationships including with its former colonies like through which they acquire raw materials. And so why upend that beneficial world order? And what is probably clear to many of your listeners. And so I won't belabor it that much and then I'll get a little more into your question about these different policy approaches. But I think suffice to say that the way in which Global north policy elites apprehended the fact of China's ascent, and they apprehended it belatedly and confusedly and hypocritically, you know, I want to name all of those things, meaning they were like late to the game that China was on this path. And there was a fundamental hypocrisy in the way they analyzed the conditions of possibility of China's rise and then what they might do in response, so we can get into that a little bit later. But if we want. But the fact of, you know, the U.S. china especially, and to a secondary degree like Europe, China and Europe, US competition is, is the fundamental reason for this turn to onshoring reshoring neo mercantilism, protectionism, whatever we want to call it. And you know what is interesting is how durable these strategies are and how much they indicate a new elite consensus. And the consensus is across the Atlantic, it's both, you know, U.S. and Europe. It's across the political spectrum, left to right. There's very little like dissent from the consensus that we should reshore onshore supply chains. And it's even kind of across the public and private sector because there's ways in which corporations mimic some of these securitizing state strategies in their own kind of business models and supply models. And so that's remarkable. It's not since the kind of heyday of neoliberal globalization or free trade or maybe in the US like the kind of apotheosis of the war on terror moment where we've seen this level of elite consolidation in an otherwise very fragmented and polarized political landscape. So I think it's just really on its own merits, like just deserves a lot of attention because it's rare for, you know, in the US for Democrats and Republicans to agree. And they agree on this. They agree that China is a threat, the economic ascent of China is a threat to Western or U.S. primacy. And they agree that a key solution is this toolkit of industrial policy that depending on the sector is reshoring it or on shoring it. And just to be perfectly clear and just maybe close out this answer, what on shoring or reshoring tends to involve in terms of the actual policies are really, we could just call them like deal sweeteners, corporate welfare. I know those aren't very precise analytic academic terms, but I think that they really like get at what is happening here. It's like here's a tax abatement, here's a subsidy, here's a concessional loan. Like that's what it involves because that's what it takes to attract mining companies to places that they actually haven't mined in very recently. Right. So they need and that have more expensive operational costs. Right. Because in the, the wages are higher for all sorts of reasons. We know about the inequality of the global economy. Like it's more expensive to do these things in the global north. Right. So you really need to super sweeten the deal. And then alongside that friend shoring is the encouragement through diplomacy, but also through real financial measures and sometimes through some muscular more hard power tactics to encourage or persuade or force third party countries to be sites of extraction or supply chain development that your country in the US or Europe, wherever it is feels that there's a special relationship or special access to that. It almost like expands your own kind of domestic production to have production or traction in this kind of allied country. And just to last sentence, as I said, what's fascinating is how durable this is to the point where Trump has upended lots of things. He has reinforced this. Right. So it's Trump 1, Biden, Trump 2. And there's such a clear through line on all of these policies.
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B
Well, let's get into the geopolitics in detail then, if you don't mind. What is the state of the competition to control the world's lithium reserves? Who controls proven reserves? And you get in the book about what proven reserves means. It's quite complicated. But just in shorthand, what is the state of play at the moment?
