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Thea Riofrancos, "Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism" (W.W. Norton, 2025)
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You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia Made to Travel welcome to the New Books Network.
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Well, thank you so much for being here today, Thea. And before we dive straight into the content of your new book, I was hoping that you could give us a bit of background on how you came to research and write about lithium mining and the frontiers of green capitalism. So for listeners who aren't familiar with your writing, I think it's really important to highlight that this comes off the back of two prior books. One on the very contested politics of resource now nationalism in Ecuador and the other a co authored book advocating for a transformative Green New Deal program to confront the escalating climate crisis. More recently, you've also published a couple of cautionary articles in the Financial Times about the critical Minerals Rush and Trump's Resource Nationalism, as well as a paper on green industrial policy with the Climate and Community Institute. And in many ways I read your new book. The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is the extension of your engagements as both an academic researcher and public intellect, but in other ways it also felt, at least analytically, like a shift into thinking about Climate and energy politics from a slightly different perspective, what some scholars have termed supply chain capitalism. So I'll start by asking first, how did you come to think about the politics of lithium mining? What is it about lithium that makes it so critical to industrial decarbonization strategies? And how did your understanding of the political economy of the energy transition evolve in the process of researching and writing this book?
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Yeah, well, thanks for the warm introduction and for connecting some of the threads of my prior work. And since I'm somewhat presuming that the audience for this podcast are people in the academic or kind of intellectual sphere, I'm going to start with an honest point about why I like kind of how this project emerged, because I think it's helpful for people to really share where research ideas even come from, which is not like the textbook methods. I picked a case where there's variation on the dependent variable. This is how we're taught in political science or formally kind of trained. But you know, the very origins of this are kind of twofold. One was a cocktail party and the other was me needing a second project. And I won't recount all of it, but suffice to say that I was having a conversation with a friend and he knew that I was in the process of about to come out with Resource Radicals. This was even before that was published. And he said, what do you think about lithium? This was like in 2018 or something, late 2017. And I said, I don't know what I think about it. He said, well, you know, there's going to be a lot of mining of lithium for the energy transition. You should look into it since they're so interested in mining. And that literally was what brought my attention to it. I went home that night, looked online and realized not only was he right about everything he said, but like the geography of lithium extraction at that time, and it persists roughly the same today, is that there are enormous deposits in Latin America and South America, particularly in the Andean region, a place I'm very familiar with in. And there was already quite a bit of contention at that time, whether from communities, you know, politicians, corporations, unfolding around the so called Lithium Triangle. That is a way that the deposits of Bolivia, Argentina and Chile are jointly referred to. And so, you know, that that takes me to the next kind of answer to your question, which is that as I was wrapping up Resource Radicals, I was thinking ahead to my so called second project and I kind of just put this on the books. I was like, you know, whenever I needed to, kind of Talk about my work. I said, my next project will be on lithium extraction. And it actually just took on a life of its own because it became so fascinating to me. It started to kind of enter into the business, press, political discussion, economic, kind of like corporations and executives were talking about this. And I started to think, like I should actually research this, right? And, and at the same time, or unfolding kind of in a similar moment, just as per your introduction, I was getting really involved in renewable energy politics in the US Right, as an activist, right. So my scholarly research at that point had all been outside of the US in Latin America. But as an organizer or an activist, that work tends to happen, you know, where, where I, where I live. And so as I was thinking through what my friend said about lithium mining and the energy transition, as I was realizing that this was going to be a quote, hot commodity in the kind of commanding heights of political economy, I was also starting to get worried. Like, wait a second, here I am advocating for a just transition in the US an energy transition that is rapid and that also meets community needs and is fair to workers. And that whole framing of a just transition, or Green New Deal as we then started to call it, soon thereafter, I started to get concerned about am I advocating for something in the US or in the global north more broadly, that would wreak havoc on communities around the world. Right. And so I realized, right, kind of then and there, in that kind of more late 2018, early 2019 moment, that I needed an answer to this question of the connection between resource extraction and an energy transition. I couldn't just black box it or ignore it. And then, and I also just thought, and I turned out to be more or less correct about this, that it was going to become like an increasingly central arena of politics, of economics, and a central node in the supply chains of supply chain capitalism that you mentioned. And so at my first opportunity, I went to Chile in early 2019, and about a week after landing in Santiago, went to the Atacama Desert and was lucky enough to accompany some researchers who knew the terrain much better than I did and kind of gave me a guide. And again, I'm saying all this stuff advisedly because this is how research actually happens, right? And I think it's worth just understanding and hearing someone backwards engineer, you know, how a project came to be and how even the methods and the kind of physical, active field work came to happen. And so I started in Chile with a focus on lithium at that point. And I'm not going to get too far ahead in Our conversation. But I do want to say this. I initially thought I'd be studying it in Chile and Bolivia or maybe Chile and Argentina. Like, I just crossed the border. Rural borders are. Borders are hard to cross, just like full stop. They're not like easy places. And actually, for reasons that might be not intuitive, like a rural border, and real kind of extreme peripheries of already peripheral places in the global economy are present their own logistical challenges for crossing. And so I ended up just kind of staying in Chile, becoming super immersed in the Chilean side of this story. Chile is the number two producer of lithium, provides about 20 to 25% of global supplies, depending on the year. So it's a major lithium producer. It's also the top copper producer, which is another energy transition mineral. So the politics of lithium and extraction in general are quite live in Chile. And so I just started investigating and we'll talk a bit more later. Like what I found in the Atacama when I was there. But I was kind of going between the capital and the kind of resource frontier itself. And then what happened? And this will allow me to answer the rest of your question about why is lithium critical? What is lithium? Why is it critical? Later that year, I ended up in Europe. And so for a different reason, again, being honest about how research happens. And that opened up a whole world of me, for the first time, thinking through, researching extraction in the global North. And so this ended up being a transnational project, which is not at all how I planned it. But, you know, what is lithium and why is it in the spotlight of policy, of, of. Of economic decision making? Also, of course, of community protest and in some cases of worker. Worker protests and worker strikes as well. So lithium currently is considered an essential input of lithium ion batteries, you know, so the name gives you an idea that they're important to the battery. I'll say for the energy wonks or chemists, you know, that are listening, that, yes, there are other possible batteries out there. Sodium batteries are kind of getting further developed right now. And so, as always with the history of capitalism and technology or the history of science, there are disruptions, there are substitutions. And so I'm not saying forever lithium will be critical, but it has been considered, quote, unquote, critical for some years now. And I don't think that's about to change. And when we talk about, you know, what makes an element critical. So lithium is an essential input in lithium batteries. Lithium batteries play an essential role for now in decarbonizing the entire transportation sector, at least ground Transportation, particularly cars and trucks and buses, including bikes and that sort of thing. And that means that lithium batteries play a role in decarbonizing the second largest source of global emissions and the first largest source of US Emissions. Given our extreme car dependency. In the US Transportation is actually our top polluting sector over the energy sector. And so, you know, we can see why from a climate perspective, from an energy system perspective, lithium is essential, not to mention its role in utility kind of scale storage, which is storing energy on a grid that relies on intermittent solar and wind sources. So it plays that role as well. But for policymakers to call something critical, it's not just, you know, they don't just ask climate scientists like which elements are important to green technologies. There's a whole kind of framework of criticality that policymakers in, in the global north tend to use. And there's sort of different framings in the global south as well as China for to kind of label similar elements. But in the global north, an element, and this is the US definition, but it's quite similar in the uk, eu, et cetera, an element needs to be essential to either economic functioning, like to the basics of capital accumulation and everyday consumption and production. And, but there's like three pieces, so that's one. And it needs to be important for national security and there needs to be some concern over supplies. It can be that supplies are insufficient, are prone to disruption, are highly concentrated, or the worst case scenario from a, you know, a kind of hawkish perspective that supplies, current supplies are hyper concentrated in an antagonistic foreign country. Right. And so that's kind of like then your alarm bells really start going off and, and all of these to some degree apply to lithium with the sort of proviso that it's not that I'm saying lithium is quote, essential to national security, but the politics of securitization have embroiled lithium and its broader supply chains in their domain of kind of policymaking power and in the sort of wide set of tools that security politics opens up to states. Right. And so lithium has been kind of cast in this, you know, in this, you know, having a kind of central role in the kind of play of not only an energy transition, but the kind of broader historical drama of geoeconomics and of increasing, we could almost say inter imperial or inter hegemonic rivalry over the supply chains of the 21st century. And so I think that gives a sense of lithium's importance. We could have a similar conversation about other elements. But you know, maybe one last thing to say as to why lithium has been a, almost early testing ground of policy approaches as well as protest approaches that, that we now see across perhaps a broader range of minerals for, for the energy transition is that, you know, I said already that lithium batteries are key to decarbonizing ground transportation, which is a major source of carbon pollution. But the auto industry is not just any sector in places with an auto industry. So we can think of, you know, historically like the incumbent auto producers of the world, the Germany's, the Japans, the United States is right, the Italy's maybe right for these places. The auto sector is very important to politicians, very important to the workers that work in it, and for sure important to the companies whose bottom line depends on it. And so the auto sector, the idea that, oh, we have to decarbonize the auto sector, we have to introduce these new technologies there, that heightens political interest in the topic. And then, you know, just to close out, I intentionally didn't mention China, even though now it's a top global auto producer, because that is something that has just happened in the past decade. And so, you know, initially this is a kind of in the global North, a thing about how are we going to change our massive auto sectors to work differently. Meanwhile, China was rapidly opening up a whole new niche which is its own electric vehicle production and as well as domestic consumption.
