Tech Won't Save Us - The Green Transition Needs So Much Mining w/ Thea Riofrancos

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Paris Marx is joined by Thea Riofrancos to discuss the global struggle to move away from fossil fuels and the future of the green transition, including the limitations of existing supply chains, geopolitical tensions, and the tech industry's role in the growth of extractive industries. Thea Riofrancos is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. She is also Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute. Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon. The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Also mentioned in this episode: Thea has written about Trump’s resource nationalism and the resources needed for a green transition. The Climate and Community Institute has done a lot of research on mining and transportation. Indonesia has been building out a ton of coal plants to power its nickel industry.

If you were to ask Trump, why do you care so much about critical minerals? One answer is he just likes resource extraction. Like I think he quite literally just likes minerals dominance, as he calls it. But if he had to name the sectors that this is all supposed to support, it would be AI and military tech. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Thea Rio Frankos. Thea is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute. She's also the author of a new book, Extraction, The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

Now, Thea, of course, has been on the show in the past, but I think it's been like a couple years since she was on the show, and in part that's because she was working on this book. And so, you know, I was waiting for it to come out to have her back on the show so we could talk about it. And so this is a fantastic conversation. I feel like we're at this interesting moment with notions of a green transition, what that is going to look like, both nationally and internationally, because it looks like in, you know, the West, things are largely slowing down in that transition to a greener economy. But in other

parts of the world, things are still chugging along. And a number of countries are even seeing that getting off of fossil fuels, especially imported fossil fuels, is going to give them more leverage, make it so that they are not kind of subject to the whims of international oil prices. And so solar panels and renewable energy are looking appealing, not so much because of how they reduce emissions, but because it frees them from that dependence on the global oil system, needing to have US dollars to buy it, and all that kind of stuff. So that's all to say that we go in many different directions in this conversation because there's so much interesting stuff in Thea's work that I wanted to explore.

So we look at the kind of extractive element of the green transition, you know, where all these minerals come from that are needed for the batteries and the solar panels and the things like that that go into whatever this green transition is going to, you know, going to be, how it is actually going to look, and how there are kind of difficulties in a moment of transition in terms of what that means and, you know, how different industries are going to respond to that. And of course, we see in some countries that means a pullback because the powerful industries like the fossil fuel and automotive industries do not want to move in this direction that might not work for them, at least in the short term, even if that means things in the long term

are going to get more difficult for them. But then obviously, the picture can be quite different in places like China, in other parts of the global south. So yeah, there are a ton of dimensions of this issue to explore. And Thea is the perfect person to dig into them with because she is so knowledgeable on this. She has been researching this for years. And it feels like we're at a moment where her research and her knowledge is more important than ever. So the book is obviously fantastic.

I would highly recommend it. But I also think you're going to get a good picture of what is in there and, you know, her thinking on these issues through our conversation. So I was so happy to have Thea back on the show. If you enjoy this episode, make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations to help you better understand the tech industry and everything that's going on in the world these days that's related to tech, which is like basically everything. You can join supporters like Ryan in Aurora, Colorado, Dominic from Basel, Switzerland, and Mathis from the Netherlands.

by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Thea, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. thrilled to be here. I'm really excited to explore your new book with you. We've talked in the past about your work on extraction, you know, work that you've done in Chile, how you've been looking at the politics around these sorts of things. But, you know, this new book feels like really bringing together a lot of the work that you've

been doing for a while. And so I'm wondering what inspired you to take this specific focus? And why is this what you wanted to explain to the readers about what is going on with this green transition and the extraction that's powering it? This book is a product of a very direct intersection between what I've been interested in for a long time and then political events that I got really involved in at the moment that it was conceived. So for a long time now, I feel like it really dates me to say how long. But for around 15 years, I've been interested in the politics of resource extradicts.

especially in the global South and Latin America, but also more broadly. And extractive sectors are super interesting. They're extremely harmful. They're deeply related to the climate and ecological crisis. But they also have these very contentious dynamic politics and economics and kind of social movements around them. And so I've long been drawn to kind of digging in, no pun intended, to these kind of very thorny, interesting sectors of our economy, which are in a way the underbelly of global capitalism. Like when we think of like what actually allows materially for capitalism to produce all of these goods and where does capital kind of touch nature or touch the planet most directly, extractive sectors really show the kind of conditions of capitalist production that

they start in nature and in ecology. And so that's kind of me and that strand of the story. And then in the late 2010s, there was a growing movement around the Green New Deal and also just a growing movement on the left to kind of directly incorporate and address the climate crisis in our political strategies and our political thinking, ideas of a just energy transition, or what would be the role of like workers and labor in, you know, in a new energy economy? What type of social movements would be necessary to confront fossil capital? And like, how can we also think about the public sector and like the role of government in this process? So all of this kind of ferment around the Green New Deal that I got increasingly involved in both through Democratic Socialists of

America, also through some kind of more, let's say, like, policy wonk work that I also started to get interested in around that time. And so, you know, this was the moment I was living through. And I very quickly, like, started to connect that dot, but in a way that was difficult and initially uncomfortable for me. Like, I'm someone interested in mining, very aware, therefore, of the ecological harm that mining causes, but also the extreme violence, the human rights violations, all of that. it's a particularly nefarious economic sector. And then as I was starting to think about what decarbonization actually means, like in a concrete, material, physical sense, like what a build-out of a new energy economy might look like, I started to learn about the broader supply chains that

allow for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, lithium batteries. And then my sort of two interests touched, but in this way that was not initially expected to me, That's not why I got into Green New Deal politics initially. I got into it out of a growing belief in the absolute urgency of the climate crisis. And then I realized, wait a second, I work on mining. I know, as I said, a lot about the harms of mining, there's growing forecast that the energy transition that I hold dear and I'm advocating for in combinations of protests and, you know, policy pressure and all this stuff would actually require a bunch of new mining, according to

at least the forecast, and we'll, you know, come back to question how much mining. some degree of mining. And then I sat with that and thought, you know, how can I promote a sort of domestically envisioned Green New Deal that would have implications, you know, at that point in my thinking for, you know, so-called sacrifice zones or attractive zones around the world and maybe create new forms of devastation, new frontline communities that were being impacted by this positive policy development within the U.S., right, if, you know, if Green New Deal were actually to be implemented. You know, later on, that got complexified because it turns out there might be also more we're mining in the United States. It's not just an over there issue, but we'll come back to that.

