Schrodinger’s Element

Writing about the climate crisis can tend toward stratospheric levels of scholastic speculation or a cheery, comforting techno-optimism, one that doesn’t ask too many questions or worry about too many facts. Or else it deals in enervating eschatological or existential proclamation—in the immortal joke of Douglas Adams: so this is it, we’re going to die.

Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College and strategic codirector of the Climate and Community Institute, takes a refreshingly different approach in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Dragging us back to genuine terra firma, specific geographies, and the very real people who live in them, Riofrancos carefully points us at the titular phenomenon: extraction. Specifically, the extraction of the lithium necessary for so many visions (including hers and my own) of a more socio-ecologically sustainable society. But this does not mean the work—and the questions it elicits—is limited in scope.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in writing about politics and climate, it’s that the devil’s in the details. And Riofrancos’ eye for the granular takes her from the Atacama Salt Flats to the halls of Brussels; from frontline activists to self-assured “green” entrepreneurs; from critiques of “green” capitalism to the limitations of our own imaginations. Lithium, it turns out, is a lot more than an entry on the periodic table or a component in photovoltaic array. Rather, it’s Schrödinger’s element: it may (or may not!) be a commodity; it is the stuff of dreams and already the source of nightmares. And extraction isn’t just a question of a binary between simplicity and grandeur. It is inherently political, contested, from the mines and those who work in them, to the communities and sacrifice zones around them, to unevenly distributed local, national, and transnational dilemmas and geopolitical conflicts.

Earlier this month we spoke over Zoom (powered by data centers, full of lithium) about extraction and lithium itself, regional specificity, geoeconomics, extractive frontiers, what is and is not bullshit—and how all of this raises some of the thorniest questions about imperfect trade-offs, zero-sum dilemmas, and even the nature of democracy itself. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.

—Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Ajay Singh Chaudhary: There’s a lot of truth in advertising to your title. You know, don’t judge a book by its cover, don’t judge a book by its title. But it’s true here: you adopt a laser focus on extraction, lithium in particular. Emissions only come up a few times. And that’s kind of refreshing, honestly, in that climate books often have what people call “carbon tunnel vision.” What made you set out in this course, and why this particular focus?

Thea Riofrancos: What I wanted to do with this project was to think about how to combine and intersect two interests of mine. On the one hand, I had worked for quite a while on extractive sectors in Latin America, in the Global South, and had been thinking through what the dynamics are of these sectors that so clearly link the present to the past—the present of the global political economy to the past of colonialism and imperialism and the kind of longue durée of capitalism. And these sectors pose all sorts of interesting questions and dilemmas for left-wing governments and movements. Then, on the other hand, in the late 2010s I was starting to get involved in organizing for a just energy transition and a Green New Deal: thinking through what that would look like in the United States, how to advocate for it, what the role of the labor movement is, what the role of communities and community ownership is, the idea of green jobs, of green investment, you know, in a way that could hopefully be progressive and transformative.

At a certain point, and it took a couple of years for this to really fully gel in my mind, I realized that the energy transition I’m so in favor of is also going to double down on a lot of these extractive sectors. And what’s more, new extractive sectors and relatively small commodities markets like in lithium—they’re all going to need to grow dramatically size. So I thought: Am I actually advocating for something domestically that on a global scale I actually am not in favor of? Or is there something new about extraction for the energy transition that that might prompt me to rethink some of my own presumptions about extractive sectors?

Those are just two of the many questions that surfaced. One way to describe this book is that it was a way to work out an inner conflict that I felt quite acutely and that I wanted to invite the reader into. The inner conflict requires taking seriously the demands of climate justice, just as it does taking seriously the demands of dealing with the ecological crisis. We need to rapidly draw down emissions because the planet faces an existential climate crisis—but at the same time we don’t want to exacerbate the ecological crisis and the water crisis and the biodiversity crisis via rapidly expanding new mining projects. If we’re treating both goals in good faith, it should feel like a tension.

I’m not compelled by the kind of easy answers like, “Oh, it’s all fine if it’s for the green economy, who cares if we destroy some landscapes in the process?” Nor—and this maybe is more of a challenge to our comrades on the left—am I satisfied with a purely oppositional answer that we just need to stop all extraction. Because, what about for the electric buses that I, too, would like? Where do we get that lithium from? And what do we do with the fact that there are a bunch of Global South societies that are staking their own future development on these supply chains? I don’t think it’s so easy to just dismiss that. These are active political problems rather than just intellectual puzzles.