- [35:03]
C
Yeah, so the state of play is that about 80 or 85% of battery manufacturing capacity is, is in China. So that's the, the battery manufacturing. But that gives you a sense of where the lithium is headed for. Right. So China has a few distinct and complementary roles in this. And since you asked about China, not just because of your interest in like, US China competition, but also because China has a really important place in these supply chains. Right. So that 85% of global battery manufacturing capacity means lots of lithium is needed. And there's a few different ways China acquires that lithium that show its multiple roles across these chains. One is China is already one of the top four lithium producers. So when we look at the list of like, where does lithium in the world come from? Currently? Australia, Chile, China, Argentina, there is a few, you know, kind of edging up into fifth, sixth place there. Right. We could look at Canada, Brazil, we could look at a couple of countries in Africa, including Zimbabwe, that are expanding their sectors. Right. And so it's a growing list. But I'm just talking about the top four. And what's interesting about China, and it stands to reason is that unlike Australia, Chile and Argentina, the three other countries on that list, China's not exporting that lithium, that domestic lithium production enters into their own domestic supply chains. On top of that, China is the world's largest importer of lithium. Right? Which means that it's importing and that's through a mix of trade, let's say. But also because its companies, Chinese companies, they're not state owned companies, I want to be clear about that because obviously both types of companies are important in China. But private, you know, private sector firms in China got really early in the game, like several years ago of what we call like asset seeking or resource seeking, right? Leaving China in order to seek lithium assets elsewhere. And that was for two reasons. One is that even several years ago it was clear that China was on an EV trajectory in terms of their domestic production and domestic uptake and consumption of EVs, that they were going to outpace their own supplies. Right. Second of all, some of the lithium deposits in China are not the best quality, meaning that there are like other minerals that are considered impurities and require additional chemical processing to separate. And so there's, you know, other motivations for why you might want to go to Australia or Latin America. And so now I bring in like the third thing, which is that each of those other places on that list of four are places where Chinese firms have like major operations and or are partial owners of projects that might be majority owned by another firm. So we have quite a bit of interesting interlocking ownership that actually crosses not only the global north south divide, but also like the quote east west divide, right? Where we do have Chinese firms that are stakeholders in projects that again, the shareholders might be majority from a quote Western in a Western jurisdiction. And that just leads to the final point, which is that Chinese firms like Tianke and Gangfeng are among the top lithium firms in the world, right? And increasingly as well, downstream firms in China, BYD CATL are upstream investors. Which is also something that those downstream battery manufacturers and EV manufacturers in China really were on the vanguard of thinking. Oh, we don't want to just be at the receiving end of lithium that may or may not be available on a given day or at what quality, or is it battery grade or not. We want to actually have tight interlocking relationships upstream like with the mining companies or the specific mine projects. That pattern, as I mentioned vaguely earlier, of like supply chain reintegration is now actually common across the auto and battery sector. But I think for reasons that are not surprising to anyone that knows the amazing level of policy experimentation in China and also of private sector kind of business model innovation, I think Chinese companies were kind of ahead on that front. And so we also see companies elsewhere in the supply chain from China making ownership or equity bids or entering into joint ventures. And so Chinese companies now primarily private sector, though in the past it would have been a lot of also state owned consortia and more. In the early days of this, the state was more directly involved are just everywhere across these supply chains and increasingly important as well in the foreign direct investment that takes place place in the global south across now the expanding supply chain, not just mining, but, you know, battery manufacturing in other third countries, et cetera.
- [39:39]
B
Recently, China imposed export controls on critical minerals. Was lithium included in that?
- [39:45]
C
So what I think the recent, so the recent controls on the mineral side, I'm pretty sure though, you know, someone can correct me for sure if I'm wrong, were rare earth elements, which are a basket of several elements. However, lithium was relevant because they also instituted a novel set of like technology transfer controls that pertain to the equipment and technologies and, I don't know, maybe even software or other aspects of battery manufacturing. Right. And so they're both doing the rare earth stuff, which has to do with this tit for tat escalation with the US having control on semiconductors. Right. And so that's that thing. But you know, it's an interesting dance that, that the Chinese government is playing in a way for the hearts, minds and markets of the Global south because on the one hand, they're engaged in unprecedented and unparalleled levels of green FDI, foreign direct investment in sectors that we can call green just because they relate to the energy transition, which is really helpful for Global south developmental ambitions and industrialization ambitions. On the other hand, in this geoeconomic battle that they're in with these great powers, they're also starting to lock down a bit some of the, some of the routes of technology transfer, primarily out of concern, most likely, that US companies would gain access. But what this could do is potentially in some cases slow down the expected technological transfer in the Global South. And so we'll see how this all pans out. All of this is like in development and these variables are kind of happening at the same time. But, but for sure, their export controls partly relate to lithium battery supply chains, even though lithium, I don't think lithium itself got a new set of controls.
- [41:27]
B
One more question on the state of play, as you say, there's this dance going on and it cuts across sectors and semiconductors you mentioned, and there are others. I guess the scenario that folks in Washington always mention is in the event of a war and then whatever else follows after that. So in the event of a war, does the US and Europe and say Japan, South Korea, do they have enough access to lithium to carry on with, with industrial capacity or no? Would they. Are they basically done for if they can't access China lithium?