But, you know, I started to think like, I've always been drawn to extractive sectors because of the how interesting they are, as I said, but also because they pose unique challenges for the left. I think it's hard to think about how a political project founded on equity and justice and, you know, making a better society for, you know, the 99% grapples with sectors that in some ways can have a certain necessity to producing the goods and services we need, but also are tremendously difficult to govern well. And so I've always been drawn to that, and I thought, you know, I'm not going to give up that interest now that there's like a new dimension added to this problem, which is the seeming clash between the climate imperative and the imperative to protect local communities

and landscapes from the harms of extraction. I'm going to think through, like, is there a way to, first of all, explore and understand how climate action gets linked to mining and extract? but also at the other end of that, maybe think through what better governance strategies, models of consumption and production, and also social organizing strategies to make sure that we're not creating like tons of new harm in the goal of an energy transition. Yeah, I think that sets us up really well for the things that I want to dig into further in our conversation, right? And I feel like you're talking a lot about mining and the green transition there, and maybe it's obvious, but maybe it's just worth digging into why mining is so central

to getting off of fossil fuels and decarbonizing the economy. Why that's such a central piece of this effort? This is a great question, and I'll expand a little more in what I was saying earlier. Creating a new energy system really is a physical endeavor. It's an endeavor of engineering, of design, of like the kind of logistical coordination, of an energy grid, of the transportation sector,

of businesses and economic activities that rely on energy every day to produce all their stuff. And so when you think through, like, we have an energy system in the U.S. and in most countries in the world that kind of co-evolved with fossil capitalism to, you know, use energy from coal and oil and gas and distribute that to consumers and businesses. And that's how we run. And, you know, that central fact is actually why an energy transition is a much more radical proposition than it might seem because it involves dismantling not just an energy system as like a feat of engineering, but like investments, finance. investments that have been made in that, right? And so, okay, that's the kind of status quo of how we operate now in terms of energy. And in order to switch to, we could call it a zero emissions, we could say, you know, a renewable energy system, whatever word we want to use, we would have to change,

like, the guts and the hardware of how our, how our, whatever built environment looks like, right? Everything from the energy grid to, you know, transmission lines that distribute that energy to the kind of forms of electric mobility that would be charging from that, right, to the way that businesses, including certain industries that would be quite hard to decarbonize, but we need to work on it, like steel and how we could make like zero carbon steel. Like when you start thinking really carefully and rigorously about the material implications of an energy transition, it's an enormous change in like the physical landscape. And I say that all to say that all of those infrastructures,

technologies, products, services that would enable the harnessing, the generation, the distribution, the consumption of renewable energy, all have their beginnings in mining. Every single one of those products involves materials mined from the earth. And in some cases, when you do a head-to-head comparison, like you look at a traditional vehicle, which we absolutely need to phase out. Those are vehicles that run on gasoline that produce really devastating emissions for in terms of the atmosphere as well as localized pollutants that are really harmful to communities. So, you know, in order, you know, we need to phase that out. I have no question about that.

This book is not a defense of the status quo in any way. But when we compare that ice vehicle so harmful for the climate and local air quality internal combustion engine to an electric vehicle, it turns out the electric vehicle requires much more mining. All of the little parts of the electric vehicle from the electric motor to the lithium battery. Also when we think about the charge stations and all the wiring and the copper that goes into that, it's a much more mineral-intensive enterprise than a traditional vehicle is. And we can apply this to other parts of the new energy system as well. And so while I want to be clear that in theory and in, you know, technical feasibility kind of language, like a energy transition that was thorough and holistic and actually

left fossil fuels in the ground and instead use these other technologies to harness the wind and the sun and geothermal, you know, and other renewable energy sources, would actually reduce planetary extraction a lot because every single day we're extracting many, many, many barrels of oil just to keep like the transportation system running in the U.S., right? Like, fossil capitalism is an extractive economy par excellence, right? So I'm not letting fossil capital off the hook. But when we turn and pivot to a new material system and a new,

set of built environments in order to create a zero emissions energy system and society around that, a lot of new sectors are involved, like sectors that may not be that as big right now as they would be in a fully electric future, like lithium, right? So we're talking specifically about expanding a bunch of mining sectors and mines into territories and populations and landscapes that have not experienced mining before or not at that scale. Or there's other sectors that are very important to contemporary capital, as it already exists, like copper, but would need to dramatically expand to allow for full electrification.

So it's not that like a fully renewable economy means more extraction than a fossil economy, but it's different extraction, it's new extraction, it's touching new people and places, it has new geopolitics around it. And it's certainly not the case that moving into renewables just eliminates the problem of extraction. It raises it in a different form than it exists under fossil capitalism. Yeah, I think that's really well said and outlined really well, right?

It's not that we should think of the green transition as this move away from resource dependence, but it kind of shifts the way that we look at it and we need to be aware of that as we're advocating for whatever is coming next. In the book, you talk about this concept of the mid-transition and what it means for mineral and resource extraction in this moment,

Can you expand on that and how we're seeing kind of patterns of where minerals are mined or where resources are extracted kind of shifting because of this? Yeah. The mid-transition is a great concept that I borrow from other scholars that kind of gets at the thick of this complicated reality that we exist in in this present moment, which is that fossil capitalism still in many ways reigns supreme, like especially in the U.S. in this moment of fossil-fueled fascism, but also just generally in the global economy. Like, it's been a boom time for oil and gas. And now Trump is doing everything he can to also make, like, a coal boom. We'll see if that's even economically feasible. But regardless, like, in many ways, the fossil fuel industry has never had it better. And that's not just about, like, numbers and sales. It's also like the physical guts of the fossil fuel economy are growing, like new LNG export stations, new pipelines. All of this is being built to, like, further the trade and investment in fossil fuels. So that's all happening. At the same time,

there are initial and in some cases and some jurisdictions in the world really impressive investments in zero emissions technologies, right? We can obviously go to China for where the vast majority of those investments in a global sense are taking place, but we can even go to the U.S. Like I just read an article recently in the newspaper that despite all of Trump's attempts to like totally clobber the renewable energy sector in the U.S., it continues to grow in no small part. And I know this is something you address a lot on the podcast because of how energy-hungry AI is. And Trump and his whole coalition is promoting AI a lot, as are, you know, centrist Democrats and actors across the political spectrum, unfortunately, AI is super energy hungry. There's a back order and a backlog of gas turbines.