ASC: There are several episodes in the book where I can just see your eyes sort of lighting up. And one is particularly distinct from the others. You switch methodological gears and give this very nitty gritty account of electric vehicles: what they are, how they compare with internal combustion engine vehicles, and not just in broad strokes. X tons of ore, and y liters of water, how the engine constructions differ, the powertrains, and so on. I find this stuff in my own research vital and fascinating. It’s where the rubber hits the road, no pun intended. And it’s also where we can sort of separate reality from propaganda and ideology. What’s the truth of the matter, and what’s just greenwashing bullshit? There’s clearly something you want people to be taking away from this very detailed account.

TR: I was propelled to be extremely precise, lest I be misread in a couple of different ways. There are easy readings of positions in the debate over electrification and its environmental impacts. And there are easy, polarized positions. And I wasn’t quite satisfied with either of those positions, so I wanted to be quite rigorous about it.

Let me spell out what the debate is. There is a basic fact, which is that anything you produce under capitalism, or even some other type of economic system, is going to have some environmental impact because we’re interacting with nature or metabolizing nature in all these ways. So as we’re electrifying mobility with the goal of dramatically drawing down emissions from our most polluting sector in the United States, the second most polluting sector globally, the question arises: Is the way that we’re doing this actually producing environmental benefits, or are those climate benefits effectively canceled out by the localized ecological harms that the production of electric vehicles causes?

The short answer is no, but that does not fully settle the matter.

But in that bifurcated, black and white framing of the question, if you are pointing out any problems with a renewable energy transition, then you’re on the enemy side. And to be clear: I love to do left-wing populism against fossil fuel companies. They should be targeted as the enemy. But the problem is that the energy transition is an extremely complex endeavor, with all sorts of logistical, geopolitical, environmental, social, and political facets. It’s not just like a simple, singular thing that we’re in favor of. It’s a whole set of conflicts and processes and dynamics, and maybe more importantly, there is more than one way to do an energy transition, right? There’s no single energy transition to be in favor of. Even within a Green New Deal paradigm, there are disputes and disagreements. That’s because there’s more than one way to organize a transition out of our awful fossil capitalism. What is to be done from a left perspective? How do we actually think about these thorniest parts of the energy transition with ruthless empiricism? We need to be self-critical about our own project to make it a better project, right?

ASC: You’re absolutely correct: there’s not just one plan. There are multiple directions that one can go in, and in some ways they’re irreconcilable.

The other methodology that you use, especially in those sections that seem to really pop out, is interviews and in-person observations. And this stretches from frontline communities in Chile to EU bureaucrats to people working for “green capital” firms. What do you think this sort of qualitative or ethnographic approach brings? Why is it so crucial for you?

TR: It has to do with our political principles. It also has to do with epistemology, how we orient in the world, how we gather knowledge, and what that knowledge is then used for. And it really has to do also with what types of actors and settings are included in the domain of the political. When we think about politics, how can we broaden that term so that it’s not only what happens in a parliamentary setting or in a bureaucracy? But also what might happen in a natural landscape—how do “natural” processes become a political fact in certain ways?

There are a couple of interventions that my methodological approach is making. The first is that I’ve really never been convinced that political economy is just a matter of the interactions between firms and states. When we think about what constitutes the global political economy, it’s so often defined in political science and in other fields as, “Well, you have state actors and you have corporate actors,” or “you have market actors and you have regulators.” It is the set of institutions and organizations, the “rules” of the economic game, that those elite actors co-create. But if an indigenous community organizes a protest that blocks a mine of a critical mineral, therefore putting real pressure on supply, therefore driving up the market price of that mineral, isn’t that a direct intervention in political economy?

Maybe we do need to take seriously the idea that organized indigenous communities are protagonists in this political economy in some way because their actions actually have consequences for far more powerful actors and are one of many factors that shape the availability of material resources. Because if a blockade is effective, that stuff’s not coming out of the ground anytime soon. If you ask corporations or you go to corporate conferences and you ask them, “What are you worried about? What are the threats to your business models or supply chains or business relationships?” They will list protest really high up there.

ASC: You have a strong regional focus in most of your work. You’ve been working on Latin America for a very, very long time, and so I’m curious how you see this as influencing your overall arguments.

TR: When I first started just living in Latin America, before I was doing any research, it was the place that taught me that resource extraction is a political topic. I had never had that thought before I first moved to Ecuador in 2008. There’s a way in which extraction is just so centered in Latin America—in political discourse, in economic policymaking, in social movements. The politics of extraction are impossible to ignore, and so it was the region that taught me about those politics and their stakes, the modes of polarization that tend to kind of exist around them.