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Well, you've touched on so many things that we'll hopefully be able to dig deeper into during this, this interview. But I want to start with the geography, as you alluded to, of lithium mining and the Triangle in Latin America. So you start in the prologue. You introduce us to Chile's Atacama Salt flat salt flats, where there's a rare convergence of climactic, geological, geothermal and hydrological conditions that have made it the region where it is the most cost effective in the world to mine lithium. And it is here that the central tension of your book unfolds. A seemingly unresolvable clash of interest between indigenous led efforts to protect the fragile desert ecosystem and the voracious global demand for lithium to manufacture the car batteries needed to decarbonize the automotive industry. Or as you describe it yourself in the book, everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition, global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection, which is how extractive frontiers are made. So you've already alluded to part of what drew you to the Atacama Desert. But what did you discover when you were there and how did you witness or experience the tension between this Global demand for so called critical minerals and the rights of 18 indigenous communities who call the Atacama home.
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I think what I discovered when I first went to the Atacama Desert was just a landscape unlike any other. And you know, I think you can say everything is unique in its own way. Some things feel more unique than others. Right. And I think that the scientific research on the Atacama supports that almost just intuition one has when one is in the landscape, that it is just unlike other places that they have probably been to, unless they are indigenous to the area or have lived in the area themselves previously. And you know, the scientific term for environments like the Atacama, and the Atacama is itself exemplary of this is a quote, poly extreme environment. And poly extreme. Poly meaning many or multiple. Right. So it's extreme on multiple parameters. It's extremely high altitude, it's extremely arid. It is actually the driest desert on Earth. So it's, you know, the driest of the dry or whatever. And it's the second driest place on Earth aside from a sub region of the Antarctica that is slightly more arid. And so it's very high altitude, it's very dry, and the solar radiation is, as I recount in the book, off the charts, I mean, which is part relevant to how the lithium is concentrated as well as relevant to how it is that the lithium liquid is then evaporated. Right. And so it's extremely solar radiation. It's a high altitude desert, so it's quite sunny. Right. In other words. But there's also another extreme which is the diurnal temperature swings. So in the middle of a hotel, you know, in the middle of the afternoon, let's say. And for anyone that's ever been to deserts anywhere in the world, you've experienced this. It's extremely hot, extremely sunny, there's not a cloud of the sky at night, it gets quite frigid, there's no humidity to sort of hold that, you know, hold that warm air. And so it's freezing at night. It can be. And you know, so, so all of those factors interact to create what is on the one hand, a landscape that can appear to a visitor or maybe to a foreign visitor is the best, the best way to put it as dramatically beautiful, but like quite austere just because it's, you know, I didn't even mention the towering Andean mountains that kind of surround the Atacama salt Flat and surround the whole region, some of which are volcanic. You're walking on this craggy white and gray Rock when you're on the actual salt flat itself. Human beings don't live on the salt flat, right. So it can look again to a far and eye, as it did to the Spanish conquerors, as a terra nullius, as an empty place that is not only empty, but actually hostile to life. Of course, there's more than meets the eye because part of what is extremely biodiverse in the Atacama Desert is microbial. Right. Because there's actual life. And the lithium deposits themselves are habitats, which is not a thing you can say about every type of mineral deposit. Right. And so the deposits being liquid in this case, not, not all lithium takes this form, but, but it's one of the kind of three or four main types of lithium deposits are these subsurface brines and even underground, even without the sun. Right. So it's chemical synthesis, not photosynthesis, that these little organ. Right. And so there's life everywhere. But not only that, you know, if you are visiting the salt flat and you, you stay there for a moment and you visit the nature preserves that are like about 20 miles from the mines, you will see flamingos and you will see other animals, many of which are endemic to the area. And so there's, you know, while, while it seems austere, if you're not in the human communities that, that border it as, as, and I'll come back to those in a moment. You'll start to see animals. Some of them are not visible to the human eye, but it's actually a quite diverse, complex chain of, you know, sort of food chain and, and web of life that intersects then in ways that are quite tensional with the supply chains that, that are extracting this lithium out at very fast rates and shipping it around the world. So those were like my first impressions. It is beautiful. It is stunning. It is unlike anywhere I've ever been. It's absolutely enormous. The salt flat is two thirds the size of the small state that I live in in the United States, Rhode Island. And so it's hard to even grasp in a human scale way. And, but leaving the salt flat, going out to its perimeter, that's where the human communities begin. And not unsurprisingly and relatedly to that, that's also where the underground freshwater aquifers that can support human life and other types of animal and natural life also begin. So the border of the salt flat is not just a border between where humans settle and where they don't or probably couldn't very easily, but it's also a kind of Porous. And I underscore that porous border between the saline underground brine that the lithium is, lithium ions are kind of suspended in or dissolved in, and then the freshwater sources that porously interact with that and support human and natural life above the surface. So these 18 indigenous communities, we won't get into all of them in depth right now, but maybe just I'll say a few words about them. They've been, of course, living in this area for millennia and have highly developed, for example, irrigation and agricultural practices that are, you know, confront the fact that this is, as I said, a very dry environment. Of course, that the salt flat is the sort of driest part. If you. Then when you go out of the salt flat, there can be a bit more humidity. If you change your elevation, there can be a bit more humidity. But whatever, you know, however you cut it, they are living in a highly dry environment. And they are. Many people are in part dependent for their livelihood or for their own subsistence on agriculture. And so you can witness visiting villages like Tokonau, which is the one that I recount in the book. You can see the complicated, you know, sort of irrigation systems that are based on ancestral knowledge of canals and locks. And, you know, they had to shut down the irrigation system while I was there at some point because there was a random flood. And you can imagine that floods don't interact very well with desert soil and it creates a lot of runoff. And so they had to kind of like lock the system so that it wouldn't flood the farms. And it's. I mean, the amount of human ingenuity such that in this really dry environment, I visited farms that were growing quince and maize and all sorts of like Mediterranean and other South American vegetables and fruits and herbs and all sorts of things. And to see then what is at stake for these communities as they may subsist, as I said, partly or wholly in some cases on their agriculture. In other cases, of course, members of the household may work for a mining company, copper or lithium. They may also work for the kind of massassizing tourism industry in this area. This is one of the most visited places in Chile because it's so stunningly beautiful. And so there's a mix of livelihoods and ways that, you know, what we can just simply call low income working class communities are making ends meet. But some of those, the agriculture and the tourism, let alone the like deep beliefs and cosmovisions about the importance of these mountains, about the importance of the salt plots, about the importance of the animals that live there have created a real conflict that has worked out in different ways at different moments of recent history between the indigenous communities, the organization that represents them and organizes them writ large, between also environmental groups that they're in alliance with, and also other indigenous groups that live around other salt flats. There's like 90 salt flats in Chile, right? And so not, not all of them are these specific communities. And so there are also alliances between communities in some cases to kind of fend off similar, similar threats. And so, you know, what I just described has a lot of unique elements, but if we want to be kind of, quote, social scientists, we can also distill, I think, quite a number of factors that tend to lead to conflict over mining in general, but maybe also take on a different set of stakes and a different set of normative dilemmas when we think about how this mining is linked to the energy transition, which is itself a necessary endeavor.