So gas-powered power plants are hard to build quickly. Coal is like an energy source that was actually declining, right? So like, where are we turning for new energy to feed the beast or like feed the slot machine or whatever we want to call it? And it turns out a solar farm is one of the fastest forms of energy to build and to get off the ground and to get generation, you know, within a year and a half from like initial investment, right? And so the mid-transition captures this contradictory reality that's contradictory in rhetoric, in politics and economics and in like the physical environment that we live in where we can simultaneously seeing booms and record profits and like the durable never-dies, zombie-like, you know, fossil capitalism

at the same time that we see growing supply chains and investments in renewable energy. This is an interesting policy problem, engineering problem, like how do we actually not get stuck in this mid-transition? Because there's a lot of ways that, you know, through the development of vested interests and path dependency and the way that physical infrastructures are built, that one could get stuck in this like all of the above, like energy addition economy rather than a full transition. And we see concerning evidence of that for sure in the U.S. and we could go out. where in the world too. But you asked me about like the implications for resource extraction. And I think that now, you know, if the listeners along for the ride, like that should be clear, which is that

we're simultaneously extracting oil and gas like never before. The U.S. government is committed to like, again, like increasing how much coal is extracted. So a lot of extraction of fossil fuel deposits of hydrocarbons. Meanwhile, we also have growing extraction of lithium, of copper, of cobalt, of nickel, of graphite, of this whole periodic table of elements that's necessary for new energy technologies. But I also want to add AI hardware and data center hardware, right? The growth of use of lithium batteries, not just for electric vehicles, but to stabilize energy provisioning within data centers and make sure that there's never a blackout that makes you lose tons of money.

So we have this growing use of these technologies. And so right now we're in a moment of expanded extraction in like all extractive sectors. And again, like one could rationalize this in their brain if we really knew that this was getting us towards the kind of horizon of a full energy transition. But it becomes harder to justify as we see in some major economies. And I'm pointing to the U.S., an increasing sense that we're just getting stuck in this all of the above energy and the all of the above extractivism that undergirds it. Yeah, and it feels like you know, you bring up AI and data centers there, and it really feels like the AI boom almost acts as a way of trapping us in this kind of mid transition, right? Like, as you're saying, where you still have all the fossil fuels that you're depending on,

the fossil fuels are potentially even growing or, you know, we see them growing at the moment, but then we're adding all these renewables, but it's just in addition because there's so much additional energy demand that is created. And so you're not getting the actual transition that you're talking about and that we would want to see. Absolutely. And I just want to add one other or two other really quick points to that going back to the kind of extractive substrate of all of this. First of all, it's worth pointing out that the hardware of data centers and of semiconductors and all the technologies that enable these large language models to kind of function,

that requires a lot of minerals. There's minerals in all of those and really dense kind of and broad use of minerals and all of these pieces of hardware, just as there are also in military tech, right? So we see all these growing applications and kind of use cases for these minerals. But also, and this is a kind of interesting aside, but it's worth noting given like the subject of this podcast, that AI firms are also promoting themselves as a way to solve the mining problem in a variety of ways, including using AI to create like large data sets of geological knowledge and surveys and academic work over like the past 100 years to help develop, use predictive

technology to basically say there's likely a deposit here, there's likely deposit there. because as much as, you know, politicians and sometimes corporations talk about scarcity of minerals, there's actually a lot of minerals that we don't even know. And so, you know, I could see, again, in theory, the justification for using technology, but it's a kind of snake eating its own tail kind of situation, right? Because on the one hand, there's more and more mining demand coming from the tech industry. On the other hand, the tech industry is like, we're going to also solve the supply problem. But how that exactly pans out and where ecology and communities and landscapes kind of fall in all of this, I think is a very open question.

That doesn't surprise me at all, seeing how they've also utilized AI tools to help oil companies find a better extract oil and gas. And also on the flip side, now that they're facing all this kind of criticism for their climate impact of data centers and generative AI and things, claim that the AI will definitely help us solve those problems as well, so don't worry about it, right? No surprise. It's also being deployed in mining, too. But we're talking about this mid-transition, right?

And potentially being kind of stuck in this kind of in-between period between the dependence on fossil fuels and also trying to transition over to a renewable economy. I feel like in the past year or so, there's been a lot more talk of this kind of tension between petro-states and electro-states, right? As there's been talk of China being this new electro-state, I wonder how you think about those discourses and how that fits into, you know, the type of work that you're doing on extraction. Yeah, I think that, you know, on the one hand, it's a useful binary to think of states that are kind of betting on the continued future of the fossil fuel industry and kind of betting their entire

political economies and political coalitions around that, the U.S. really stands out there in particular. And of course, the U.S. is not always referred to as a petro state, but it is the number one oil and gas producer. And even if it's not quite as reliant on those revenues than like the classical petro state would be it has really shaped U.S. geopolitical and global market kind of interventions, including very much under the Biden administration, just the degree to which fossil fuels are growing part of the U.S. economy internally and externally a growing part of its leverage over its adversaries and over its allies, increasingly under Trump as well, right? And so I'm fine with calling the U.S. of Petro's state, especially under the current government and the commitments to that

continuity. And electros state, you know, thinking about places not only China, but an increasing number of global South and other emerging economies that see their own pathway to development running through the mass deployment of these technologies as well as the mass industrial production of them, right? And there's increasing desire to think about are these green sectors a pathway to industrialization in like low and middle income states, right? So we can see, and then, you know, again, the U.S.-China kind of tension kind of dramatizes this idea that there's two energy futures for the world, two different hegemons are attached to them, and two different kind of geopolitical alliances as well as financial investments are kind of agglomerating around

them. The kind of, I think, downside of this analogy is really relates to exactly what we were just talking about, which is it papers over the fact that when we look under the hood of the electro state, whether it's China as an electro state or any country that we want to call that, we see a lot of fossil fuels, right? You know, I'll name one example of that, which is Indonesia, which has an increasingly prominent role in battery supply chains due to how much of the world's nickel comes from Indonesia. Nickel is an important input in one of the key battery chemistries that's used, especially in electric mobility.

