Biodiversity and territorial rights of indigenous and other land-dependent peoples. That those two values of rapid, urgent climate action, which I completely subscribe to, and the value of protecting and allowing to flourish non-human life, our ecosystems, our water systems, our soil systems and the peoples who are primarily indigenous, though not exclusively, that steward those non-human relationships and cultivate them and are immersed in them in their own livelihoods and cultural practices. And the idea that these two sets of really important phenomena that have deep significance and are both harmed by extractive capitalism in lots of intense and durable ways, the idea that there would be a fork in the road that either we have to choose climate action or we choose the protection of life.
Speaking Out of Place is produced in collaboration with The Creative Process and is made with support from Stanford University.
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with scholar, journalist, and activist Thea Riofrancos about her new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. She takes us deep into the mining of lithium and the production of lithium batteries, which have been welcomed as a key element in our transition from fossil fuels. Traveling widely through Latin America to see lithium extraction at work, Thea brings us stories of how this industry has disrupted lives, changed local and national economies, and devastated the environment. On the other hand, she gives us an unflinching glimpse into the alternatives. The book wrestles with these and other issues, tracing the contradictions of things like on-shoring back to the 1970s. While not arriving at an unproblematic “solution” to extraction, Thea nonetheless outlines a critical set of best practices and imaginative alternatives to the bleak offerings of capitalism, green or not.
Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, renewable energy, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Her publications have appeared in scholarly journals such as Global Environmental Politics, World Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, as well as in media outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Policy, n+1, Dissent, and more.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
I had Malcolm Harris on the podcast a while back to discuss his latest book, What's Left? And that book and Extraction really resonate in many ways, but the reason I mention Malcolm is not for that plug, but you have a great blurb from Malcolm, and it reads, “An unflinching journey into the gritty details of the burgeoning green economy. Rigorous and fun to read. You'll never look at an electric car in the same way.” And that's no small achievement. That's what we used to call a paradigm shift in a point of view, and it drags so much with it. But in your book, the shift is not at all linear, and there are a lot of back and forths, and I found myself noticing a lot of on the one hand, on the other hand and yet on another hand.
But instead of feeling frustrated, I felt a lot of appreciation because I was grateful for how thoughtful and politically and ethically attuned you were to the things that many of us are concerned about. And I'm just going to read you two quotes as an example. One quote, “Extractive frontiers are not simply given by nature, but made by political decisions, economic investments, unequal power relations and often a large dose of violence and conflict.” End quote. Second quote, “If climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means? The question implied an existential trade-off that left me with no exit.” End quote. So before we get our new understanding of electric vehicles and lithium, maybe we could talk about this complexity. What are the main conundrums between these two polarities, so to speak?
THEA RIOFRANCOS
Yes. There are a number of conundrums, and I'm glad that you appreciated the on the one hand, on the other hand, which can often be a little unsatisfying or there's a kind of false balance or that people are just trying to be nuanced and then nuance themselves out of actually taking a position on something and being an ethical subject. I think that instead, I wanted to embrace a different way of thinking about ethical subjectivity, which is grappling in an authentic way, in a way that felt authentic to my own values, with problems that I view as material and relatively objective, just in the sense that the problems are given to us. They exist in the historical circumstances that we're in, and there are also, given the nature of the book, no pun intended with the word nature, they're also material problems and the problems of non-human nature of our relationship to the earth's resources.
And so I wanted to take seriously the fact that there aren't easy answers, which doesn't mean there aren't any answers, but they're not easy. That easy answers are likely to be incorrect, and that I felt that multiple values were at stake, that there's a clash of my own values and I imagine the values of aligned readers. And I wanted to, again, have fidelity to that conflict, not wish it away or resolve it away, but get as inside the conflict as possible, right? Without it becoming per se psychoanalysis.
But I think there's a way in which we have to route this through our values, what's meaningful to us, how we position ourselves vis-a-vis the conflict, whether politically position ourselves or maybe more to the point of this book, also position ourselves in the world system, in the global economy. What is our class position, our geographic position that inflects how we grasp these issues and how and whether they matter to us? And that is, you picked up on that really well. I think that the first conflict, or I guess the foundational conflict that the book addresses is between climate action and local biodiversity, or I shouldn't say local biodiversity, just biodiversity, which is global and local, depending how you think about it.
Biodiversity and territorial rights of indigenous and other land-dependent peoples. That those two values of rapid, urgent climate action, which I completely subscribe to, and the value of protecting and allowing to flourish non-human life, our ecosystems, our water systems, our soil systems and the peoples who are primarily indigenous, though not exclusively, that steward those non-human relationships and cultivate them and are immersed in them in their own livelihoods and cultural practices. And the idea that these two sets of really important phenomena that have deep significance and are both harmed by extractive capitalism in lots of intense and durable ways, the idea that there would be a fork in the road that either we have to choose climate action or we choose the protection of life.
That almost doesn't make sense as a sentence, right? Because the climate crisis is threatening to biodiversity as it is threatening to indigenous peoples and water systems and all the other stuff that I named. And yet, when we think specifically about the supply chains and kind of material footprint of an energy transition, in all sorts of specific moments, those values come into material conflict with one another, especially under the specific regime of accumulation and attendant form of the political state that we have in most places on Earth. And it's not a natural conflict, whatever that might mean.
It's very politically mediated, but it nonetheless takes material form in specific times and places. So that's the foundational dilemma of the book. But just to add a little bit, as I started exploring the topic and literally doing field work, and so going to different places to do the research and thinking about it more on my own, other conflicts surfaced that some of them are subsidiary of that one. They have their own terms and merits. For example, what does economic development in the Global South mean or look like or should mean or look like today? And how does that relate to these issues of extractive sectors for the energy transitions and these new supply chains and the kind of evolving multipolarity of the world system? Is development even possible anymore?