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And moving in that direction, actually, you mentioned already, you alluded to the fact that in the process of researching and writing this, what started as a focus on the actual zones of extraction shifted over time to a look at the way in which lithium became the sort of critical mineral necessary and vital to the energy transition. And you write that this came about actually through a serendipitous trip to the headquarters of the European Union, which gave you the first inkling, as you write, of the world historic dimensions, of battles over strategic minerals of the 21st century green economy. And it was on this trip that you came to appreciate, seemingly, that a frontier's political importance or the policy decision to designate its natural resources as critical or strategic is not a given. But it is wholly contingent on the shifting calculi of state officials and the evolving needs of global production. In other words, it was during this trip to Brussels that you encountered the world of geoeconomics, which you describe as the fusion of national security and economic policy, which has become a hallmark of our era. So can you elaborate what was so significant and revealing about this trip. And what did it show you about the flows of money, goods, people and knowledge that link these peripheral zones like the Atacama Salt Flats, to the centers of economic and political decision making in financial districts and capital cities like Brussels?
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To start answering that question, I'd like to unpack a little bit this concept of an extractive frontier. Kind of help listeners understand why, despite relating to kind of natural endowments in the earth that humans can't shape, we can't decide where the copper is. They actually are subject to a whole host of human decisions that can shift over time where extraction takes place and can also make salient certain extractive sectors at certain moments for higher levels of national security interest or investor interest. Right. Often actually in ways that are linked to one another. So I'm going to start with what extractive frontiers are, and then I'll come back to what I learned on that trip to Brussels in December of 2019. So we've already talked about extractive frontiers having one of these two elements. One is that they are places that political and economic elites see as sacrificeable. Meaning they are places where the harms of extraction, the social dislocation and actual political conflict those harms can cause are worth it in the pursuit of some energy or mineral resource that is considered essential. Which tells us about the second facet, that they are considered strategic. And that is a duality that in and of itself contains a slight contradiction. Like this place is, is not important. We can just dispose of the people there. Who cares what happens? It's out of view, it's far away, it's on the borderlands or hinterlands of our country, whatever country you're in. But also this is a place that commands very high levels of state interest at certain moments, extremely high levels of investor and corporate interest, and gets linked quite directly to the operations of global kind of extractive capitalism. Right. And so grappling with those two things at once, I think helps us understand that it's not always the case that policymakers prioritize resources being out of sight, which again emphasizes their kind of sacrificeable element. And you might want that to be as far away from population centers or centers of political power, like let's pretend this dirty stuff isn't happening. But because they're strategic and because geostrategic thinking evolves over time and is conjunctural, and at certain moments the foreign policy experts want to do one thing, at another moment they want to do another thing. And also, even at a more complex level, on the longue dure kind of timescale, the relationship between capitalism and warfare, or capitalism and statecraft, or capitalism and geopolitics, to use a more normative term, like shifts over time, even who is in the driver's seat, no pun intended, with electric vehicles. But anyway, who's in the driver's seat of that relationship changes over time. And there are huge historiographical debates, you know, in the age of oil or the age of empire, to actually understand, was it the oil companies pushing the states, Was it the state? You know, and, you know, very smart people can disagree about this, but the whole point is that there, it's not a given where extractive frontiers are, except that the resource provides, like a preliminary cut, but there's lithium in lots of places. So that really doesn't narrow things down very much. And so what I witnessed on that trip to Brussels, which I was not going on for my research, but I decided to kind of noodle around while I was there and talk to whoever would talk to me in the EU commission, what I discovered was that we were at an inflection point that as someone that studies resources, I was not even yet myself aware of, but I became aware of, you know, in doing the little preliminary research for the trip, and then much more starkly aware when I got there and talked to people on the EU commission, which is that, you know, a resource that for a while had not been considered super important. And yes, we need it for our electric devices and the batteries in our laptops. And okay, maybe these EVs are going to take off at some point, but it's cool to have it in South America far away. Also, we're in 2019. We still maybe kind of believe in free trade and global markets. I mean, that was in the process of chaining, changing. Of course, Trump had already won, and there had been far right victories in, in the UK and EU that had put kind of more mainstream policymakers on alert that there was a backlash of free trade. But. But there hadn't been the full paradigm shift yet. Right, because we were before the pandemic, before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, before policy elites in the, in the west had even fully assimilated what was happening in China and the degree to which it posed a threat to their understanding of what their primacy rested on, which was, you know, technological power being at the technological frontiers, to talk about a different use of the word frontier. You know, China for a while had been laying the groundwork to fully surpass these global north countries. But they were like belatedly becoming aware of it. But this was still early days of that in 2019. Right. But there was enough of each of those things happening. You know, popular backlash to free trade, awareness of Chinese primacy in key areas of the sort of 21st century global economy, also for some of the more thoughtful policymakers, and awareness that climate change itself poses risks to the security of supply chains and security, I don't mean that in national security, but just their functioning. Right. If you have extreme weather events which are increasingly happening, that might pose problems to these really sprawled logistical kind of empire of global capitalism. Right. So there are a number of reasons that policymakers were starting to think we should regionalize supply chains, we should onshore more processes. You know, what was, you know, all that Hubbub in the 90s of offshoring and outsourcing and this is how we were going to develop low income countries by bringing western capitalism to them and kind of offshoring the low wage stuff and the call centers and the, you know, certain assembly versions of manufacturing. Right. And so suddenly, but not, but, but still at an early stage in 2019, like, this seemed foolhardy, it seemed maybe wrong to like continue to rely on, quote, unquote, open markets, which are of course, things we can deconstruct. I mean, free trade itself is, is, is not a very useful term. There's nothing very free about free trade except for certain forms of capital mobility. But regardless, like, you know, the eu, like a real holdout on the neoliberalism stuff in many ways. And a real, like, you know, the top policymakers in the EU are real acolytes of these ideas that we have to have like, you know, free trade rules and that everyone has to, we're already starting to like, say, maybe the 21st century is going to require a different model of economy and trade and investment. Right. And so you know what I learned, you know, I've said most of it, so I can sort of probably close this out here. But what I learned in talking to policymakers in Brussels is that the issues of, you know, geoeconomics, which is this fusion of national security and economic policy and an idea that's already contained in the definition of critical minerals, for whatever it's worth, you know, they were already aware and starting to advocate in elite spaces that, you know, maybe we should bring supply chains home or we should bring some of them home, or we should bring the ones home that seem really relevant to like having high level geopolitical status in the moment that, that we're living in. And you know, I'm sure that maybe, or maybe I shouldn't be so sure, but one would presume that some part of their brain was like, this could be conflictual, like maybe communities in northern Portugal are not gonna like mining any more than communities in the Atacama Desert do. But that's, you know, we can sacrifice them. They're not super important. What's more important is the strategic element of these front resource