And the Indonesian government has, we could say, very savagely, leverage that into a form of kind of supply chain-based development and upgrading. And so they said for the past decade or so, you can't just take our raw nickel out. You, you know, whoever the investors or buyers or traders of this nickel are, you have to develop it here, refine it, maybe make it into cathode materials, batteries, you know, kind of develop the whole supply chain in Indonesia. And that's been successful in attracting a lot of investment, especially, though not exclusively Chinese, in the burgeoning battery industry in Indonesia. So we could call Indonesia an electrostate in many ways, right? But then we ask, like,

okay, what is the energy source that powers this growing economy of not just mining, but refining and processing? And folks that may be aware that refining and processing are really energy-intensive activities. And Indonesia, what it looks like is like a proliferation of captive coal plants. What that means is a coal plant that's built only to provide energy to like a specific economic activity, in this case, mining, refining, processing. And so all over Indonesia, there are new coal-fired power plants in order to power the extraction and refining of inputs to the so-called like electro economy. And if we were living in a perfect world, that would be like an engineering problem to solve, like we could think through, like, what other energy sources could we use to power

this? You know, there are technical solutions to these issues, but the fact that we're living in this mid-transition moments means that we see these kind of Frankenstein, like, hybrid economies that have electro and petro components to them. Absolutely. And you see that in China itself, right? But I had no idea about that example of Indonesia. That's fascinating to hear about the coal plants just to power the materials going into the batteries effectively. I did want to ask, you know, China has come up a few times. And it feels like China is being positioned as like the state that is at least furthest ahead on electrification, right?

They obviously still rely a lot on fossil fuels and all those sorts of things, but they've, you know, electrified a lot more of the transportation. They, you know, are doing these massive buildouts of renewables. And I feel like for you, you know, as someone who was looking at the, you know, potential consequences of a green transition, are there lessons that we see in the approach that China has taken that kind of are things that we should be aware of as our societies get further down this track of electrification because they are further ahead? Absolutely. I think that you can see both like the tremendous harms that the extraction

related to the energy transition can cause and those harms are within China. It's worth noting that China is one of the top four lithium producers just, based on its own domestic lithium assets. But since China's like the top consumer of lithium, its domestic lithium assets do not satisfy its own consumption. And so it's also like the biggest importer of lithium, right? And so, you know, we can look at the sheer kind of material requirements of what China has done. We can see how that's incentivized Chinese mining firms and other conglomerates to like go around the world seeking those assets as well as developing more of what China has within its own hinterlands. In fact, you know, related to current geopolitical turbulence,

there's a renewed push to also mine even more domestically within China to kind of be a buffer against all of the volatility, right? So we can see all these different strategies playing out. You know, we can see the fact that rare earth mining and refining in China has caused tremendous ecological and public health harm as well as being linked to, I think, quite credible allegations of forced or forced labor among, you know, ethnic minorities in China, right? And so, you know, we can see the human toll, the ecological toll, issues that the Chinese government has been sensitive to, if only in a bid to, like, maintain its own internal hegemony and legitimacy. So there have been moments that the Chinese government has reduced the extraction

and export of rare earth or tried to manage the rare earth economy in ways that produce less environmental harm or at least kind of manage and manage the legitimacy around that economy. And so that's a lot that China can teach us about the harms and, like, also how, what governmental response might look like, especially in that political system. But also, and I would say this maybe to the people that are promoters of these supply chains or investors in them or the government officials like in the U.S. and Europe that are trying to kind of copy China in their own way, just like the sheer amount of policy and fiscal and kind of coordinating support from the public sector that is necessary to create these supply chains

writ large and especially their attractive requirements, which can take a quite long time frame and time horizon and a lot of investment in very fixed, sunk, you know, upfront capital costs that are not the type of thing that contemporary capitalists in the so-called West like to invest in. Like they want the quick turnarounds. You know, they're interested in these like tech bubbles and kind of just appreciating their share assets. Like the idea of like physically building hard stuff and like digging into the ground and like the risks that come with a mining project that might take a couple of decades to be fully operational, to be fully profitable. That's the type of economic endeavor that planning and coordination and state support are pretty

essential to, which I think global North policymakers are belatedly waking up to, but they're torn between the kind of neoliberal underpinnings of our existing economic system. As much as neoliberalism has been contested and problematized both on the left and the right in the global north, it still remains like a fundamental orientation of our political economy. And it's a fundamental limitation then to actually discipline capital, put the state in the driver's seat. And that's not to say that China is like some fully socialist or let alone communist system. Like there's a huge amount of economic competition and private enterprise in China. But there's a way in which the planning and coordinating capacities of the state. And also we should

say out loud, like the degree to which public institutions control and manage finance in China and have capital controls and the ability to leverage even like ordinary people's savings into these massive development projects. Like that is the kind of administrative capacity and fiscal space and just dedication and political will that is necessary to build these supply chains. And so I think, yeah, the dual lessons of tremendous ecological harm and the political risks that that can cause for governments on the one hand. And on the other hand, like the amount of capacity policy administrative and fiscal that's

needed to actually build these supply chains as rapidly as, you know, the energy transition requires of it. I think those are really the dual lessons to take away from China. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And on that point, you've kind of set us up really well to talk about the United States, right? If you're thinking about the kind of the global North response and what would need to be done to actually see a transition happen. And I feel like in the past decade, we've seen this turn against China in the first Trump administration that followed into the Biden administration. And it felt like, you know, we saw a real effort to try to start to shift the energy system