- [42:00]
C
Really good question. You know, and there's this whole kind of tradition in international relations of, of like war games and thinking through war scenarios and what, what would happen in X or Y circumstance. And the answer is Both yes and no. The yes is that lithium is relatively abundant in geological terms. The U.S. you know, for sure has significant lithium resources and deposits that I distinguish that from reserves because we don't know about the technical or economic viability of all of those resources, but they're there. And actually, you know, under the Biden government, the USGS was directed to do more critical mineral serving. I don't know where that's at right now given like budget cuts under Trump to like all sorts of things, scientific research. But we have more than we even know we have is the point. Right. And so in Europe, there are also significant resources. I'm not sure how they stack compared to the U.S. the U.S. probably has more just for like, just reasons of geological history of the U.S. the continent. But that, that aside, there might be for sure enough lithium resources. And then, you know, every time there's these really interesting headlines and new scientific papers that will come out, like in just the mining waste of other mines, we could supply 30% of lithium. Right. So the US has a really legacy mining industry which involves a lot of not fully remediated mine waste, some of which has critical minerals in it. So even when we think about secondary mining, there are other possibilities there as well. And then on the other end of the supply chain for sure, the US and even more so Europe have more electric vehicle and battery manufacturing capacity than they did several years ago before any of these incentives, you know, policy incentives were created. Right. Of course, some of that is stalling out in the US due to Trump or, or its growth is stalling out. But we still have more than, than we used to. So we have a few important nodes here. But there are problems. One is like we don't have a lot of the intermediary nodes, the refining, the processing, the cathode material. You know, some of the stuff that goes in between a mine and a battery plant or an electric vehicle plant, we're weaker on. The other thing is that you have to have a complex and variegated basket of raw material inputs. It's not just lithium. So if you want to make NMC batteries, which have been the. Sorry to get a little wonky for a second, but they're different battery technologies. And one is called NMC that has nickel and cobalt in it, and that's been the preferred one of western automakers. It's more energy dense, but it's also a little more expensive because the cobalt and nickel anyway. Okay, do we have cobalt and nickel in the US I don't want to say off the top of my head, because I'm not a cobalt or nickel scholar, we probably do, but like we don't have sectors around that. Right. And so those sectors would need to be developed. Or we could switch to lithium phosphate, you know, a different battery chemistry, a little less energy dense, but also a little cheaper. And maybe we have more of the inputs of that. But you get the idea. These supply streams are really complex, you know, that involve like dozens of different minerals, let alone the other like nodes that beyond the mining piece. And maybe the last thing that I would say, because we're talking about a war context, so we're kind of imagining what that would look like, what resource mobilization and kind of political capacity would look like in a situation of outright conflict between states. And what the US lacks right now, though it has had in the past, is like the institutional structures to really mobilize domestic resources towards really specific use cases that are declared to be in like the public interest, whether, you know, in the time of war or let's say if it was like post war economic recovery, like whatever that moment was, we could rebuild those institutions or create them. Right. We had a war production board in World War II that literally said all the lithium has to be used for the war. It wasn't batteries then, it was other industrial uses of lithium. So we have historic precedent, but we've really like dismantled or neutralized those institutions for the most part. China has a leg up here and maybe Europe to a certain degree, though it's nowhere near China's level of administrative capacity on this front. Has institutions that can actually direct supply streams in cases of emergencies and has much more capital control. They literally have capital controls. Like they can prevent finance from leaving the country. They can, their export, export control system is very rigorous. Like they can keep their resources in house, prevent looting and like coordinate internal supply chains in a way that we would have to just do new institutional development in the US to get to that point. And in a war context, we'd have to do that very quickly.
- [46:41]
A
I'm really glad you ended here. So I'm situated in the American west, right in Utah. So I've been tracking a lot of the new mining proposals or kind of restarting of projects, whether it's for lithium at Thacker Pass or rare earth elements in California or Wyoming, Montana. So you have all these projects proposed across the American west. And I think the geopolitics part of the story in the US is motivating a lot of the investment and push towards reopening these things. So could you talk about how geopolitics and trying to get China out of the supply chain in the US Are motivating federal money from the government with certain strings attached to it.