Some people have declared the death of economic development, whether because they disagree with development as a concept, or they think that under contemporary capitalism that's crisis prone and in secular stagnation, development isn't possible, whether or not we like the concept or not. But there's those types of viewpoints, but then Global South governments and societies around the world, if anything, double down on the idea that they merit economic and political sovereignty and a real voice in the world system, and that they are not satisfied with just being an extractive zone for Global North consumers or corporations.
But there's a lot of dilemmas within that. How do you actually develop today whether we think there are objective constraints under capitalism like I mentioned, or we just think really closely about the ecological impacts of development, the way in which it might run roughshod over indigenous communities or other communities or workers. And so there's a whole host of dilemmas in that topic itself. I'll maybe just name one more to add on and to go to the Global North side of the global equation, which is a dilemma that I never thought I'd actually really confront, but this kind of challenge of what does it mean that Global North governments want more and more of this mining to happen within the Global North?
Is that good because it means that we're internalizing the environmental impacts of our Global North consumption, or is it not good because actually that extraction is going to affect people unequally within the Global North, kind of recapitulating the global relationships of environmental and economic inequality? And so those are three dilemmas. That's not an exhaustive list, but they are three of the ones that consumed my attention the most and where I really felt like I was trying to do justice to different reasonable left and critical positions on those topics.
DAVID PALUMBO-LIU
Yes. And the third one you mentioned was also on my list for the interview. To make everything worse, of course, we don't have a lot of time. It's not as if we could sit back and philosophize or test out this and test out that because each misstep, and as you say, it's almost like a minefield, leads us further down the path to a future that is excruciating to imagine. So let's dive back into the electric car, which now we won't see ever again the same way. Tell us about lithium batteries, because when the electric car came out, we all liked the idea that it was an easy fix. Great, we'll just drive electric cars. We'll electrify everything. We just leave everything in the ground, and you point out, no, we're just going to dig another part of the earth up.
So tell us about lithium batteries and lithium itself, because you do a really deep dive into the materiality of both those things…
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I'll start maybe with an unexpectedly positive statement, which I think it's worth stating out loud: lithium batteries are an amazing technology, and also were the result of something that feels impossible today or a bit lost today, which is transnational scientific collaboration between scientists in different countries collaborating implicitly in a sequence of events in which it was almost like one scientist handed the baton to another scientist. And I don't think that science, which itself is obviously a complex set of relationships and sectors and interactions, is the solution to all our problems in some straightforward sense, but it's involved in the solution to many of our global problems, whether we think about public health or the climate crisis or whatever it is, and it's cool to witness collaboration between scientists. It wasn't always even directly motivated by economic concerns, though there's some of that in there, but there was a real search for how do we store energy? How do we do that in a way that is safe and energy-dense and can power things?
And I say there was some economic motivation because as I talk about in the book, surprisingly, the very beginning of the origin of lithium batteries has to do with the oil companies' own response and hedging of bets during the energy crisis of the 1970s. And there were bets that we might enter a post-oil economy.
One thing that you said that blew my mind, I thought that's where you were going too when you started your statement, was Exxon. Wasn't Exxon the first—
Yes, exactly. That's where I was going. In a long-winded way.
So the whole phrase “Exxon knew” takes on so much more meaning. They didn't just know, but they were developing technologies for a post-oil economy that they thought was much closer to hand than it ended up being.
And of course it ended up not being close to hand by their own actions. So there are layers of ironies and hypocrisies, but there was a moment of real scare around the world about oil prices and oil supplies and all sorts of things, and long lines at the pump in the US and elsewhere in the Global North. And so Exxon began investing in research and development for advanced energy technologies or post-oil technologies as they were called at the time. And in that emerged the first scientist that ended up working and developing lithium batteries, but as I said, then it became a more transnational scientific pursuit.
Exxon abandoned the whole idea, so it went back to the more, let's say, pure science labs, but it took back on an economic contour and motivation as the distillation of the lithium battery was advancing and the chemistry was advancing. There was a realization like, “Oh, we can have really lightweight batteries that power things.” And then of course, Sony gets interested and the camcorder is the first lithium battery in a mobile application. And so then for many years after that—so that camcorder was 1990 or 1991 when I was a kid, and I remember when it came out—everyone was taping their birthday parties at home and things like that.
But for a decade or so thereafter, it really is just for personal electronics, the lithium battery. Though then of course we get into the early 2000s, and then we start seeing the development of the electric vehicle. And so again, we have this interesting combination of scientific development and really interesting collaboration with major sectors in capitalism of electronics and then of the auto industry propelling this forward. But I guess I just emphasize that the lithium battery is a useful technology. It's not one that I think we should oppose or something just to say, “Oh, lithium batteries are bad because they involve extraction.” They're quite useful, and for good reason, they're a very important part of the energy transition, if that's what we want to call it, and if we think there's an energy transition at all, something we can talk about later.
But why lithium batteries are so important to that transition and to the decarbonization of these major sectors like the transportation sector and the energy sector, is that, as I've mentioned, they can store energy. This allows vehicles to charge up, let's say, hypothetically zero emissions energy or renewable energy, store that in the vehicle, and then the vehicle can drive around without producing the carbon pollution and the local air pollution that a traditional vehicle would cause. With the energy sector, the storage aspect is still relevant, but it's a more stationary storage. So the energy sector, if we have sun, if we have wind energy, solar energy—sun is not always shining, wind's not always blowing, as the saying goes—and we need something to store that energy even if only on the course of a few hours.
And so there's that application as well in our energy grid. And so that's all well and good, and we can see why this is such an important technology. The issue, though, is the amount of extraction that is needed to produce lithium batteries in general, and especially when we get into heavier forms of ground transportation. I'm thinking of the large vehicles that we tend to drive in the US that are practically trucks; we call them cars, right? And so when we take a detailed look, as I forced myself to do, and we compare the extractive requirements of a traditional car, an internal combustion engine car and an electric vehicle, it becomes a bit complicated to actually do the environmental accounting.