in the United States under the Biden administration, most notably with the Inflation Reduction Act. And so I wonder for you what your assessment is of the efforts of the Biden era and what actually came of it. And then also whether we see that continuing in the Trump, in the second Trump administration, or like whether this agenda has just been completely derailed by what Trump is doing? Absolutely. Yeah, it's such a great question. And I think it's good since you've given us some reference points over the past few presidential administrations to kind of just zoom out and look at like the patterns in geopolitics

and in an energy policy in the U.S. and in U.S.-China relations. So, you know, under – and I won't go through it in a lot of detail, but just to kind of sketch it broadly. Under Trump, one, we had this escalating trade war with China, and solar panels were a big part of that, right? In addition, it's interesting to note that it was Trump's first term under which the U.S. government designated lithium and some other energy transition minerals as, quote, unquote, critical minerals, opening up the kind of possibility of more state support, but also like fast tracking and pushing through these projects in a bid to contest China's, quote, unquote control or dominance of critical minerals, right? So even under Trump one, though, you know,

of course, he's long been a climate denier and like completely against the energy transition, he started to kind of play into and escalate the geo-economics of these energy transition supply chains, right? So that's one. Then we get Biden and we actually get a much more targeted, but we could also say escalated version of this, right? So he's not, you know, Biden's like escalation with China is more specifically centered on the energy transition rather than just like this broader trade war. But it's also really increasing the tariffs, the, you know, we have 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, right? New tariffs on critical minerals and batteries from China. So he's going all out in this idea that the only way that the U.S. can compete with China over these supply chains that the Biden government

agrees are key to the 21st century economics and geopolitics, as well as to address the climate crisis, that often kind of fell out even as a justification, right? But that these are the strategic industries of our moment, that in order to battle with China, we need to engage in a mix of protectionism. So those are the tariffs and the kind of barriers for our market that I just mentioned, but also domestic subsidy for domestic firms that will make these investments here as well.

And this is important to mention because of the connection to mining, as well as incentivizing domestic production to use domestic mineral content. Right. So in the Inflation Reduction Act, it's not just tax breaks and subsidies for, you know, solar firms and automakers to like incentivize them to make EVs. It's also to say for all that stuff, you get extra tax breaks if you use U.S. minerals. And that kind of mix of a carrot and a stick actually was meant to increase over time to get the U.S. to be quite self-sufficient in the critical minerals that furnish all of these supply chains. Right. And so that that is the Biden moment. And it was also an idea. because your question is also a question about the politics of all of this. It was also a way, it was meant to kind of thread the needle in a variety of ways. Like, we're going to do climate action, but we're also going to increase the U.S.'s geopolitical stature in the world, right? We're also going to revive American manufacturing under the idea that what caused Trump won

was deindustrialization, meaning the way deindustrialization can fuel right-wing populism, and that's a whole complex conversation unto itself, but that's the prevailing wisdom among leaders in the Democratic Party. And so it's almost like you can achieve a lot of things at once by really using the fiscal firepower of the U.S., which with its dollar hegemony and other aspects of the U.S. tax system and fiscal situation, like can really command quite a lot of resources

if political leaders develop the will to use our fiscal resources towards some goal. Right. And so this was all under the Biden administration. And one thing I'll say before moving to our current moment is that this, This involved climate wanks and climate experts and climate advocates kind of aligning with the national security state, right? And there was a lot of discussion at that moment as to whether this was a good idea,

whether it was going to further the cause of climate action and a rapid energy transition to kind of join the bandwagon of anti-China sentiment of like hawkishness of the new Cold War. Or, and just to say, I was among the people, among others, not me alone, that were kind of, concerned about this Faustian bargain, about linking these two things together, about what that would mean for the fate of climate action if the Cold War actually ramped up more, like, whether that would continue to be prioritized. Also what it meant for the fact that, you know, not to sound like Pollyannish, but a degree of global cooperation, even if it's not just like, you know, just nice diplomacy, but also like aligning the economic interests of different countries. Like, you need multilateralism in an economic form and a political form to actually get climate.

action happening fast and in a coordinated way, right? And so the idea that we were going to double down on a new Cold War ran counter to the kind of cooperation conditions of thorough climate action on a global scale. And so I was quite worried about this. Now we get into our current moment, and it's a lot of different changes that are quite interesting, just to pick up, you know, where I just ended, we very much see that the kind of national security imperatives around supply chains, around critical minerals are more durable than the idea that this is all aimed towards climate action and the energy transition. In other words, once you say that we're going to offer a lot of public support in terms of taxpayer dollars, in terms of regulatory fast tracking, like whatever it is,

to get these mines off the ground and to build out these supply chains, and we're going to do this all in the interest of a green transition, then you get a right-wing government in power. And they love the kind of like idea of the national security state and geo-economics and the geopolitical like underpinnings of our economy, but they don't care about the climate stuff, right? So that falls away. And instead, just to circle back to the strand early in our conversation, this is now all supposedly for AI and military tech. Like if you were to ask Trump, why do you care so much about critical minerals? One answer is he just likes resource extraction. Like I think he quite literally just likes, you know, minerals dominance as he calls it. But if he had to name the sectors that this is all

supposed to support, it would be AI and military tech. Ironically, those are actually pretty small segments of like the total markets for a lot of these things. Like rare earths mostly go to electric motors and EVs and wind turbines, right? Like not, you know, it's a smaller slice for these for these other markets. So that's the kind of situation that we're in where we have absolute continuity of this, what I call the critical minerals consensus, but unmoored for any kind of climate oriented goal. The last thing I want to say on this point just relates to what you were asking about the state of kind of U.S.-China competition. I think if Biden thought, perhaps erroneously,

that the U.S. could, like, beat China at its own game and use protectionism and subsidies and tax breaks to kind of contest and maybe transcend China's so-called dominance of these sectors. Maybe that was a fool's errand all along. We should have just cooperated with China. I mean, again, that would kind of be my position. But that was the gambit. Trump, actually, and the broader MAGA coalition,

is like, China can have that game. China can do its electrostate thing. It can have its trade partners, allies there, whatever it is. That's China's domain. Our domain is fossil fuels. And we are going to actually, instead of trying to beat China, its game, pose to the world this other future in which we just double down on fossil fuels, right? And again, both with adversaries, but maybe even especially with allies,

use our fossil fuels, our exports, our position as the number one oil and gas producer, to kind of strong arm transactionally, whether it's Europe, Japan, you know, these deals that have been made that say, like, in order to get access to the U.S. consumer market for your exports, you have to buy our energy exports, i.e. fossil fuels, right? And so, you know, how that's going to play out is really questionable. I think that that itself is a kind of almost nihilism and almost death drive, like a sort of like abdication of the idea of futurity and the ability for the U.S. to compete in, like, the 21st century economy. But it also, represents, I think, in certain ways, diminished ambitions.