I’ll say a little bit more about the region, but first I want to zoom out a little bit and say that what surprised me in writing this book is how relevant a lot of those lessons were when I then went to the southwest United States and Europe. Which is not to say that those places are in the same position in the world system as Latin America or grapple with the exact same dilemmas of how to govern their economies. But a lot of the modes of conflict, especially at the community level, that I first encountered in the highlands of Ecuador or in the Amazon—where communities were battling with multinational companies over threats to their land—I saw very similar battles in Nevada. I saw very similar battles in Portugal.

That’s not just an isomorphism. Instead, this observation reveals that Latin American struggles have imprinted global struggles. Latin America has been the place with the most mining-related conflict, with the highest level of environmental consciousness and indigenous rights consciousness, where people are using really savvy tactics of resistance, with a high level of knowledge about their rights, about environmental impacts.

As time went on, and as I studied this over the course of a decade or more, I started to see similar repertoires of conflict in other places. And I thought: Is some of this drawing on a playbook of Latin American resistance? So I asked other people—scholars and analysts and advocates and international NGO staff—and they confirmed, as does the academic research, that there is actually a process of diffusion. What I mean by that is that Latin American repertoires of anti-extractive resistance—even the naming of extractivism as the target of resistance—have been taken up and riffed upon in contexts as disparate as South Asia, Africa, and Serbia.

I’m not saying Latin America is the source of all anti-extractive resistance. But this process of diffusion is really just a matter of living in historical time and tracing sequences of events. It was in Latin America where there was really the first wave of this mode of anti-extractive resistance, starting in the early 2000s. And so over time, it stands to reason, especially with the existence of the internet and the ability of communities around the world to learn from one another, that communities are learning from a process that started earlier somewhere else. The reason it started earlier in Latin America is because it was a major site of expanded mining during the commodity boom of the early 2000s, as well as the way in which Latin America was brought into the world system by Spanish and Portuguese colonizing powers, and then later, the imperial powers of Great Britain and the United States.

Thus mining, from a quite early stage in capitalist history in Latin America, is really important to the origins of the region and the origins of its political economy. The first experiments in nationalization and expropriation of resource sectors—outside of revolutionary context, outside of the Soviet Union—were in Latin America. Resource nationalism and a sort of radical politics of extraction and the role of the state and the role of workers movements are notions that, for a particular set of reasons, Latin America was hip to at an early stage.

ASC: These are problems that you see in other parts of the world but whose political repertoires sometimes might look quite different, even as some of the dilemmas are similar—the path to prosperity being very dependent upon of one or two commodities, for instance. As someone who also works on climate and politics but came initially from a regional focus on the Middle East, and stretching into Africa and Asia, I can recognize how, for example, you’re pushing back on the notion of the “resource curse” critique of post-colonial governance. At one point, though, you pose the question of reconciling the interests of indigenous communities, national majorities, and a “speculative global community.” I love that last bit, that global community is sadly quite speculative. But, setting aside different repertories, it’s not clear to me that these categories apply the same way in, say, Tunis or Egypt or Saudi Arabia—or China for that matter!—as they do in Latin America. While there are similar problems, do all of these categories translate directly?

TR: It would be absurd to claim that the politics of extraction in Saudi Arabia and Ecuador are the same. They’re simply not for a variety of reasons. What I mean more specifically about this diffusion is that at a certain moment in history starting in the early to mid-2000s, activists in Latin America started to say, “We don’t want better extraction. We don’t want just better labor conditions at the mine sites. We also don’t primarily or just want national ownership of the same extractive projects. What we want is a society that isn’t based on extractivism.” What that means from a situated resistance perspective is that we are opposing extractive projects that are really harmful to the environment and that violate indigenous territorial rights. We’re opposing those projects tout court. We’re not renegotiating them. We’re not trying to govern them better.

What’s interesting about the anti-extractive position—and this is an argument I make in my book Resource Radicals—is that it’s part of the same tradition that gets us to resource nationalism, because it’s a tradition of critical left-wing intellectual thought and political praxis that orients to a set of fundamental questions. What do we do with this extractive position that we’ve been relegated to in the global economy? Do we overcome it by taking it over? And who is the nation anyway? Is it the demos? Is it the state? Or do we actually try to get out of extractivism altogether and into a different economic model that has a different relationship to nature? I think the anti-extractivist position only makes sense, becomes intelligible, because there has been one hundred years of trying out other left-wing ideas—whether it’s nationalization, worker ownership, labor strikes—and actually getting to a point almost logically of realizing that we’re actually still in this position, and the watersheds are still being exhausted, and the species are still being obliterated, and our rights are still being violated, even if there’s a state-owned company, or even if there’s a bigger role for the state or workers in the process.