Which is worse and which is better? I do come away, after all the on the one hands, on the other hand, with a relatively clear upshot, which maybe I'll start with so I don't get lost in the mix of detail. Which is that electric vehicles on the whole are better in terms of decarbonization and addressing the climate crisis. There are some caveats there, I'll come back to those. But on the whole, I think we can safely say that there's no argument to be made that a car powered with fossil fuels is better for climate action. That's just not possible to make that argument. However, it is also the case that electric vehicles require more mining per vehicle of metals than a traditional car does in terms of just producing the physical car.
The situation is immediately complicated on both sides by two factors, and I'll maybe just leave the answer here. While a traditional car—the body of the car, the motor of the car, the whole physical apparatus of the car—doesn't require as much mining as an electric vehicle, it does require huge volumes of extraction in order to furnish the power for that car, which is gasoline, a refined product of crude oil. And when we look at just the US transportation sector and just at individual passenger cars of the traditional sort, 14 million barrels of oil a day are needed just to power the traditional cars that we have. So it would be totally incorrect to say, “Oh, traditional cars need less extraction.”
They need less mining to create the physical car, but they need much more extraction to power it, and we have to keep that in mind, especially because that fuel, we combust it. We burn it, and it's lost to the atmosphere in the form, of course, of emissions and localized pollution. We never get it back. Whereas the battery minerals are completely recyclable, even though we don't do that, and we should do that, but just in a technical sense, we can recover 99% of the lithium. So there's a circular potential.
If we lived in a perfectly planned ecological society, which we do not, we could, in theory, have a moment or a phase of extraction to get the initial build-out of our renewable energy system while dramatically drawing down the extraction of fossil fuels. Overall our balance would be less extraction, and then we could continue to reuse and recycle these more durable infrastructures of the renewable energy transition, which again, we can recover the minerals from and recycle and make more of them. Same for solar panels or other such technologies. And the last thing I wanted to say—I said there were two more things, so this is the second of them—is that when I said before that on the whole electric vehicles are better for the climate, that's true, but it gets less true when we have bigger electric vehicles.
The supply chains to produce those are more energy intensive and more emissions intensive, and the benefits are much lower because we're spending all of this energy, including very much fossil fuel energy, to create an electric Hummer, somewhat canceling out its climate benefits, in addition to the fact that the battery might be charged with a dirty energy grid. So if you add in certain factors, the benefit of electric vehicles lowers slightly, but I do want to just make it clear that there's, again, no universe in which a traditional carbon-spewing car is better for the climate than an EV. But an EV can bring more damage to localized environments because there's more mining to produce it in the first place.
I always try to end the podcast with a note of hope, and that's what you do in your book, so I'm going to alert the readers that there's not a happy ending, but an opening onto a different set of possibilities than the ones we've been discussing so far, which your book delivers in a wonderful way. But before we get there, let's work our way through some of these other things. You've had a long career working in the area of environment, the planet, radical activism, and I usually ask my authors why they decide to write the book in question. But I thought I'd also ask another question. Why did you decide to write the book in the way that you did? In other words, there's a multiplicity of voices here, including yourself as a first-person narrator, and then you have different kinds of corporate executives, and you have local activists. Why this melange of voices to tell this story?
For a long time now, my academic work has been ethnographic, and I imagine many listeners are familiar with that term. But in the event that someone isn't, ethnography is often associated with anthropology, but there are sociologists and political scientists like myself that use the method, and it usually involves place-based immersion, in situ field work where you are interviewing people, but you're not only interviewing people. You are also observing your physical surroundings. You're observing social reality as it unfolds. You are a participant observer, as the phrase goes.
And there is a whole set of rigorous ways and ethical ways in which we learn how to do an ethnography, and we learn from experience, and we learn from methods classes and all sorts of things. So that's just been my method, which necessarily invites other voices as well as an attention to social scenes, social setting, natural setting. But in this book, I amped that up a bit. There's not as much of me padding it with more analytic perspectives or really clearly distancing myself from the speaker. I do let people speak a little bit more directly to the reader.
I try to also let the landscape speak a bit to get out there with the materialist ontology or the idea that whether nature has a subjectivity or not. I'm not getting too philosophical here, but when we go hiking, when we go camping, when we experience nature, there is a communication that's happening there, right? I want to make that clear in these landscapes that are sometimes on the precipice of being fundamentally altered by extraction to get at something that quite a while ago I realized was important in these moments, which is what I call in the book a future tense nostalgia. A sense that we are sometimes observing things and holding them dear to our hearts and imbuing them with meaning precisely because they might be lost or changed in some way, and that's often how anti-extractive activists feel in their affective orientation.
And so I try to make that really present in the book. Some of that comes from an ethnographic sensibility, we might say, methodologically speaking. But it also comes from the fact that writing a non-academic book meant that I couldn't rely on certain academic crutches or formulae, whether in the writing or the argumentation, to get my point across. I needed to relay my point through character, through landscape, through scene and setting, through suspense sometimes—a technique I hadn't experimented with much before writing this book, but I learned how to do it, or at least to my best ability. And because I basically wasn't allowed, it sounds weird to say, but it's just basically the case, to say things like, “In this book, I will argue X, Y and Z.”
Exactly. Just not a type of sentence that a normal human wants to read. Or they'll read it, but then they will use the book as a kind of something to prop open their door and not return to it.
Yes. And so letting the people that I was studying and working with and the natural places that I visited speak for themselves is just a much more inviting way, and you can still make, I would hope at least, pretty incisive, whether analytically or politically, arguments that way. But you have to think a lot more: whose voice can carry this? What scene description can make this bigger point about capitalism? How do I actually do that? And you have to reach for a novel sometimes to learn how to do that, right? Or a poem or other genres that can do a tremendous amount of social commentary, but without directly analytic language always.