frontiers. And so we are willing to internalize into Europe the socio environmental costs of extraction because the payoff in geoeconomics is so high. And that really surprised me as someone that previously had only worked on Latin America and had a really, perhaps almost like, I don't want to say simplistic because it's not wrong, but a pretty static, maybe is a better word understanding of a kind of neo colonial world system in which resources for the most part, with a few exceptions of, let's say, fossil fuels in the US for the most part, raw materials go south to north. And I had never really imagined or contemplated a situation in which policymakers in the wealthiest countries on earth would want to open huge mines and all of the negatives that can come with that in order to secure their position in these supply chains. But I was wrong. Or history evolved in ways that, you know, none of us would have predicted, perhaps. And it turns out that not only are global north policymakers open to this, but they think it's extremely important to have critical minerals, whether for the energy transition, but also increasingly semiconductors, you know, supercomputing, artificial intelligence, as well as military hardware. So energy, military and AI are like the three kind of drivers. At first it was just energy transition, but we can see how these things glom on, take on a life of their own to the point where now we can almost forget that there was like a climate justification for all of this. And instead now it's like, oh, we need this for the most advanced military tech or the most advanced AI. But whatever the justification, a lot of the kind of political economy and these big shifts that have taken place remain not only the same, but I would say that they are accelerating.
- [35:28]
C
And on that last point that you make about the climate justification, because I think you're right that oftentimes in all of this that actually can get strangely lost. I mean, you describe very well the way in which green capitalism is a sort of paradigm, this effort to meet net zero emissions targets. It's forcing these bureaucrats that you encounter in Brussels to sort of ask the fundamental question what is the role of the state in a capitalist economy? And to address this, you give us a sort of narration of the range of industrial policies that the Chinese government began implementing as early as the 1980s to rapidly expand its share of global battery manufacturing capacity, which has transformed China into the world's leading importer, refiner and consumer of lithium. And then the frenzied response that that is eliciting within both the United States and Europe that all of a sudden they're forced to play catch up. So in that sense, it's, I think, clear what's driving this renewed interest in industrial policy in both the EU and the US but an open question seems to be, can the prevailing emphasis on supply chain resilience or security, whatever terminology is used, be reconciled with the broader imperative of combating climate change?
- [36:49]
B
Hmm. It's a fascinating question that to some degree also takes us outside of the book, just because to fully address that question, I think we need to get a feel for some of, for the kind of full range of political debates on this question. And I won't really give the full range, but just to situate us a little bit, and maybe a place to begin is a few years ago when we in the US were living under the Biden government and the Biden government was advancing its, its green industrial policy, which I recount quite, quite a bit in one of the chapters of the book, which took on this whole idea that I first encountered in Europe, but was kind of starting to also simultaneously happen in the US where we need to onshore these supply chains. The way that China, in this Western perception, what China has done is somehow managed to, quote, dominate from end to end, from mining to manufacturing to the final consumer markets. And so we need to onshore the whole supply chain. And so this resulted in a number of pieces of legislation. Executive orders, you know, new forms of public financing, new tariffs as well, protectionism, the whole gamut of, of industrial policy. Well, I shouldn't say the whole gamut. Let me, let me backtrack there. Like a lot of industrial policy tools, not the whole gamut, because not some of the industrial policy tools that states with a more disciplinary approach to capital are more willing to use, states such as China, but also historically some developmental estates in the global south, right? And so, so, but a pretty wide range of tools was, is. Was starting to be deployed nonetheless. So as I mentioned, tariffs, subsidies, loans, even grants and prizes, public R and D support, a huge range of stuff. And so in that moment I was pretty immersed in, in the, in the Debate among climate people, among political economists around, wow, like suddenly the US is really going like whole hog on green industrial policy. This is great. We're finally figuring out the way to get climate policy off the ground in the US which is to connect it to national security interests, but also because I don't want to be too unfair, to also connect it to green jobs and the resurgence of manufacturing and much more marginally connected to policies that might help consumers actually participate in this economy, like rebates and things that address some of the affordability questions. Right? And so there was almost like a whole political theory around how this all was going to align and we were going to kick off this amazing, you know, century of green growth in the US and some of the climate activists understood that there was a potential catch, maybe even trap of two, closely linking climate and like geostrategy or geopolitics, right? With the knowledge that the more powerful actor in that coalition, if we, you know, term it loosely, is what we call the blob, right? Like it's the security state. And like their imperatives, their interests in maintaining US military hegemony and kind of security hegemony, those are always going to be more powerful actors than the climate wonks or the energy analysts or the people that are thinking through how to engineer the energy transition. But precisely for that reason, it's like let's, let's hitch our, you know, let's hitch our wagon to these more powerful actors that surely understand that the only way to quote, beat China, like seemingly like thoroughly impossible thing at this point, but we can put that aside, the only way to beat China is to, is to create, you know, some durable political block that, that includes different interests, but that align for their different reasons and for self interested regions, right? So there's actually quite a bit of theorizing of why, despite perhaps it feeling like a kind of little bit of a deal with the devil, despite the fact that we know that addressing climate change involves global cooperation and there are a lot of risks to climate action posed by escalating geopolitical tensions. Even if those that escalation is partly like who can go green the fastest, even if it's a race to green, there's like a surplus there, there's like a surplus of imperial energy and of militarism and of buildup and of tension that may not redound to the benefit of a climate safe world. Okay, but this is the only way forward in the U.S. right? And I had my concerns at the time, which I said then, which are the same as you know, not to say I told you so, but like some of my concerns have actually, you know, were validated in ways that are much worse than I even imagined. Because not only are we in a world that is more fraught with geopolitical tension than before, but actually the kind of political theory of change that doing that, doing climate policy, or better put green industrial policy in this way, was going to provide for durable political coalition with positive policy feedback loops such that Biden would get reelected. Okay, it's not Biden, it's Harris. Harris would get elected and we would keep actually like the Democratic Party itself would somehow revive itself around this new realignment where maybe even some Republican governors that benefited from a lot of this stuff because a lot of the investments went to so called red states for reasons that we could get into. Like, maybe we're even going to like peel off some Republican. I mean it got fantastical. And what happened instead is that the Republicans created a culture war out of the energy transition and geopolitics got worse. And the, you know, the, the US economy, even with the important injection of industrial policy and public financing, is not set up to really handle this type of transition without actually more state involvement than moderate Democrats were willing to countenance. And now we're in a much worse scenario. In the US Though it's very important to note to not get too US centric that in the rest of the world on at least the kind of renewables deployment and lithium battery and industrial policy that supports all of it fronts, things are moving ahead. What's fascinating is actually how the US is kind of decoupling from a global trend. But we can talk about that more later. But you know, maybe that, that, that did take us out of the book. But I really just wanted to spell out like what was the argument for this kind of geoeconomic turn and what were some of the concerns that I think were visible at the outset that unfortunately have become quite real in the intervening years.