And so we're going from, like, the Biden liberal hawk, like U.S. China one-on-one, to, like, U.S. dominant in its sphere, the Western Hemisphere, China can be dominant in its, or U.S. dominant in fossil fuels, China dominant in renewables. And, like, those are just, that's like a balance of economic and political power instead of a direct attempt to, like, take over China in these supply chains. I find it interesting trying to see as well how, like, Canada and Europe, are trying to like thread this needle you know they want to be close to the united states because they're so dependent on it canada for example has approved a bunch of new fossil fuel projects recently

lng in particular because i you know i think that that is in part around like where short-term economic gain where can we kind of get some cash in the short term but then also the prime minister mark carney was just over in china we're reducing tariffs on chinese electric vehicles now trying to work more with China on even production of electric vehicles. And there was this question that the Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was asked when he was in China by Bloomberg about like a new world order that was forming. And it was fascinating to hear him talk about like shifting multilateral institutions, potentially the World Trade Organization and these, you know, organizations not being,

not playing the role that they used to in the past. And even like opening the conversation of the Chinese currency playing a greater role in like international transactions and stuff. I don't know, it's really fascinating seeing like those discourses starting to come from like Western leaders as well as they're also trying to not like anger the United States, you know. Yeah, it's it's such a crucial point. And I think brings up another element of the kind of Biden-Trump contrast on these issues, which is that the other aspect of Biden's bid for the U.S. to battle China on these new supply chains was that we were going to do it like multilaterally with our allies that we're going to have a unified kind of global north front, create these new economic partnership and alliances. between the U.S., Europe, Canada, all of these countries, to kind of further not only a kind of countervailing economic force to China, but this whole discourse of like autocracy versus democracy

and like that there was like a political, civilizational clash. Like, of course, Trump doesn't care about any of the democracy versus autocracy stuff. But, you know, under Trump, like in this kind of erratic, arbitrary, escalatory way, constantly threatening other countries with tariffs, trying to get other countries to buy our fossil fuel exports, all of this and the breakdown of sort of traditional U.S. alliances, transatlantic and across U.S. Canada, Trump is kind of providing an opening for these global north countries to kind of think through like, who is the more reliable partner, which is a set of thoughts that interestingly is kind of foreshadowed and presaged in

global South policy discussions, where there's been a real sense of like should Latin America or Africa ally, you know, in this new Cold War dynamic, I'll I'm more with the U.S. or China. And I think the outcome there is pretty clear. Like we have more and more trade, finance, loans, all of it, you know, infrastructural investments coming from China into the global south. And like the direction of that is pretty clear. But it was still, as you said, like, been an open question and a kind of nuanced question about how Europe and Canada would land. And we see not only the example of Carney that you just brought up and the kind of warming of relations between China and Canada, and just to borrow someone's post on social media

recently, like the idea of, you know, Canada right across the border, not just from the U.S., but specifically from like the upper Midwest and like the deindustrial, like, where a lot of the, you know, auto manufacturing is. And the idea that we're going to have BYD is just like driving across the border to like visit Detroit or whatever, you know, just on a road trip and like Americans are going to see these China. You know, that actually could have some interesting implications. But joining that, I was just reading in the Financial Times this morning that, Germany is going to unveil new subsidies for electric vehicle purchases like rebates for consumers, and they're going to be agnostic as to where those vehicles are from, meaning German consumers

are going to be able to use publicly funded rebates and use that towards the purchase of a Chinese EV, right? And so I don't want to overstate it because we also see all sorts of ways that Europe has been like timid, including in this moment that we're in with the Greenland conflagration, has been like a little bit cautious around Trump or trying to still use transatlantic diplomatic channels that have all but broken down, but the Europeans are still very committed to it. And yet we see, you know, especially in particular member states like increasing relations with economic relations with China and just an increasing sentiment that is Carney expressed that we might be entering into the Chinese century. We might be leaving the American hegemon kind of

moment very much so. And there might be a new hegemon in town that we need to think about how we orient to. Yeah. And it feels like things are evolving so quickly now as well that even this conversation in a few months we might be talking about things that are completely different, right? And just on your point about reliability, Mark Carney was asked when he was in China, who's the more predictable partner right now, China or the United States? And he said clearly it's China, right? It's not the United States. But, you know, you were talking about the global south there, right?

And how global South countries have been relating to this moment, but also a lot of extraction, mineral extraction, has long been outsourced to the global South instead of happening in global North countries. And as we see this transition kind of being undertaken and as we see greater demand for mineral extraction, you know, you mentioned Indonesia earlier and some of the policies that they've undertaken. And I know a lot of your work has really looked at Chile in particular, but what are you seeing with how countries in the global south are reacting to this moment? Is it creating opportunities for them? Or are they being locked into kind of the same kind of colonial imperialist relationships that have long been there?