- [47:20]
C
Absolutely. And this has gotten even more interesting under Trump in ways that honestly confounded me or surprised me. So I mentioned earlier that it was under the first Trump government that a lot of this idea of reshoring or onshoring and for lithium, it's a mix of reshoring and on shoring. And so sorry that I keep saying both of those words, but it's me trying to be very precise, which is that the US Used to have a big lithium sector. I just mentioned the War Production Board. And from like the 1940s through the 1990s, we had lots of lithium mines in a kind of different part of the country. More in North Carolina and kind of more eastward, but significant resources in the US west, as you said. But the US Kind of government, we could say, let the lithium industry kind of die. It didn't seem that strategically important, but ironically, that was timed with the takeoff of the lithium industry in personal electronics and then electric vehicles. So they really, you know, if I was a national security hawk or that type of person, I would say, wow, we really made a big mistake like giving our industry to China, so to speak. Right. But that's how they think about it. But regardless, so there's some reshoring, but there's also onshoring because we haven't had this big lithium sector in the US west, minus one mine in Nevada. That's, that's longstanding. And so, you know, how is the geo economics relevant to specific projects and to the financing of them and to how the government's relating? Super important. So under Trump won, we had the declaration of lithium as a critical mineral added to the USGS critical mineral list. We had the kind of designation of some strategic projects, some of that, you know, that list included Thacker Pass, which is now under construction in Nevada and is one of the places that I did research for the book. And so while Trump was still in power, in the first government, there was what many refer to, and it was technically a fast tracked approval process. Right. And so the public hearings were more limited. This was also during a pan, during the pandemic. And so everything was on zoom, which was still a very novel technology to people. So we could really say they ran this project through the record of decision of the Bureau of Land Management. It all came very quickly. But it was really Biden that financially underwrote and buoyed this project. So under Biden, the Department of Energy gave, awarded Thacker Pass an enormous loan that covered 75% of the capital cost of their construction. And anyone that knows anything about the mining sector knows that like one of the biggest impediments to finance. There are a couple, but one of the big one is high upfront fixed costs, many of which are actually sunk costs like they can't be relocated or resold. That equipment is site specific. And so there's a big capital push at the beginning of mining. And if the government basically says, here's a concessional loan that covers 75% of that, you're never going to get that from Wall Street. And so that was huge. And also Biden just in a number of other ways, Biden and Democrats in Congress and the Inflation Reduction act and all a bunch of regulatory decisions really just help create the vision that we were going to have onshored EV supply chains in the US which then encouraged downstream manufacturers to get involved in financing. So General Motors then takes an equity position in the Thacker Pass project in exchange for a guarantee of supply. Right. So that we see that vertical reintegration that I was talking about a kind of like neo Fordism of sorts. And so that really ushers along and it's important to name. There were two protest encampments. There were multiple lawsuits. There were protests in Reno as well as on the site itself. That's a lot of public opposition, especially for Nevada, which there's a really interesting history of grassroots environmental organizing in Nevada. But most of the folks I spoke to there said it can be hard to galvanize protest against a mine in Nevada. It's not, you know, it's just known as like a mining state and people kind of take it for granted. So there was a lot of opposition with legal and kind of direct organizing tactics. And I think it just shows the level of elite consensus, but also public financial underwriting that's necessary to push something through despite tremendous protests. And then I'll just end with where we're at right now with Trump too. And this is not, this isn't in the book because this is very recent. So the current Trump government has also taken a direct equity position in both Lithium America as the company and Lithium. And Thacker passed the project and has gotten somewhat involved in kind of thinking through like price floors or like offtake guarantees, like more full throated industrial policy than we actually saw out of Biden in certain ways, or at least in regards to mining specifically. So this project got you Know, got fast tracked. Trump 1 got a big loan from Biden. Under Trump, too, the government is a partial owner of it and is just going to ensure that, like, no matter what, this project moves forward to fulfill Trump's idea of what he calls minerals dominance. And what's fascinating is this minerals dominance idea applies just as much to lithium as it does to copper, as it does to coal, as it does to rare earths, because they've really expanded what counts as a critical mineral, and coal is on there. But it's not important to him at all the broader electric vehicle supply chain that is the main source of demand for lithium. But the lithium mining is very important to him, which has again opened the floodgates of this kind of public financing. And so support.