Yes, and it becomes all dogmatic if you pick those things.
Oh, totally. Yes, I think part of what you pick up on with the ethical subtlety of it, I think you're more able to do that with these other genres of writing.
Yes, no, I emailed Thea a while ago saying, as I was digging into it, it's such a beautifully written book. It is so wonderfully written. And one of the points that you make both in the book and in the remark you just made was that often the voices that are not found at conferences or policy decision meetings are the people most affected. So could you maybe pick out or pull out a couple of those voices or stories? Which stories were the ones that really impressed you the most? Which voices of the people that you don't usually hear from say, “I have to get this voice in”?
Totally. It's interesting because I think some of what I'm going to say is going to sound expected and is almost prompted by the exact way you asked that question. Some of it might be a little unexpected, so I'll go in that order. It was very important to me to talk to and relay the voices of activists who are actively defending their territory from what they see as the predations of extractive capitalism. And it's important to me both politically, morally, ethically, meaning that I have a sense of solidarity with those people in their struggle.
I think their struggles are absolutely related to bigger struggles over the economic system or the relationship between society and nature. Meaning they're not just parochial localized fights. They actually have much bigger meaning. And I do see, and for a long time have seen frontline activists in Latin America and everywhere in the world—but I first encountered such activists in my work in Latin America—as intellectuals, as organic intellectuals, as Gramsci would term them. In the sense both of being situated in a particular struggle, but also at being really good at articulating big concepts in ways that make sense to ordinary people that they're trying to agitate and persuade and mobilize.
They're intellectuals and organizers, and I want to make that clear to readers. But for a second reason too, and this is maybe me more picking a fight with some academics, but there is a certain approach to political economy, to that field of inquiry, that really only looks at elite actors at the state, at corporations. It really views political economy as the words might suggest, as the interface between the state and markets or the state and the economy. And that's a big part of what political economy is, but very much in extractive sectors, and I think you could make this argument more broadly, we see that grassroots organizing, whether of workers or of affected communities or of both, is absolutely pivotal to the political economy of these sectors, right?
You really can't understand why corporations are doing some of the things that they're doing, or why states are doing some of the things that they're doing, or which projects move forward and which become stranded assets if you don't look at this agitation from below and the mobilization from below. It actually intervenes in market forces and in the accumulation process, whether to slow it down, whether to open up new possibilities, whether to force corporations again to embrace new tactics to push their projects forward. And so in order to analyze political economy properly understood, I think it's just empirically necessary to look at activists. So that's maybe where you were thinking I was going to go in terms of why I bring so many of those voices into the book.
But I want to say a word about the more elite actors and why you even mentioned earlier, corporate executives or sometimes high level or sometimes mid-level bureaucrats are in the book, and their words come out pretty clearly, too. And in the case of corporations, I'm not relaying their words because I have a solidarity relation to them, obviously, to anyone that knows my politics or can just hear the words that I'm saying right now. But I do find it much more interesting than one might think to try to get inside of the heads of investors or executives or sometimes lower-level managers that are tasked with community relations.
It is important to not just use generalities or mechanical laws when we try to apprehend capitalism, but actually get into the situated worldview of capitalists. Some of whom were not capitalists their whole lives, regardless of the economic station they were born into, but they may have started as an academic or started in an NGO, and then ended up being a capitalist. And those are people I'm really taken by, partly because they bring their knowledge of environmentalism or of social movements into corporate boardrooms, and they provide, wittingly or not, a very crucial function, helping companies understand what causes resistance, which they need to understand to push their projects forward. And then the last thing is that probably the most unexpected actor in the book that garnered some sympathy from me, or at least a lot of interest, are the bureaucrats, right? And this is regardless of who the political party is in power in whatever country of the few that I went to in the book.
Oftentimes, bureaucrats are not always so directly connected. They may not be a direct political appointee. They might be a career bureaucrat. They might've been a scientist, and whatever it is, they trained in some way to end up in state bureaucracy, and they have a commitment to being a bureaucrat and doing their job well. But they are completely torn in eight different directions by the nature of their day-to-day job, whoever happens to be in political power, the reality of the sector that they're trying to govern. And I found that, surprisingly, you can learn a lot about the contradictions of ...extractive sectors by talking to the bureaucrats that are tasked with regulating them, often tasked with not enough resources or power to actually regulate them, and that itself is quite revealing.
So two things. One is, and I'll take your last point first, we sorely miss those bureaucrats under the Trump regime. Yes, wouldn't you love to have a conscience-ridden or at least a reasonable person who's going to weigh these things? But my God, those were the good old days... in terms of looking back fondly on things that probably weren't that. But then I also interviewed Karen Hao on her book, The Empire of AI, and she talks in very similar terms as you do, because you talk about being at conferences and being with these folks, and Karen was deeply embedded in the Sam Altman universe. And what she revealed was that, you already know there was a warring faction with the AI community, et cetera, but she found it really useful to see how these folks think and talk to each other because it explains so much about their actions, right?
The way they've convinced each other that these are the set of parameters that are operative here, and there are no others, really helps you understand how these folks operate. I really appreciate that answer.
Yes, totally. And as is the case in her work, you find a whole mix of motivations in people, of course, in any state bureaucracy. But you do find some people that have what we can just call good faith motivations for the job that they do, and feel really limited and undermined by what we can call capitalism or the misuse of political power. They won't always frame it that way, though. Sometimes they do, especially in Latin America, you'll get the odd bureaucrat who's read the same stuff we've read, like the one that recommended that I read The Shock Doctrine. And I'm in Chile talking to this bureaucrat at a nuclear facility, and he's recommending Naomi Klein's work to me.