- [43:10]
C
Yeah, and thank you so much for breaking that all down. I'm sure listeners will appreciate it as well. Returning, returning to Chile and moving away from the U.S. you, you alluded to this already, that the really unique and fascinating politics of extraction in Chile. And I want to really dive into that because you speak to it really, really well throughout the book. You explain first how Chile's contemporary lithium sector is, which is dominated by two foreign companies, Albermalle and sqm is a legacy of Cold War politics and Pinochet's dictatorship. And this historical context then shapes your analysis of the current President Gabriel Borch's efforts not only to nationalize the lithium industry, but also to position Chile as a high tech green superpower. And while you acknowledge the emancipatory, at least, goals behind the current government's nationalization agenda, you also warned that, by quote, by more fully incorporating resource extraction into the workings of the state, resource nationalization can impede rather than facilitate the transition to a less extractive economy. And you go on to explain that there are few places on earth, really, where activists and policymakers have grappled with the multifaceted harms of extraction, as did Chile in the early years of this decade. And that was exemplified in many ways most clearly in the efforts to rewrite the Chilean constitution in the aftermath of the social uprisings of 2019. So, first, there's a lot to unpack here, so I'll ask several questions. Could you walk us through the key events that led to the election of the constituent assembly in 2021? What made the composition of that body so significant? And then how did the activists and, and, and politicians within it attempt to reconcile the often competing goals of economic development and ecological sustainability while centering resource sovereignty and democratic participation? And then finally, what are the lessons that we can take from the eventual rejection of the proposed constitution?
- [45:22]
B
Yeah, I felt very lucky to be able to witness some of these quite historic, really transformative, even if ultimately provisionally defeated in some cases, processes that unfolded in Chile. My before the Constituent assembly, just to situate us back in kind of historical time in Chile, I had my prior visit, like my second fieldwork visit, just to put it that a little more simply, was in the summer of 2019, and that I said we already started earlier that year. So I'd gone back and forth a few times to spend several months in Chile that year. And so I was there in the summer of 2019, spring and summer, and you know, it, it I could already see that Chilean society was like quite tense. It felt like a powder keg situation. I attended and felt privileged to even be there. The march on International Women's Day on March 8th in Chile. And it was for my own life. And I've been to some huge demos against the Iraq War, Palestine solidarity, demos, all sorts of things. This was by far the largest and most militant demo I'd ever been to. And to compare it to like the quote, unquote, Women's March, you know, the day before Trump was inaugurated. I mean, just like just totally different situation. And it wasn't just that the Feminists were so radical and that they were calling out not only patriarchy, but capitalism, making connections to ecology and a whole kind of broad swath of issues. It was also just. You could just tell that this protest meant a lot, or this day meant a lot to people, because society was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the entrenched inequality, the political corruption, the legacy of the dictatorship, which was not a legacy under states. It just the degree to which a neoliberal, brutal, violent dictatorship had, like, reshaped not only Chilean economy, but like Chilean subjectivity, you know, and. And was considered by, you know, famous neoliberals to be like one of the most important laboratories of neoliberalism for that reason. Right. And so, you know, all of that was unfolding and then under a quite right wing government of Pinera. And so that was my last experience in Chile before what happened a few months later, which was an enormous social uprising in October of that year. And so when the uprising, the estellido in Spanish happened, I was inspired. I was happy to see people take that level of political agency and risk and collective action. But I was not surprised because I had seen how unhappy lots of ordinary Chileans were and how also remobilized the left and grassroots forces were becoming. And so that 2019 uprising, which not only shook Chile, but really shook the world. And we were all watching on social media and seeing what was unfolding, and it was just. It looked like a civil war at certain moments, and elites definitely felt like it was a civil war. And I went back to Chile a couple of years later. In the intervening years, I did field work in Nevada and Portugal and Brussels. Right. The other places that come up in the book. I returned to Chile on the other side of that process, which is always quite interesting when you see the kind of beginnings of something. You go away and you kind of come back and you see what happens. And the kind of the physical changes that the protests had wrought, like, I mean, buildings that had never quite been rebuilt or graffiti or, you know, they were all still there. It was like the protests had just happened yesterday. And the degree to which elites remained kind of shook by what happened was like, still palpable. But in those intervening years, a lot more had happened. And it switched from being like, whatever we might think of protests, they're episodic. There's an element of spontaneity, no matter how planned they might be, had entered the halls of power and entered into like, the long march through the institutions, right? And so out of that major uprising came, you know, an Electorate. An electorate, excuse me, that was ready to elect Chile's first left wing president since Allende. Properly left wing. I mean, Bachelet, you know, she's a complicated figure, but more of a center left figure. And so Gabriel Borich comes out of the student movement, which itself is part of the longer history of repertoires of resistance that led to that 2019 protest. So he was an activist. He's younger than me. Like, you know, he's young, like, he, he's a millennial president. And he speaks forcefully to issues of social justice, of inequality, of ecology, of indigenous rights. And so he's elected. But also another key victory of the protest was what emerged as their top demand was rewrite the constitution. Because I said, it's not just the imprint of the dictatorship of Pinochet. Augusto Pinochet's brutal dictatorship is not just a memory, not just a story people were told. It continued to shape Chilean political economy, subjectivity, ideology, the party system, all of it. And a lot of that shaping happened through, you know, to use the title of someone else's book, like the Code of Capital, like the actual, like, legal infrastructure that supports capital accumulation. And that is in the writing of the Chilean Constitution. The Chilean Constitution is written as an exemplary neoliberal constitution that has forms of protection for private property and also just forms of property and commodification and privatization that are very rare to encounter in, like, a constitution would normally be done by ordinary law. Right. So it designates entire arenas of the economy as basically purely private and, and not really arenas where public regulation, decision making, public investment, or anything like democracy can happen. And so Chile has, like, the most commodified water system on earth. Right. I mean, just to go down the list, and many of these are quite relevant to mining, whether to mining itself and mining property and mining, you know, extractive accumulation, or to the supports for mining and energy, water, land use. All of those types of things are all thoroughly shaped by the Pinochet constitution, which remained unchanged, you know, basically unchanged throughout the years of democratization. And so protesters said, we need a new government and we need a new constitution. And they got one of those things and they almost got the other. But, you know, politics is unpredictable. And Chile is just as kind of embedded in the partisan polarizations and volatilities that are familiar to politics everywhere in the world. And so a lot of victories that seem initially successful can be overturned by those swings of partisan politics, but also, of course, by the machinations of all manner of elites, including, in Chile's case, media Elites became quite relevant. So I'll come back to that when I say why the constitution was rejected. And you know, I said part of it, but I'll say a little bit more at the end, but we get what the causes were. Similarly, and this won't be surprising now that you, the listeners, know what they just learned. The actual delegates on the Constitution really were representative of this broad swath of mobilized citizens and social movements and community organizing. And you had like a quite left wing constituent assembly, doesn't mean there were no centrists or conservatives in it, but the left really dominated. Not only did the left dominate though, the kind of, in some ways like non institutional left dominated, because again, you can imagine this is a moment of questioning everything about the political system. A lot of political parties lost their legitimacy in this whole moment. But also the way the vote was set up, you could elect people that weren't a member of like a traditional political party, right? And so you