- [52:28]
B
I find this one of the most interesting aspects of the discussion and this sector, because for the last three decades, we've kind of assumed that global economic geography was a reflection of global capitalism. Right. So states were somehow involved, but really it was supply and demand curves where, where things were cheap, where factors of production were cheap. And that explains why certain countries got locked in as resource exporters. And now everything, all of our assumptions are being upended. And it seems to me that economic geography is a reflection of, in part, geopolitics and geostrategy. So I wonder what the impact of this will be on green energy transition. Will geopolitical rivalry actually accelerate, do you think a green energy transition, because there is a competition to dominate, as you say, these sectors, or do you think it would be the opposite, that for whatever reason, supply chains will just be fragmented, interrupted, markets will disintegrate, we'll see some level of decoupling in the future, and maybe we'll see a green energy transition inhibited as a result of geopolitical rivalry.
- [53:38]
C
Yeah. This is a very hard question to answer, in part because I think the answer changes based on the particular moment in time that we're looking at. Right. When we look at, like, trajectories of political and economic change, I think there are certain moments where one could validly argue that the geoeconomic competition was propelling energy transition investments and public support for them. You know, over and above, what would be expected by just like climate values or climate principles. Right. Meaning climate commitments. Right. That. That the. The added ingredient of geoeconomic competition was propelling much more public support or public support, I mean, governmental support, and to a degree, broader public support for getting these supply chains up and running within the global north or anywhere in the world. Right. And so there was a moment in the US where it was very clear that climate advocates and energy transition advocates were willing to make a bargain with the kind of national security state or with more hawkish kind of elites over this issue of, okay, you, the security hawks, you want to fight China, you want to compete with China, you want to regain Western primacy, whatever your goal is, right? We, the climate people, we want mass deployment of these energy technologies. Maybe we can have an uneasy coalition, but that kind of works where like we can argue to you that the US investing in all this stuff is good for its position vis a vis China and vice versa. Right. And so then we get more public money towards the, in the sectors that are important to us because we know, especially in the US but now increasingly in Europe, the idea or the notion that a sector is strategically relevant just opens the floodgates of public money. Right. We're seeing this with rearmament right now in the EU and some real dilemmas around like are we going to use public investment for rearmament or for the energy transition, or are we somehow going to do both of those things? Right. And you know, I was always a little skeptical of this alliance between like climate hawks and like security hawks, Right. You know, to use Daniela Gabor's and Ben Braun's framing, it did help them push back against the fiscal hawks who are the ones that don't want to spend money on anything. Right. So that's useful to kind of like open up the fiscal space. But if the fiscal space is being opened up in a way that is contingent on these shifting geo strategic calculi, it is quite vulnerable. And I think what we've seen, and I don't, this is not a like and I told you so because I do think it's more complex and we have to make these calculated judgments at different moments. But there is a little bit of a like, okay, that was a Faustian bargain. Because at the other end of that what's happened is we've strengthened the hand of the security state, we've given it a new battery of justifications and tools and all this sort of thing and new domains of geostrategic conflict. So now all of a sudden the energy transition, it's not just for public health or planetary well being or even economic development, it's because of geopolitics. Right? But what that means is once the geopolitical gaze like shifts to another strategic sector, now it's AI or semiconductors, we could imagine in the future, it's still other sectors then, like the, the climate stuff and the green Stuff drops off very easily. That was always the weaker party of that coalition, we might say. And we see these literal coalitions in like a multi party context in Europe, right, With the Green parties and with conservative parties allying sometimes in these ways. Right. And in the US it's all within parties, but it's still a kind of coalition of sorts. Right. And so that for sure concerns me and, and I'll say one other negative thing and then I'll try to, I don't know about a silver lining, but I'll look at it from a different vantage point, more related to the global South. So I think that the other thing that's clearly been sacrificed in the kind of geo economic framing of the energy transition is the possibility of global cooperation, or at least global cooperation that includes like the main hegemons or powerful actors in the world. Right. And so, and I think that as much as there's a lot of climate change that we can solve through economic investments and just retooling the physical plant of our societies, there also needs to be collaboration, not just because we want agreements that countries are sticking to. And there's evidence that even if those agreements don't work as well as we want, like the Paris Agreement didn't change everything or change enough, but we do have evidence that countries are on a better framework, excuse me, emissions trajectory than they were prior to the Paris agreement. So I think global