It's those moments where you realize, no, some of them actually have political alignment. In my book, Resource Radicals, I called those types of bureaucrats critical bureaucrats. Bureaucrats that actually were critiquing the use of state power or economic power, and self-consciously, and those are some of the most fascinating characters, I think, that I've found in my work.
Yes. You mentioned onsourcing and start way back with OPEC at the 1970s. So could you give us a quick ramp up from OPEC? Because I thought that was really important to know.
Yes. There's a lot of analogies to the 1970s in our current moment, so I'm not the first to analyze that moment, which was another moment of geopolitical turbulence, of new forms of grassroots militancy and of an energy crisis. We maybe don't call our current moment an energy crisis, but there's a lot of intense geopolitics and changes in the energy system that kind of, again, have their parallel in that moment. But what I discovered by doing more research is that the analogies are actually much more relevant than we might think. The ways in which what's happening today can be traced to developments at that period became more clear to me. And you mentioned OPEC, and you mentioned also onshoring and that connection and then how it's playing out today.
OPEC was established in 1960, I think was the year that it was formally established, but it was really over the next decade and a half that it grew into its full political role. And so OPEC, people know, is an organization of oil-producing and exporting states that whatever we think of it today, in its origins, had an anti-colonial and a really transformative vision of bringing together Global South countries, then called Third World countries. These were in all cases former colonies, former European colonies, or in some cases were still in pretty starkly neo-colonial relationships, especially when we look at the Middle East or North Africa. And they all had one thing in common, which is that they produced oil. Oil was the lifeblood and remains, unfortunately, the lifeblood of the global capitalist economy.
And they banded together to coordinate amongst one another to increase their leverage vis-a-vis the multinational companies that extracted their oil. And they did that successfully to the point that not only was there coordination among producers, but those producers started to transform their own oil industries by nationalizing the oil sector. They did this by establishing state-owned companies and just inserting the public sector much more and notions of political sovereignty much more.
And in response to all of that, the Global North, particularly the US and the UK, but also some European countries, were really rattled by this. The governments of those countries, I should say, were really rattled by this. Okay, all of a sudden, these former colonies who we still treat as colonies are ganging together and ganging up on us. This is the perception of the Global North or the West, and the result is higher oil prices because they're increasing the revenues they want to get for the state.
The result is we have to now negotiate with these much more muscular states versus neocolonial states that we could do whatever we wanted with. And it really changed their perception of the global economy and of their position within it. The Global North position realized that it's not the case that we can just guarantee that we're on top of the world and we can get whatever resources we need. And they did a lot of things in response to that. There were, of course, in some cases, military coups, like in Iran, when the government of Iran nationalized its oil.
Or we can go to Chile, which wasn't an oil story, but when copper was nationalized in the same heady moment of Third World solidarity and internationalism, copper was nationalized by Allende, and we know how the US supported the coup, right? So coups are one way to respond to this, but there's a maybe less directly violent but still really important way that Global North governments responded. They responded by saying, “We should have these resources closer to home. We should not rely on these Third World governments, quote-unquote, that are unreliable and nationalizing stuff left and right. We need our own oil sources in that era or gas sources,” which is part of the origin story of the big expansion of oil extraction in Alaska, in the Gulf of Mexico, the US and in the North Sea offshore oil extraction in the UK.
And so fast-forward to the present, we're in a moment that, again, has some parallels in terms of geopolitical turbulence. Global South countries are asserting some degree of sovereignty over their resources, and also maybe a new factor in our moment is the delegitimation of neoliberal globalization and free trade. In that ferment, we see Global North governments using this onshoring toolkit again, which is that we want mining in the US, in Europe and in other places in the Global North because we can't rely on these Global South countries. Or we're in antagonism or tension with China, so we can't rely on them, or they're doing export controls. So whatever the specific justification is, the end result is the same. There's more extraction of critical minerals happening in the Global North happening already or planned to happen or under construction than there would have been in the absence of this perception of geopolitical threat.
Yes, you have a really nice discussion of that, and you mentioned it earlier in our conversation about how with this, there's one way of looking at it which says, again, one way and another way. One way of looking at it is like bringing the war home. We're used to distancing and exporting all of the devastation to other countries. We'll let that happen over there and take the benefits. But if it comes home, then we're going to have it in our own backyard. But then you very rightly say, “No, it's not our backyard. Living spaces are the most vulnerable.” Can you talk a little bit about that trade-off?
Yes. I think that there's a very reasonable initial perspective one might have when we think about onshoring mining. Like we might simply say the Global South has basically borne many of the most devastating ecological and climate impacts that have resulted from global capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, et cetera. And that a form of justice might involve relocating extraction or at least redistributing this burden of extraction and the attendant ecological impacts so that the Global North is not simply offshoring harmful ecological sectors, but instead is paying its own ecological price. And this could be just fairness in terms of the distribution of extraction and its environmental impacts. But also maybe by onshoring or reshoring these extractive sectors, we might think more carefully about how much extraction we're in a sense subjecting ourselves to, right?
And I've had these discussions with environmentalists in the US, some of this is recounted in the book, where they were taking this seriously or thinking through it, and I was therefore trying to also think seriously. And again, it was really motivated to the extent that people adopted that view by a sense of global justice, like it's simply unfair to dump all of this elsewhere. And that's all well and good and aligned with that basic perspective. The problem is exactly as you put it, like who exactly in the Global North is now on the receiving end of this new mining? Because as it turns out, surprise, there's not one Global North.
It's not a monolithic place. Just like the Global South has class divisions and racial hierarchies within Global South countries, and there are people in the Global South that benefit from resource extraction. We can call them the comprador class. There's all sorts of names for them even in Marxism and in a kind of leftist political terminology to talk about the elites that betray their own national sovereignty to do dealings with international corporations or finance. And so if there are people in the Global South that benefit from extraction, it stands to reason that in the Global North there are going to be winners and losers as well, right?