I feel like I'm answering every question this way, but it's both. I mean, in the sense that there's a continuity of extractivism in its most classic sense. Not only that, but there's like a renewal of like resource imperialism, you know, in a way that harkens back to gunboat diplomacy and to kind of earlier stages of imperial resource grabs. So, you know, we see that very clearly in Venezuela, but and the threats to Greenland, but we could see it happening, you know, elsewhere would be quite easy to imagine. So the extractivism and the imperialism and use of the, the, the, the, global North's use of its own state power to kind of enforce that is absolutely happening. At the same time, as the Indonesia example illustrates, and I'll get into a couple of other examples, we are also seeing increasing opportunities, both in the sense of these new sectors and supply chains that are important, but also in the very fact of U.S.-China competition, we are sometimes seeing openings for global South States to kind of bargain up rather than race to the bottom in terms of how they're interacting with trade partners or what types of finance they're accessing. It's not just pure, like, where you have to deregulate and, like,

go to the lowest common denominator in order to get investment. No, there's, like, multiple great powers that are interested in us. Maybe we can play them off against one another. And, you know, that might be more in theory than in practice, but we can definitely see examples of that as well. So it's a contradictory moment for the Global South. Maybe just to step back a little bit and situate this. Global South countries and entire continents are forecast to be the main places where these important critical minerals come from, right? And so even as we're seeing absolutely more resource extraction in the global north, as I said in this bid to kind of domesticate supply chains and have mine to factory within the global north and contest China, so we have mines opening up in

the U.S., Europe, new mines. I mean, Canada's already kind of a mining powerhouse, but we have new mines and lithium and other critical minerals opening there. And so that is all happening, but that should not trick us into thinking that the so-called West or Global North is about to be self-sufficient in mining. Instead, the majority of these minerals, whether we look at copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, et cetera, are coming from Latin America, Africa, and Indonesia. I mean, just that's just kind of like the raw data and what the forecast suggests will continue into the future. And so these Global South societies have a potentially major role, but also one that might be alarming if we think about what the impact of extractivism has been. Ecological, you know,

we have the contamination of waterways, we have the pollution also of soil, the difficulty having other agricultural livelihoods or other livelihoods of any sort, like while the mining industry kind of takes over. We have very volatile boom and bust market cycles so that countries that rely on these exports might find themselves in a market crash if the price of copper goes down or lithium, or they might find themselves in boom times, but those can also be difficult to govern well. And as I already mentioned, the human rights and sheer violence issues, right? So mining is the most violent sector on earth

in terms of how many land and environmental defenders literally get killed, trying to defend their land from the predations of extraction. So these are concerning sectors that global South governments, especially if they're progressive or have some degree of like the public interest at heart, are wary or want to be thoughtful about how they expand. At the same time, having these resources is potentially a way to upgrade your supply chains

beyond extractivism. And that's the kind of Indonesia route that governments around the global South are looking towards and kind of copying. So we've had a few African countries now that have implemented export bans following Indonesia's model, including Zimbabwe, or we have the Democratic of Republic of Congo, which had an export ban and now is moving to a quota system, precisely because the price of cobalt was going down, which posed threats to their economy, and they've actually been able to lift that price back up, right? So that shows them doing what we can call market craft based on the fact that they have a vast majority of the world's cobalt supplies or in terms of the current, you know, market dynamics. We have Chile instituting under a progressive government new

public-private partnerships, we can call them, like a state-owned company in copper, but that's interested in lithium, partnering with a shareholder-owned firm and inserting the state more into the lithium economy, but also with the goal of expanding it and the goal of also having battery manufacturing in Chile, we'll see if that happens. But we see all of these different positioning starting from the fact of the resource deposits that are in these countries, the history of colonialism and neocolonialism that they want to avoid repeating, the continued ambition and desire for industrialization, and the fact that some of these sectors in terms of the tech that they produce, the solar panels, the lithium batteries, the electric vehicles are really useful products

for Global South societies. Like, it is much cheaper and more reliable, actually, to have an energy system that has a lot of solar panels as part of it than being a low-income global South country that has to import oil, which is like super volatile in its pricing and can be geopolitically controlled by a variety of actors. If instead you have, you know, just solar panels on rooftops as well as solar farms, and if you have coastal access offshore, you know, whatever it is, like, you can have a more domestic energy system that's more reliable and meets the need. And we should remember how many people around the world lack access to energy and electricity. Likewise, having lithium battery powered electric buses,

which are prominent around Latin America and other parts of the world, is a great way to deal with the smog issues. It's a much better and more equitable way to move people around versus individual vehicles, whether they're electric or otherwise. So these technologies, we shouldn't forget, can be quite socially useful, especially from like also an economic development perspective. But the question is how you connect the fact that you have lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper underneath your soil to the kind of developmental and socially beneficial use cases of the supply

chains writ large and how you navigate all of that in a fraught geopolitical environment. Yeah, no, really, really well said. And it has been fascinating to see these discussions about countries in the global south trying to adopt more renewables. You know, I know Pakistan is the example that's so often. used of, you know, really installing a lot of solar energy in a short period of time. But how there does seem to be this growing conversation around adopting, you know, renewable technologies, electrification. And it's not so much about, you know, addressing climate change.

It's about making sure that you're off foreign oil imports and trying to have better control over the domestic energy economy, right? Absolutely. And deal with the fact that in some global South societies, pollution is also a major issue of political risk for governments, right? And we can see how the Chinese state kind of managed its own pollution crisis and partly through the mass deployment of electric vehicles. And so I think that's another thing to bring in and the fact that these supply chains, when you look at their entirety, involve a lot of innovation, technological development, opportunities for training your workforce to do more difficult tap. Like there's a lot of ways that if the collaboration can be equitable, which is a lot to ask under conditions of global

capitalism, if you can get that technology transfer, if you can get something for your own workers and communities out of this bargain, there's potentially a lot there, which is why a number of emerging economies have actually said to China, we don't want to just be the kind of dumping ground for cheap solar panels, as useful as those can be. We also want to manufacture them, right? So we've increasing, alongside trade, we've increasing amounts, and this goes back to some of our other questions of Chinese firms in the private sector doing direct investment in building factories and assembly plants within the global south. And so we also are seeing a slight, let's say, deconcentration. I don't want to overstate it because China's still, you know, 85% of battery