had all these people that were move in activists, sometimes people that were basically like cultural entertainers, like crazy motley crew, like really interesting people that made their way on into that assembly. But one of the interesting kind of blocks that emerged, like voting blocks and legislative, like deliberative blocks that emerge, was this group that called itself the Eco Constrientes or like the Eco constituents. And they were eco in the way that we get what that means, green, ecological, environmental. They were delegates to the assembly that strongly identified environmental protection as well as often some manner of indigenous rights and or kind of community participation in these processes as their top goal for how to rewrite the constitution. And issues like the degree of water, land and resource privatization in Chile were like really what they wanted to do, to go after, to undo, to dismantle and to propose a totally different way to socially, ecologically, economically and democratically govern land use and natural resources and like the human nature, metabolism itself. Right. And so they had a quite visionary proposal which I just again, there's a lot of luck in serendipity and research. I happened to be there on the day this proposal was being debated and I just, I felt like, you know, there are just certain moments when we just feel like we're in the thick of history. And that felt like one of them. And I saw the presenter, the kind of chair of the committee that had written it, spell out how resources were going to be under fully public control, how there was going to be firm ecological limits. I mean, some of the most radical things that were in that first proposal, some of these got taken out for the final version of the draft constitution, but were even proposed ideas that we would not mine lithium in wetlands. And since actually salt flats, despite them being in dry environments, are technically wetlands, because I said there's brine underneath, there's water all around them, they're imbricated in the water system and they serve a very important role in terms of hydrological circulation. So precisely for that reason, if you say you can't mine lithium in wetlands, you like can't mine lithium in Chile. Like it would make. And they kind of knew that, but also like didn't want to put that full card on the table, so they just left it in that vaguer sense. But that would have been its implication. And so I was like, this is fascinating, but you know, ultimately, well, that provision was taken out, but still a quite radical version of resource governance. That part of the reasons I found it so vanguard as someone again that like, with my perspective, like I'm coming from a place where I've worked a lot on these issues, I've seen a lot of interesting radical proposals, heterodox economists, you know, environmental economists, left wing movements, all sorts of labor unions, all sorts of people in Latin America and in the world that have weighed in on a more just governance of resource extraction. So it's not like the individual ideas were not wholly new to me. What was new is that in this proposal that ended up in the constitution that Chileans ultimately voted down, but in the final version of the text, Chilean activists, in the Chilean delegates, I should say, some of whom are activists, and in their collaboration with outside activists, this to get ideas, had ended up creating a version of radical resource governance or left wing resource governance that kind of managed to square the circle of some of the impossible divides, even on the left on this topic. And those I recount fully in resource radicals what those divides are, and you narrate a little bit at the top, but the main divide is like environmental protection, anti extractivism, we shouldn't mind at all versus we should mine. But it should be publicly owned or worker owned or community owned. And those can clash a lot in Latin America, even if like sometimes it's comrades who are otherwise in the same political party, like they can really disagree on that matter. And this did both. They said we're going to do public ownership, we're going to do democratic ecological planning with ecological limits. So it's going to be publicly owned, yes to like resource nationalists, but it's going to have limits like yes to anti extractivists. And that I found to be for me, almost on a personal level, because its debates had been deeply embedded in like, they managed to just find the breakthrough of how to combine the best of these different visions. And then the whole constitution was rejected. And so, you know, I think that there's a couple of things to take away without repeating what I said earlier about the, you know, elite structure of Chilean society and elites going all out to defeat this and the, you know, really quite oligarchic media in Chile playing a big role in fake information and in catastrophizing about different aspects of the Constitution, saying stuff that wasn't even true about it. Right. So, you know, you have a situation in Chile that's not auspicious for the dissemination of information to like a democratically mobilized citizenry. Right. Like, that's just. And we might say that anywhere in the world, but like, we have centrist and center left newspapers and magazines in the United States. In Chile, the media is like really quite, it's like if it was all Fox News, like, it's really quite right wing. And so you can see how this, how debates are distorted for that reason. And so, you know, but I think kind of at the, at the end of the day, the issue wasn't just the media or just this or that elite counterreaction. It was also the fact that there was not what I would call left wing hegemony. You had a left wing president, they had a minority of seats in Congress, they had people in the constituent assembly, but in other arenas of government, they were divided government. Right. And so, you know, they didn't have the level of political power that Ebo Morales or Hugo Chavez or Rafael Correa had in the high tide of the pink tide. And so they were. It was already a very difficult situation. And, you know, now we're years after the uprising, people are demobilized, they're back to work, they're back to being worried about childcare, they're not necessarily super engaged in politics. So a lot of things worked against them that I think can mainly be explained by the basics of partisan politics and elite power in Chile. The very last thing I'll say on this though is that I think when we look at the rollercoaster of transformative politics and political struggle and attempts to kind of win victories for, you know, for the working class or for indigenous movements or for environmental preservation, like these are not linear processes ever. And it should really not be discounted the fact that what ended up in the draft constitution was itself a historical advance, perhaps somewhat on the intellectual or symbolic Plane, but also on the plane of like real groups had to meet in real time to put out a vision that was as holistic as it was. And those ideas don't just disappear, those demands don't just disappear. People's expectations do not revert to the status quo ante. That is not how politics work. And like the next round of struggle, whether at the local community level, whether at the national level, whether in some other formation is going to bring to bear these ideas and these new demands and the. And so I think it's a mistake to just see anything in politics as like a closed chapter. It's more like how does this create a new discursive resource for future contestation around this topic, including elsewhere in the world where people may be inspired by what Chilean's achieved.
- [60:14]
C
Well, and staying with Chile in some of these sort of contestations, but also binds that the national government is continuing to try to navigate. You explain that Chile's progressive government is. It finds itself caught in a. In a trap familiar to countries of the global South. Take too hard of a line with multinational companies, whether through regulatory interventions or nationalization, threats to the sanctity of private property and risk capital flight and disinvestment. Take too diplomatic of an approach though, and watch the country's resources, both natural and monetary, drain out to the benefit of companies and consumers everywhere. And yet still you argue that the existence of this dilemma and this bind, it cannot serve as a justification for this progressive government to just maintain the status quo of public private partnerships that fundamentally leave multinational lithium firms in full control over the governance of extractive frontiers and mineral supply chains. And you really go on to detail. I mean, some of it was shocking really, that essentially, I mean, it's a, it's a data problem, it's a regulatory issue, because the data doesn't exist and it's all in the hands of the corporations themselves. Right. So they're expected at certain times to be almost self regulating. And I think that begs some questions, not all of which can be answerable, maybe. And, and some might only be, you know, we can speculate on. But what does the Chilean experience reveal perhaps about, you know, the limitations of building ecosocialism in a single country? What's at stake in the financial sector's push to turn lithium into a tradable, homogenized and standardized commodity? And then for organizers, how might ecosocialists need to rethink both global energy supply chains and the very concept of sustainable mining? And what strategies might they be able to implement, employ to Restructure these supply chains in ways that minimize extraction and maximize public benefit.