cooperation is something we should hang on to, at least multilateral. And all the geoeconomic competition, excuse me, makes that more difficult, but maybe to get a little more complex here because I think that there is a case to be made that there are some new opportunities opening up in the fragmentation of what was a more unipolar world order into a multi or non polar world order. And I know I'm speaking to actual IR specialists, so I don't know what term you prefer, but you know, there's evidence that we have multipolarity. You know, one can also make an argument that we have non polarity and that it's just really not clear exactly how these competitions are going to, you know, who's going to win which competitive race and what the end result will be. But regardless, we're not in a world of like US hegemony anymore, especially not on a soft power level or a kind of institutional level, and increasingly not on the level of like trade and finance. The US has military supremacy, it has dollar supremacy and it has the biggest consumer market in the world, which is very important and is a center of global finance. So you know, we have those four types of power in the US still, you know, pretty much undented. But all the other things, soft power trade, other types of financial relations, other types of multilateral engagements that can, like, increase your weight in global policy making. Like, we are either intentionally abdicating and, or losing those venues. And what's happening in the wake of that is that emerging economies, and I want to say political economies, right, because it's as much about their governments as, like, the size of their markets are really, like, filling out some of this multilateral space. There's a whole new and complex set of global South China relations that are emerging, some of which follow concerning patterns of, like, inequality in terms of, like, the distribution of value of economic production, but some of which are upending those patterns. Like I mentioned the green FDI on purpose because it's not just that China's exporting solar panels. They are, but they're also like, exporting the technology to produce solar panels. And that is more developmentally important to the Global South. And that's because. That's not just because China is like, you know, it's not noblesse oblige or like, China just being a good actor. It's the fact that Global south governments, understanding these shifting alliances and the fragmentation of the world order are. And understanding their own society's developmental and sustainability ambitions are putting real caveats on trade relations and on finance relations and saying, you have to do local content stuff. You have to help us with tech transfer. You need to hire locally, whatever the kind of provisions are. And for various reasons, Chinese firms are more adept and, or more willing at playing that game versus Western firms, which tend to just be a little bit more scared off or, like, skittish about getting too involved in, like, kind of industrial transformation in the places that they operate where Chinese firms are much more willing to do that. And they have. They have said, yes, okay, we'll abide by your export controls or your local content requirements. And so what we see is a route not only to industrialization, which honestly has seemed almost foreclosed. There's a lot of development economists that have been super concerned that, like, we don't know if this continued replication of, like, industrial revolutions or industrialization processes is viable in some cases just because of sheer overcapacity issues or whatever it is, right? Or just the lack of tech transfer or the difficulty in climbing the ladder of economic complexity. But this new set of relations between China and the global south and also among different emerging economies, including Brazil, et cetera, is opening developmental Pathways that I think seemed more shut down before. And as importantly it's opening pathways to green development. There was such a concern like a decade ago, let's say among climate experts that this technology was just going to be too expensive. And so they were, that Global south countries were just going to stay on the coal path, let's say. And instead we're seeing actual substitution effects. It's at the margins, I don't want to overstate it but we are seeing countries from Nepal to Pakistan again to Brazil to Mexico starting to substitute in their energy mix or their transportation mix again using those China dominated supply chains and or tech transfer from China to actually have a more green complexion to some of their development. I don't want to overstate it. We are in a planetary emissions crisis. But it's the economic math is the economics and the kind of sustainability math are working out a little bit better. And we do see real protagonism in the Global south, the real return of industrial policy and resource nationalism which is making that possible. So I want to just think broadly about what this multipolar moment means outside of the immediate great powers.
- [62:56]
A
I think that's actually a great place for us to wrap up. And I'll do a shameless plug. Seth has one more question.
- [63:02]
B
Can I ask one more question? Something that came up. I couldn't help but think about some of the, the things you talked about in relation to the miner strikes in the 80s. And you know, as you know the UK no longer mines coal. And one reason is because Thatcher wanted to break the power of the unions, the mining unions in the 1980s if mining is reintroduced. So you talked about reshoring in countries like Spain, Portugal, us, Serbia. I mean US is so big it'll be a drop in the ocean. But do you think there will be a significant impact on the domestic politics of these countries? Because you'll, you'll recultivate or you'll see the resurrection of, of a constituency, a working class perhaps in the mining sector.