It's not, maybe to put it really bluntly, the lithium mines are not going to be in Silicon Valley or Wall Street or in the wealthiest neighborhoods or in the downtown shopping districts. They are going to be in places that have long been not only marginalized on class or race terms or by the kind of settler colonialism itself when we're thinking about indigenous territories, but also are places that time and again have been slated for extraction. Even if you have to go 50 years ago or 100 years ago to look at the last mining boom, in many of these places there are histories of mining.
And so we get this kind of sedimentation over time, just like the north of Chile has seen one extractive sector after another, so has the southwest US. And so it gets more complicated when we look more closely at who's affected, and that led me to think much more clearly about the multi-scalar nature of inequality. That there's a global inequality, and we can roughly divide the world into the haves and have-nots, or the North and South, or the former empires and the former colonies. When we look inside the US, for example, we have class inequality, race inequality, geographic forms of inequality and, of course, the somewhat originary inequality of settler versus indigenous.
And extraction is shaped by those inequalities and contours, and it just, it's not as neat a solution as we might want to think, which doesn't take it off the table. I still think the contemporary map of extraction is itself unjust, like the distribution of where extraction takes place, but that doesn't mean that simply onshoring or reshoring is a solution to that. We need to both think about where specifically mining is being sited and what types of vulnerabilities and marginalization it interacts with. And also, as I kind of land at the end of the book, we need to think about the total volume of extraction itself.
Yes, and it's almost a kind of counter example. Think about the outrage about data centers being built all over the place. So now we're anticipating the positive arc in the podcast. You make a great case for transnational solidarity and point to some really impressive instances, mostly in Latin America, as you said. Could you talk about the battle between transnational activists and both transnational capital but also national governments? And you also point out that there was this sort of hopeful moment in Chile. I can't help but ask you about the current situation in Chile. So tackle some of those questions, please.
Well, this is not going to be a fully good news answer then, given who was just elected in Chile, unfortunately. Yes, just immediately segueing from where we were just talking about this onshoring phenomena and more mining in the Global North, one of the big findings of my research was this set of parallelisms and even deeper forms of explicit coordination and convening and articulation between frontline communities in the Global North and in the Global South. And what I found is when I talked to anti-mining activists in Nevada and I talked to anti-mining activists in Chile and in Portugal and elsewhere in the world, but those were the main places that I did in situ research, I almost heard the same thing twice or three times.
And it was momentarily jarring just because that déjà vu experience always is. Even when we're doing research and we expect to see patterns, sometimes when the pattern hits us over the head, it's a little bit destabilizing. Like I literally heard someone in Chile make a similar point about how deserts are actually precious wetlands. Sounds like an oxymoron, though it's scientifically completely true, and then I heard someone in Nevada say that, and it was like there was a space-time portal, but not just a space-time portal, a portal across the asymmetries of North and South. That despite being in the Global North, these environmental justice activists and indigenous activists felt in similar relation to extractive capitalism as their southern comrades did, so to speak.
And again, it's not just a parallelism or a set of coincidences or a mechanical diffusion of tactics or ideas. These activists literally get to know one another. And there was also an unexpected element of how the pandemic shaped this, because I was conducting my research both prior to the pandemic, because I started this project in 2019, during the pandemic and the most alarming moments of it and the moments where we were really restricting our movement, and then when we moved out. So I got all three phases in during this research, and I had to adjust my plans at multiple points. But the reason I bring in the pandemic is that for a time period when we really were doing much more virtual life than in-person life, we're on Zoom right now, and that was something that we all learned how to do in those moments, a lot of the activist convenings that normally would've been in person were online.
This has lots of downsides that are quite obvious, so I won't get into those. But the advantages are not always thought about. Which is that what this allowed for was real-time transnational coordination between communities that are marginalized enough that international travel is a huge burden and a huge expense. And even communities where traveling to the capital of their own country is a huge ordeal just logistically and financially, let alone crossing an ocean. And I was able to witness, and felt very lucky to be able to witness, despite the tragic public health circumstances that kind of occasioned this, communities from Chile talking directly to those from Nevada and co-developing analysis and sharing things and thinking about how they related to some of the very same companies.
And what's important to me in this is to probably do two things simultaneously, and this is a very much on the one hand, on the other hand moment. On the one hand, to show and communicate to the reader these unexpected forms of solidarity across supply chains and across extractive frontiers, and how important they are to hold onto, to cultivate as a form of political action today. That's one. On the other hand, it was important to me to not completely flatten the earth, right? You know, the Thomas Friedman book, The Earth is Flat or whatever it was called, from the late '90s, whenever that was, that moment of globalization where we thought all differences between places were going to disappear.
I never thought that, and you never thought that. But that was a narrative at the time, and it's important to not flatten time and place. By which I mean that it is not exactly the same to be an anti-extractive activist in Latin America and to be one in the US, even from a very marginalized background in the US, even knowing that there's a lot of police brutality in the US, right? And I'm not erasing that, but it just simply is the case that your risk of death threats, assault and outright murder are higher in Latin America or in Africa or in Indonesia or South Asia, battling these extractive companies and the governments that often do their bidding. And I want to be real about the different risks that activists face while showing alignment around vision and grievances and what their demands are, and that sort of thing.
Okay, I'll pause there. I think that you asked me another question, like an addition, which I might have lost in...
Oh, about because you were talking about how much... So you have transnational activists collaborating and learning from each other, but then also, as you said, very much rooted in place, and local governments, national governments. And so there was this moment in Chile when things were blowing up. And now this, so as an example of how the local or the national... So talk about what's happening in Chile now.