- [62:18]
B
The Chilean experience with lithium, one thing that it reveals is that the dilemmas and challenges, and in some cases almost near impossibilities or near constraints that govern the position and the kind of potentialities of resource extraction in the Global south hold across resource sectors, meaning like lithium for being green, for being part of the sustainable economy, for, you know, being part of the fight against the climate crisis. If, you know, mining as mining companies will frame their, their, their operations as, you know, that we're the climate saviors, like, for all of that, the same really classic dilemmas in here, in the position that Global south states find themselves. But added on to those classic dilemmas, some of which you listed out, that if they push too hard, they might risk capital flight. Or how are they going to really properly govern an industry that is so essential to their own fiscal base? Maybe they don't want to even push too hard in terms of governance because, because they're more interested in the operations continuing so that they can skim off the top with royalties and taxation. And like, not to belittle any of this, right, in many countries where resource extraction takes place, like, you have populations that are not fed enough, you have people that don't have electricity access, you don't have the basics perhaps of proper housing and sanitation. I mean, so like the social demands on these governments and the pressures of redistribution, the pressures of ensuring some public revenue to pay for essentials are very real, right? And so it's not just like, it's not just the fact that there's regulatory capture or that companies are really good at lobbying states, or that elites in any number of Global south societies are corrupt, those can all be the case. But even if those weren't the case, even with like, good faith actors who have commitments to progressive politics and do desire some modicum of regulatory control over a quite harmful industry, there is a real inertial tendency to want to continue and even expand extractive sectors precisely because they offer near term, in some cases quite immediate revenue possibilities for states that are fiscally constrained by design, meaning not by their own design, but by the designs of history, the designs of global trade and finance that really limit how much Global south countries can borrow and at what terribly high rates they are charged for that borrowing. And just even the fiscal space accorded and the political space accorded to Global south governments by international IFIs and by, excuse me, international financial institutions and by creditors and by their trade partners in the Global North, I Mean they are under so many constraints, it's a wonder that certain Global south governments are, are able to actually implement transformative or at least progressive policies. Right. And so I want to be super real about why extractive sectors can be appealing, let alone the fact that in this case, as I already mentioned, there was a lot of other pressure around this particular sector. It's going to help us green the economy. It's going to put Chile in this really important position in global supply chains. Right? But at the same time, Global south countries or host countries to these mining operations don't just face those like classic dilemmas that we could be in the mid 19th century and some of those would be the same. Right. They also face populations that are extremely, much more knowledgeable about the environmental impacts of mining, are much less tolerant about the maneuvering and oftentimes nefarious tactics used by mining companies to insinuate themselves and actually penetrate territory and habitats and sacred cultural spaces. They are much more aware of their own rights and they have many more rights because of prior waves. That's why I said we should always think, you know, over the complexity of historical time, as to what kind of sets up a particular conjuncture. There have been prior waves in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America that have basically expanded the types of rights that Latin Americans expect to have and expect to be in enforced. Whether it's prior consultation, in some cases not in Chile because the constitution wasn't ratified, but in neighboring countries, like rights of nature, the idea that nature is a juridical subject whose rights can be protected. Entire mining projects have been shut down by the courts in Ecuador because they violated the rights of nature. Right. And so like you're in a situation in which communities have higher expectations, more knowledge, more rights. And it's also much easier because of the Internet to learn like, like, oh shit, like our, our neighbors in another community, maybe people in our same kinship network that live on another, the other side of the border. But it's the same indigenous community. Like whatever it is, people learn about bad experiences with mining companies and so they have a lot more concrete knowledge. And so this has meant that like a progressive government is. And I don't want to excuse what I do think are some, I personally think from my own political perspective, I mean, who cares? I'm not a Chilean, like you know, who cares what I think perhaps. But you know, I could point out places where I don't think the government was strategic, or I don't think the government lived up to its promises, but I think for a Global north audience, not that I want to overly presume who's listening to this. It's important to just understand the bind that governments are in and the bind that communities are in. Right. Because a lot of these same dilemmas kind of pertain in a slightly different way at the community level. Like you're a community that has very little in the way of public infrastructure or economic opportunities. Yes, you're aware that mining will cause harm, but maybe that trade off is worth it to bring investments or jobs or the company is promising to build an electricity grid that the government never did. Right. And so these dilemmas are felt even at the household level and whether or not people are aware of the sort of macro economy governing all of this. But you know what, what that's meant is that Borich in some ways has stayed, who's the current president of Chile, not for much longer, but most likely it'll be a right wing president next. So we can think about the implications of that. But Borich has in a way stayed true to the demands and desires and preferences of his broad political coalition. But those preferences are misaligned with one another. Right. And so in a way, some of what he's doing is just right, reflecting different elements of his base and maybe also different whispers in his ear at the more elite level. Right. But the idea is we have to maintain Chile as being a top producer of lithium because that's key to Chile's like, place in the global economy as well as its copper, you know, its role in, in copper. We also want to like not just have these same two companies, SQM and Alvar Maro being the only people and having a kind of duopoly. We want other companies to move in, but we also want the state to be involved. So we're going to have the state owned copper company in the meantime, because we don't have a state owned lithium company yet, do joint ventures with both the existing companies and hopefully some new companies. We're going to move into different salt flats, but not all of them because we're going to put a third aside for ecological. So and we're going to talk to the indigenous communities, but sometimes we're going to forget to and then we're going to go back to the table after they protest us and shut down lithium mining for six days. Right. And so this is the kind of situation, and I think, think in just a way you might be hard pressed to find a different, a kind of better illustration of how on their own imperatives, many, maybe not all of which, but several of which I support, like more dialogue with indigenous communities, preserving some of the salt flats so that they never are exploited. Like more national and state and public sector presence. I support all of those. I mean, I won't comment on whether I support more lithium extraction and new companies moving, you know, that's whatever, that's not my place to, to say. But I think, you know, there's some clear ways that I align with some of the goals here. But they're intention with one another. And that means when goals are intention, like you know, or when the law itself is not dispositive, like just to riff on Marx, like, you know, like we know that like force will decide that question. And so in some moments the force is very much the elite forces or the companies that have the ear of the government. In other cases, indigenous communities as I just referenced, have used their physical location at a choke point of extractive capital to shut down operations and bring the company and government back to the table. Right. So it's not that it's just a totally top down power balance. There's leverage on both sides, but it's asymmetric. And I think understanding how power laden extractive politics are, but also how by virtue of their natural setting and their proximity to marginalized, but also in geographically empowered communities can also provide openings for really quite radical demands and also can force really powerful companies back to the table and force negotiations. The only way that happens is through community organizing now. Okay, so you've asked me two other questions. I'm going to wrap them up a little bit. I'll be briefer on the second one, but it's quite interesting. But it's also gets a little technical about what it means to commodify a natural resource. But you know, I think just briefly to say right now Lithium is a globally traded good, but unlike copper or oil, it is not considered by like economic analysts to be a mature commodity. Now what that even means, like you know, for people that read the business press, they may know what I mean, others might not understand that at all, you know, which is quite valid. But what it means to be a mature commodity these days is that you, that you are traded in a commodity trading house, that you have a number of financial architectures kind of built around you, of futures markets, of hedging, of various ways that the price, risk and the volatility of commodities is managed. And so there's a really complex financialization combined with like physical trading that characterizes a mature commodity. And lithium is kind of more Old school. It's still traded in a lot of bilateral agreements like more contract than market or more contract than trading house. But it's in the process of getting some of these kind of features built around it which you