- [63:45]
C
Yes and no. Again, sorry to do the annoying to hard answer but you know, yes, it will affect the politics. Not sure about a labor militancy that matches the kind of, let's say late 19th century through 1970s kind of role of miners unions or coal in particular, but also copper depending on the country that you're in. And we could bring in everywhere from the Appalachian region of the U.S. to South Africa to many Latin American countries that had huge mine workers movement. So we could go. And the Thatcher case is really instructive about the types of political muscle it took to defeat such a militant movement. Right. Which was not just defeating them by defeating them politically, but actually like take, you know, just selling off the mine so that you don't have to deal with the mine workers at all. Right. So that was, you know, she successfully battled that, that movement, but it took a lot because mine workers have been historically among the most militant vanguard of the labor movement. Right. And there are many explanations for that. Of course, Timothy Mitchell's book Carbon Democracy gets into this, but you can read about it elsewhere depending on the country. But the reason I say yes is that for sure, just a handful of mega lithium mines in the US west or scattered throughout Europe, whether in the EU or technically outside the eu, in Serbia or including there's a project in England as well, outside of the eu, but in the neighborhood. And so. So absolutely. I mean, it turns out that communities in the global north also have mixed feelings about mining. Right. And that can really catalyze local movements, but it can even catalyze domestic scale mobilization. We saw that in Portugal and we saw that in Serbia, people out in the capital cities of those places and governments being really affected, almost taken down in some cases. And lithium was not the only issue in either Portugal or Serbia that made those governments unpop. Popular or whatever. But you know, we had a prime minister of Portugal resign in partly over scandals related to lithium. And so, you know, we've seen, you know, even super local kind of political impacts of this return to mining and of course the kind of environmental concerns that surface anywhere that mining takes hold. But the no is that we have seen a real change in the mining industry in the composition of investment and the composition of capital versus labor. Right. We've seen, seen a real intensification of machinery, of mechanized logistics, of automation, of mining operations, of the importance of computing to mining. Now we're seeing even artificial intelligence firms that are selling their LLM models where they go through rafts of geological data and can pinpoint potential mineral hotspots that maybe government surveyors haven't picked up on. But you also visit a large scale mine today and you see some workers and you see many more machines per worker. Right. And so what that means is that the capital intensity of this sector, it doesn't eliminate labor, but it changes the composition of labor. Right. We have a lot of white collar engineering desk mining type people that are operating remote machinery or writing code for them or just doing surveying. Then we have much more precarious labor and seasonal labor. That's like building the mine. But the amount of workers required once the mine is operational is much less than it, than it used to be. And so I don't, you know, my work, you know, one major deficit of my work, which I readily admit to is I don't focus as much on labor, which has nothing to do with my politics or worldview thinking that working class organization isn't important. It is, but like I said at the beginning, I follow the actors and in this case I follow the conflict. And where the most. The kind of scene or setting and social categories of the most intense mining conflict that's becoming more widespread around the world has been more on the kind of front of affected communities battling mining companies. But while I was doing this fieldwork, there was a major strike at one of Chile's two lithium mines. That strike, some of the workers there entered into interesting relationships with environmental organizations and indigenous organizations. So sometimes you see a broadening of the kind of grievances and a kind of broader understanding of who the impacted community is. So it's still relevant for sure. And in parts of the world where mining remains more labor intensive, the kind of like working class organization piece is really still quite important. But I think we just again need to look at the composition of capital, at the business models, at the ways in which perhaps in some cases intentionally automation has been used to weaken or neuter labor movements. Right. Oftentimes in the history of capitalism, we see that turn to relative surplus value and increased levels of valorization through machinery is a response to working class militancy. And if I were an expert on the history of labor in the mining industry, which I'm not, but if I were, I would probably be able to periodize some of this turn to capital intensity as, you know, as a tactic as much as it is just a kind of neutral seeming business model. Yeah.
- [69:06]
A
I want to thank you so much for this wide ranging conversation and for all your work on this fabulous book. I know that Seth and I could ask many more questions, so we really.
- [69:14]
C
Appreciate your time today.
- [69:16]
B
Thank you so much.
- [69:17]
C
Thanks. These were awesome questions that were thought provoking to me and it's just such a pleasure to be in conversation with you scholars I respect so much. So thanks for having me. Thank you.
- [69:27]
A
And I hope we can keep that going. And we'll share the book and links to some of Thea's other research on the podcast notes and you can find us@the secondgoldwarobservatory.com as well as on the New Books Network. Thanks so much.
- [69:52]
C
Sa.