Yes, maybe just to say a word about Chile before right now. What happened now, just to make it clear to everyone, is that a fascist, I guess we can call him a fascist, a far-right political figure who has expressed sympathies for the Pinochet dictatorship, and whose brother, I think, was in the Pinochet dictatorship, whose father was a literal Nazi, not a metaphorical one. Right, Kast is his last name, that will be inaugurated in March. He won, unfortunately, against the communist candidate, so it was a real socialism versus barbarism election. But before we say more about that, I think it's important to understand where my book unfolds and what's also led up to this moment.
The current government of Chile is a left-wing government, the government of Gabriel Boric, and he's been in power during a lot of my field work, though actually when I first went to Chile, it was a conservative government. It was before he was elected. So I worked going over multiple periods of Chilean recent political history, but Boric was elected on, in the wake of this huge social uprising in 2019. And one of the many little factoids in my book is that I, by doing the research, forced to remember that 2019 was actually this moment of global uprisings, and it's right before the pandemic, so we forget about it a bit.
But Chile was a place where this was particularly intense, and out of that uprising came a left-wing government and came the social demand to rewrite the constitution. This was a constitution that was an artifact of the Pinochet dictatorship, and so it had been a long-standing social demand to change it, but the uprising kind of gave the political opportunity for that to be a more resonant demand. And the activists won. They elected a left-wing government. They got a constitutional assembly approved and elected.
The constitutional assembly had tons of activists in it, not of every stripe, but including a really pretty coherent block of ecological activists, and they called themselves the eco constituents or the eco delegates, and who also were quite left-wing, not just environmentalists in general, but with a left-wing analysis. And it was such a hopeful moment despite and through the contradictions and tensions that always exist between movements and the state. But I happened to return to Chile after my initial period of field work during this moment of constitutional rewriting and left-wing government, and got the amazing opportunity to see firsthand these delegates trying to rewrite the constitution. Specifically rewriting the parts that have to do with resource governance, and with how we think about nature, and with who owns these resources, and even really lofty concepts like rights of nature or intergenerational justice, the idea that we should preserve things for generations to come.
Just amazing stuff to see official delegates who are writing a constitution grapple with and try to codify while movements outside the state are agitating and pushing, and the government is dealing with right-wing counterattacks. It was just such a moment to be present for where you're like, no, some of them actually, there's political alignment > where you realize, no, some of them actually have political alignment.
And I think that when movements are defeated temporarily or provisionally, I think it's important to hold onto what they were trying to achieve and have some fidelity to the fact that even in their defeat, horizons are expanding. Expectations just don't go back to the status quo ante really ever, which I think we have to think about when we think of what were the achievements of the George Floyd uprising, right? Maybe we didn't fully rewrite the laws of how police and communities interact, but we also didn't revert to pre-2020. New ideas and new demands and new visions were hatched in that moment that don't just disappear.
And so similarly with Chile, despite the fact that the Constitution ultimately was not ratified by the voting public, the ideas that it attempted to codify are really live with activists there and with left-wing political forces there. But not unrelated to the fact that the Constitution as written and as I witnessed being written, did not become ratified. That itself is indicative of the fact that the left-wing government in Chile has really struggled with popularity and with, on a pragmatic level, pushing through its political program. And that's for reasons that are familiar to us in the US because it's been a divided government, like they don't have a majority in Congress, and a lot of other right-wing power centers not only remain in existence but have been emboldened by trying to fight off the attempts of progress of a left-wing government.
And so you have this quite polarized dynamic. Which then has resulted, and I'm sweeping over things quite generally, but in that election that I just mentioned, the left-wing government has struggled enough with popularity and with implementation of some of its goals, and in the left wing's inability to fully accomplish everything, the right wing has been very emboldened by just the fact of a left-wing government. Again, these things probably make sense to us in the US with the way that polarization dynamics play out, that we have a right wing that's been able to really capitalize on people's fear of crime and violence and insecurity. And those fears are partly related to reality and some upticks in certain types of crime categories, but also have elements of moral panic and exaggeration, as well as racialized and anti-immigrant sentiment with the Venezuelan migrant population and also Haitian migrant population in Chile.
So it's really a mess, and it's quite sad. It's sad, the electoral outcomes, and scary, I should say. Sad understates it, and will be particularly, I think, scary for frontline activists, for activists that are battling agricultural, forestry and mining companies in Chile, which are the pillars of the Chilean economy. We're going to see more violence and more repression, I'm sure. And this is not going to make these dynamic politics of extractivism go away. It's just going to make them higher stakes in terms of the risk that people face in mobilizing and organizing.
I think that's exactly right, and looking at our own country, the polarization is so intense, but I think this also makes the argument that you do at the end of your book, which is that we have to break out of this binary that right now we're in gridlock, and rather than retreat to the center like a lot of governments do, we need to be more imaginative. So I'm going to read you yourself back because there are two quotes that I think, or a series of quotes, just pastiching them together, that come out with a vision for something new, and it gets us out of the polarization between more extraction, less extraction, on or offshoring, to notions of how we change our lives and how we can adjust to change the terms in which we work. So this is just a pastiche again.
What practical steps can we take today to call forth a different tomorrow? We can start by demanding supply chains organized around justice for everyone they touch rather than profits for just a few. Supply chains are currently organized for profit, but they have nonetheless become arenas for grassroots organizing and unexpected alliances.
Lithium battery supply chains just don't link mines to factories to consumers or upstream to downstream corporations. They also connect indigenous land defenders and urban transit users, workers manufacturing e-bikes and battery recycling advocates, bus drivers and avid cyclists and climate activists and promoters of dense walkable cities and towns. Electrifying while also changing ingrained habits like car dependency and urban sprawl seems far-fetched, if not utopian. But fear of radical change is misplaced. Radical, turbulent, accelerating and yes, frightening change is already baked into the carbon in the atmosphere and in the reign of sclerotic elites, predatory corporations and moribund institutions.