manufacturing capacity in the world is concentrated in China. But we're seeing a slight movement towards other manufacturing hubs within, you know, especially emerging economies who do to their own consumer markets and labor forces have a bit more leverage with China and can implement their own policy strictures to ensure that they don't just get trade, they also get industrial development out of it. Yeah, I think this is going to be fascinating to watch in the coming years to see how it develops. And there's so many other things that I could ask you about in relation to this book. Like, it's so fascinating and digging into the scope of all this. But I wanted to end by asking you, because, you know, you've also been doing all this work at the Climate and Community Institute,

looking at what a transition should actually look like and, you know, very much informed by the research that you've been doing for years, right? So after doing all this, after looking into all this for so long, what does this tell us about the type of transition that we should be doing to address climate change? You know, what are the tradeoffs that we're going to have to consider? And what is the right path if we're trying to reduce the harm or the extractive necessity that is going to come of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? As I mentioned earlier, the Green New Deal moment was really pivotal to my initial conception of this whole book and project, in the sense that I wanted to take seriously the Green New Deal principles of social justice at the heart of climate justice, right?

Of involving workers and communities and materially uplifting them in the process of an energy transition, of using the public sector and the powers of government to usher through a coordinated and plan transition, rather than leave it to market forces or the kind of whims of Wall Street or finance. All of that is still relevant today, and I'll say a little more about it, but what I wanted to say about my thinking at that moment is how do we internationalize that?

You know, that I think we can't, in a world of global capitalism, in a world of fraught and interconnected geopolitics, it doesn't suffice to think in terms of one country as if it's an island. And I think for principles that animate us on the left and on the progressive side of the political spectrum, internationalism and solidarity and not stopping your values at the borders of your country,

knowing that, you know, whether for just purely principled reasons, which are my own reasons, but even for more strategic reasons, like all of these international conflagrations actually make domestic progressive politics more difficult by amplifying the role of the security state, you know, including domestically internally for repression as we're witnessing right now with ISIS murders of, you know, people engaged in activism against this clamped. down on immigration. So, you know, it's really clear more than ever that we need to be rigorous about the international perspective that we bring to climate politics. But the other thing that is clear is that an approach to climate politics that doesn't take seriously the economic needs

of working class communities, wherever they are, you know, including in the U.S., is not going to create the conditions for its own political continuity. And sorry, that was a slightly complex statement, but just to say that the Inflation Reduction Act, as much as it represented by the very low standards of recent U.S. history, like the greatest climate and energy investment that the U.S. government has undertaken, you know, as much as that is true, it was actually not targeted to address the material needs of ordinary households in the U.S., right? The assumption was, oh, you're a wealthy person buying an EV, here's like a few thousand dollars off of that, right? Or you're a wealthy person that owns your home and can install solar panels or heat pumps. like here's a tax break for that.

But not everyone is an asset holder, or even if they are an asset owner, they might be pretty low income or middle income and not have the ability to make these types of investments on new assets or on retrofits, even with some governmental help, right? So it really did not address what was already becoming a crisis in affordability

in everyday needs, and therefore missed the opportunity to show that green policies, that climate policies can also be policies that uplift the, material circumstances of ordinary people and the kind of 99% to use that populist framing. And in not kind of connecting those dots, it is one of many, the way that climate policy has been enacted in the U.S. is one of many factors that has provided opportunities to the right

wing to kind of present itself as the, as the ones that are going to save Americans from the affordability crisis. And then even worse, to also say expanded fossil fuels are better for energy affordability, which is not even true, given what we talked about earlier about. how much quicker and honestly cheaper it can be to set up a solar farm than it is to kind of expand the fossil fuel economy. And so this is the position that we find ourselves in as leftists, as climate leftists. We have to, I don't want to say start over because I actually think that the Green New Deal principles were really solid, but we need to think about in our current geopolitical and economic environment how to deepen the connection between green and what is economically beneficial to most

Americans, we also need to be clear that the resource-intensive way that we've been going about, the energy transition poses a ton of risks, meaning that, you know, I haven't gotten the opportunity to say this yet, but I'll say it now, that the idea that everyone's going to individually own a Tesla or an expensive electric vehicle doesn't make sense from an equity or justice perspective, as I just said, but also is the most mining-intensive way to go about the energy transition compared to a transition that would rely more on public and mass transit, on shared forms of mobility, on affordable housing and the density of that, on kind of reconfiguring our societies to access and fully leverage the benefits of renewable energy for everybody.

And all of the economic opportunities that that also presents, right? But at the same time, we're also seeing that these resource intense supply chains are sites and arenas of geopolitical competition. And the more we kind of double down on an idea that we need more and more of these minerals, whether to fuel AI, military, energy transition, whatever the next excuse for it is, we also increasingly imprecate ourselves in supply chains that are ecologically harmful, but also geopolitically quite sensitive. I think that there's a lot of reasons, and we're seeing this play out in real time now,

to rethink in a way from the ground up or even below the ground, from the subsoil up, right, from the kind of underlying resource deposits that our Earth's crust contains to the supply chains and all the way to how those reach consumers and communities and touch down on Earth. There's a lot of, I think, reason to rethink what type of energy transition we want, what type of economic tools that would involve, how we can minimize the ecological impacts of that, how we can maximize the economic benefits of that to working class people and renew and create a new. new climate left paradigm for how to address the most important crisis of our moment. And as upsetting as it is to me that even the quite imperfect and suboptimal inflation reduction act is being dismantled, I don't want to quite call it a silver lining, but the reality that that creates is that, like, we have to rethink all of this, but not abandon our Green New Deal principles or abandon some of the major insights of climate justice or internationalism that the left part of the

climate movement has developed over years. And instead, retool them for the moment that we're in, and I think actually argue with more confidence that they're more relevant than ever. Yeah, I think a really great point, and something that people need to be thinking about, you know, as we continue heading into this moment, as we continue to think about what a green transition

is going to look like. As I said, Thea, there's so many more things that we could talk about in relation to this. It's all the more reason for people to check out the book and, you know, to follow your work. But thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your great questions, Paris.

It was a pleasure. Theo Riofrancos is an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, and the author of Extraction. Tech Won't Save Us has made in partnership with the Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Husson. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.