know, would only further complicate. Like if my book was written five years from now, I would have had to more frontally address the powers of like financial speculation and commodity trading houses. And whoever writes this book in five years will do so, and I'm thrilled to read it, but it will, it multiplies the number of actors in the room and it multiplies the different pressures that a government is, is, is facing. And at the community level, it unfortunately does, can make things harder to shape because there's this whole abstract set of financial processes that are less immediately kind of immediately vulnerable, but not, not at all. Right. And, and absolutely any commodity that's been traded in these, in these quantity houses and, and with these futures markets still can be prone to the types of disruptive politics that I just mentioned. Right, but, but you get the idea that there's kind of another layer, you know, the last question about sustainability. You know, we can start in some ways how we started. Like, you know, the mining of lithium is not special for being, for having a quote, unquote green end use. Right. It looks just as nasty and toxic and violent and all the things as mining of any other sector does. And I sort of came to the conclusion which took me many years to get here. And really writing the book is what, is what made it clear to me because this is a change of mind on my part. It's not something I understood when I was working on mining in Ecuador, for example, or I didn't understand it as well. There's one set of things that is quite clear and that I think I grasped a long time ago, which is that the local governance matters. Local, I don't mean the little community level of that too, but just local meaning. In the places where extraction takes place, in the countries and provinces and nearby cities, in the places that extraction takes place, takes place in the world, there's a whole set of interesting politics, a lot of which I've already detailed, that can result in better or worse, quote, unquote governance of these sectors. You can have rights or not have rights. Those rights can be enforced or not enforced. You can have a state owned company or only, you know, shareholder owned companies. You can have a contract model with a high level of royalties and those royalties can be invested in public infrastructure or you can basically give the resources away. And get no social benefit out of it. So, so there's a huge amount of variation if we just stay within the jurisdiction of mining. But what this book taught me was that you can't fully stay within the jurisdiction of mining to understand how better governance happens. Or maybe to put it a little bit more bluntly, if we presume that mining is harmful and that even under better regulatory regimes it still creates irreversible landscape change and may have not fully preventable environmental impacts. Like, given that reality, the way that I think about mining in terms of what can make mining better is I kind of use like a harm reduction framework, you know, barring that term from the public health world, which is you're not going to eliminate the harm of mining. Even in like an ecosocialist utopia, if some mining needed to happen, it would have some impacts on some animals or soil or water or people nearby. And you know, so how do we reduce the harm though, is important. So one way to reduce harm is everything I said about local government, you know, government, you know, in this sort of attractive frontier geography itself. But we know that what drives mining in the first place is not decisions of host governments. They're on the other end of a bunch of demand that's coming to them globally. And so if there is some rough correlation between the total scale or volume of mining, its total physical footprint, the total tonnage of mining daily, yearly, whatever, if there's some rough correlation between the volume of mining that happens on the planet and the volume of physical, environmental, social harm that takes place, which I think that there is a rough correlation there, then it stands to reason that it's not enough to just govern existing volumes better. We need to think about how to reduce the volume. And maybe for certain things, we can't reduce them tomorrow because we're at the beginning of building out a renewable energy transition. So maybe even in a much better governance regime, way better forms of production and consumption. Like we don't even have individual electric vehicles. We're all riding electric buses or walking if we can't even. A world like that. We need some lithium tomorrow for the electric buses. But do we need more lithium in 10 years? That's an open question. We can fully recycle batteries, we can get feedstock from existing batteries rather than from felling rainforests or salt flats in the world to get our lithium right. And, and so there's a whole host of questions that emerge once you start looking more critically. And I follow in the footsteps of resource geographers and environmental historians and Kind of commodity chain capital, the capitalism kind of analysts like what drives, quote unquote commodity, commodity markets in the first place is not what happens in the host government. It's really like the demand for it that comes from the end uses, from the battery production for the electric vehicle productions themselves, which are kind of downstream from a broader social infrastructure of oh, what kind of transportation do we prioritize over what right? Or do we build out the recycling right away or do we wait for some future moment when at that point, you know, we're already destroying half the earth with, with these mines. Right? And so there are a number of ways to reduce the volume of total mining that's needed for a zero carbon transportation sector. And I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to collaborate with people that know much more than I do about how to model these things. And using tools of what's called industrial ecology to think through what is the throughput of the material throughput of a renewable energy system. And how can we kind of adjust different levers to reduce how much mineral demand there is and still get to the same endpoint of zero carbon and actually get there faster? In this case, because we're on the slowest path with this one to one car replacement. What would be better is to get some people out of cars that maybe don't even want to be in them in the first place, but they have no other option, at least in the US and so we made this whole report at a think tank that I work with, the Climate and Community Institute and did the first empirical study to actually show that we could transition not, not with zero mining tomorrow, maybe not with the next day, but over time with dramatically less mining than is being forecast by any of the mainstream forecasting agencies. And we're not using like left wing modeling like we use normal modeling, normal data sets. The only thing we change is what can generally result in big differences in modeling of anything, which are what are the assumptions and what are the, the parameters that you're, that you're, you know, what are the on off switches that you're like availing yourself of. And we just added in factors that while they fundamentally shape the transportation landscape and therefore the raw material demand to furnish that landscape, they're basically never included in these models. And so we, we were able to say that, yes, you know, as per the title of the report, that we can have more mobility, more clean mobility, more affordable mobility, more reliable mobility for working class and middle class communities around the U.S. we were modeling U.S. transportation with less mining for the world's extractive frontiers and with absolutely achieving our zero emissions goals.
- [79:47]
C
Well, you perfectly anticipated my final question, and I think this is the there's so many things that I loved about this book, but one of them was your willingness to really stay with the messiness and the difficult sort of at times uncomfortable questions to ask about the energy transition. I mean, you reflect at the end of the book on the fact that each of the locales that you visited during the field work, including Portugal, Nevada, obviously Chile, are that each of them felt like the wrong place for a large scale intrusive mine, which inevitably forced you to grapple with a really difficult question. What would be the right place? Or put differently, if climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means? And you know, the answer to that question brings us to your belief that while supply chains are currently organized for profit, they can nonetheless become arenas for grassroots organizing and perhaps also unexpected alliances, which is the basis for the writing and report that you've done with the climate and Community institute that you've just outlined for us. And there really are, I mean there's so many other topics that we could cover from this book, but unfortunately this podcast won't be able to get to all of them. I do want to just conclude though, on a note for any current listeners who are prospective readers of the book. I know that you make a political point out of writing in a way that is comprehensible and approachable to non expert audiences, which this reader very much appreciated and I really admire as well. And it's something I hope to emulate ideally in my own writing. There's so many quotes from this book that I think I be revisiting, but I want to conclude with just one illustrative example near the book's conclusion, which I think speaks really to how eloquent you are as a writer and how captivating and important this book is, which is on page 178 where you write the energy transition is not a peaceful bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy, but a crucible where past, present and possible futures collide. And I think for anyone who's interested in better understanding that crucible and the source of of futures that we might be able to win from it, there can be really no better place than your truly excellent new book, Extraction and the Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which is out now from W.W. norton. So thank you so much Thea.
- [82:11]
B
Thank you so much, Alec. This was an amazing conversation. I do feel like we probably could keep going because I just, I loved the questions and the care with which you treated the book. And yes, absolutely. Right. That there was a public audience in mind here. And I hope that that comes through to those who read it and feel more comfortable sharing with a friend or a family member than they might, you know, your average academic book. So. But yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was.