So can you talk more about this? And an add-on question I would pose, which is that what you're recommending here in the areas of environmentalism, I think has a broader implication about social life itself, right? It's not just extraction, energy, the environment, but what you point to is a different way of organizing, sensing our interdependency.
Yes, 100%. It took me really working through the research and thinking for this book to start to see supply chains in the way that a union organizer might see a workplace. Or an environmental or indigenous activist sees their community and their landscape, which is to say that, yes, this can be a site of dispossession, exploitation, appropriation, violence, but it also, for that same reason, the other side to that coin is that it can be a site of resistance, transformation, organizing. And to then stretch that out over a supply chain, I think we're used to seeing discrete arenas of exploitation and counter-organizing here and there. But as you put it, we are all connected for better or worse, right now mainly on capital's terms.
But the flip side to how capitalism, and this is one of Marx's most important insights, right? Capitalism draws us together in ways that can be brutal and violent and dislocating. Think of the primitive accumulation process he described or of the process of proletarianization itself was a brutal process for those individual lives and biographies. But the end result was a coming together of now workers from different parts of a country, a region that never would've met otherwise, discovered they had some fundamental thing in common, which is we're working class, or we are indigenous and we're being colonized, or we're places that hold meaning in this landscape and it's being devastated by an extractive company. Whatever the source of commonality is, and interdependence, those interdependent relations, even if imposed from above, can be transformed from below.
And just seeing that in a way that spans out more translocal across these supply chains was really helpful to me. Not to say that this happens automatically, and I don't think any Marxist or labor organizer or indigenous advocate thinks that it's automatic that people organize once they become enmeshed in these interdependencies, but just that latent possibility does exist. And so that's one way to think about this. The other, it gets at the conclusion of my book and where you were just reading from, which is that I began to be dissatisfied with solutions to the harms of mining that zero in exclusively on the places that mining happens. And I see this a lot in the world of international policymaking and think tanks, and even some international NGOs and institutions that are well-meaning for sure, but they're like, “Okay, the problem is mining has these environmental impacts.
It causes these social conflicts. There's corruption often as well. What we need to do is govern mining better in the places it happens.” And there's almost an implication, whether conscious or not, that the problem with mining is that those governments in those Global South places don't know how to properly govern this difficult sector or whatever, and so we need to give them some advice and help them out in governing better. And I agree that governance needs to be improved, but what I don't agree is that the problem starts and ends in Peru or Zimbabwe or whatever, right? It doesn't start there, and it doesn't end there.
And to understand why extraction takes the form it does, why it devastates the particular places it does, who benefits from it and who loses out, we need to open the aperture a bit. Our lens, our understanding needs to be much broader. And it turns out that what drives extraction in the first place is not a decision of a local politician or bureaucrat, or even this or that specific investor. It is the broader needs of global capitalism at particular moments, and those needs relate to the duality of production and consumption. They are productive processes but oriented towards consumer markets. And the electric vehicle is just as any other capitalist product can demonstrate this very clearly in the sense that the reason most lithium mining is happening is for one type of product, which is an individual electric vehicle.
And once you realize that, on the one hand, it can be a bit intense and devastating. Wow, all of this mining in order to support this one particular product. But on the other hand, I think it's helpful to make that connection so we can ask, okay, if we take it for granted, as I do, and I hope most listeners do, that we need to address the climate crisis rapidly, and that means getting the carbon out of entire economic sectors, including some of the most emitting sectors—which transportation is top of the list in the US—we need to get these traditional cars off the road, and we need to do something else, right? If we also, to go back full circle to the beginning of our conversation, have a value in protecting biodiversity, in protecting indigenous rights and the rights to territorial self-determination, if those are also important to us, then we can't advocate for a way of decarbonizing that would destroy tons of ecosystems and water systems and violate the rights of indigenous people. We just can't do that.
And rather than view that as zero-sum, what I began to think about is, is there a way to decarbonize rapidly, equitably, justly and on a scientific basis that does not involve massive amounts of new extraction? And I asked that question in a way that, for reasons that I can only partly understand, had not actually been asked before. Meaning that I tried to search for research on that question, is there a way to decarbonize that is less resource-intensive, specifically in the transportation sector and specifically with electric vehicle and lithium battery supply chains? And I found out after many frustrated attempts that that specific question with that framing had not been asked, or at least not in publicly available research.
And so I got together with some colleagues at a think tank of the Climate and Community Institute and collaborated with people who have different methodological expertise and approaches so we could view this really holistically, and we designed a framework and an empirical model in order to test that proposition.
Can we get to zero emissions without as much mining as the most alarming forecast would have us believe is totally necessary and completely? And the answer is yes, and the answer's not only a resounding yes to that question, but we were not testing how would this affect the speed of transition. We were holding that constant. Our question was: to get to zero emission transportation in 2050, what are the different routes we could get there?
How many would they involve? But it also turns out, based on other research that one can read and look into on the internet, that the more that we get people out of cars, the more that we build dense and affordable housing, the more that we rework our built environment, we actually get to our climate goals more quickly. So in fact, even though we were not directly testing this, it's not just the case that we can get to zero emissions mobility with less mining than the worst forecast. If we went that route, if we expanded mass transit, we expanded walkability, we built denser, more affordable places to live, we would also get to our goals more quickly before 2050. And so it's not that there are no tensions between our values.
There absolutely are, and we need to be honest about that in order to have coalitional approaches that address those tensions. But it is the case that the most zero-sum versions of this narrative are themselves artifacts of a specific regime of accumulation and a specific approach to climate action.
Yes. We do have a blog function in the podcast, and it would be really great if you could share some of those resources with us so people could look at them. Please do. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Thea, and you've helped us go through the third and fourth, fifth hand quite gracefully and with wonderful results, so thank you so much.
Thank you so much, David. These were such thoughtful questions. I can't thank you enough for how carefully you treated the subject matter.
Well, it's a great book, and you raise such important questions.