But that’s not at all to say that in the context of authoritarianism or outright monarchy, that the politics of extraction are going to look similar everywhere, right? Which is why we have to always be grounded in our particular context, and see the kind of really multifarious ways that extraction can take root in different societies.

ASC: That brings up the idea of where the extractive frontier is now: it’s in Chile; but it’s also in Portugal, it’s in Nevada. You seem to have found the case where “onshoring” and “friendshoring” are not just mountains of bullshit. The death knell of globalization has been horribly overstated. And when you think about the Inflation Reduction Act and Chips Act, part of the reason those things were even possible is because of the ways in which we’ve created pockets of Global South in the Global North. At one point later in the book you suggest that this might overturn the binary of South and North—but does it? Even if Western power is waning, American imperialism, it’s still there, right? It seems like there’s this sort of shadow picture of the global economy humming in the background of these stories in the book. What does this picture or, perhaps more directly, structure of global political economy look like?

TR: Let me try to do justice to your bigger question, which is something that, as you can see on the page, I experiment with myself: trying on different ways of apprehending the global political economy. This was a challenging one, and the rise of onshoring is what made me confront this challenge. I didn’t have to confront this as much when I was just someone who studied the Global South, where it’s easy to say that they’re in a peripheral, or at best semi-peripheral, position in the world economy. They have these extractive and/or lower-wage manufacturing sectors. They are relegated to this position by more powerful entities, and it’s all reinforced by the global architecture of trade and finance.

But when I started looking at places in the Global North that reminded me of the Global South, it forced me to consider: Why would Global North governments want to internalize the very sectors that they had always used to dominate the Global South? And when they do, it turns out that they’re doing it to communities that—in terms of a variety of social, economic, geographic characteristics—have a lot of similarities with the communities that are affected by extraction in the Global South. This forced me to think a little bit more rigorously about combined and uneven global capitalism and the territoriality of global production and extraction.

And I came away with a few conclusions that are not fully exhaustive but give us some reference points.

The first conclusion is that I do think that the terms Global South and Global North have explanatory power. One major fact that you can demonstrate with these categories is that the Global South is a net provider of raw materials, of embodied labor, energy, and land to the global economy: they give more of all those things than they get back. Not only that, but they are also a net loser in the monetary surplus of all of those exchanges. So these categories of Global North and Global South, which emanate from colonial, imperial, and neo-colonial relationships that have persisted over hundreds of years, still do a lot of explanatory work. So I do not get rid of them. I use them throughout the book.

The second conclusion I draw is that neither the Global South nor the Global North, or any country within them, whether it’s Bolivia or France, are internally homogeneous. You’ve got a domestic ruling class, and you have a working class in every place. You might have people that are so marginalized that they’re not even in any kind of wage labor relation. All of these places, North and South, are riven by inequality, exploitation; there’s a relative core and periphery. There are affluent neighborhoods in Santiago where you would never breathe the dust of a mining operation, even if your fortunes are tied to it. In other words: the core and periphery relation is not just global—it’s not just two poles of the earth. It’s fractal, and it goes all the way down. And I actually take this in part from Martín Arboleda’s amazing book [Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism] that I reviewed for The Baffler.

But, the third conclusion is that these parallelisms, between peripheries in the Global North and those in the Global South, aren’t exact equivalencies. You are just not at risk of the same level of life-threatening violence when you oppose a mine in the European Union as you are in Latin America. The data is clear on this. That’s just plain true—which at the same time doesn’t mean that Standing Rock and the brutal response of repressive forces there never happened.

To answer your question about Western power waning, it’s absolutely true that the United States has lost certain forms of hegemony, power, and leverage in the world—in large part by its own doing. In this context, we can make that important distinction, as political theorists have made, between hegemony and domination. The fact that the United States has lost, or abdicated, forms of soft power does not mean that our military is less strong or that our currency is less strong. The sheer weight of our consumer market gives us a certain power in the world. So while the United States has lost legitimacy, it has not yet lost some of the more brute forms of domination.

And the fact that the United States is actually losing power in certain domains is actually why we are onshoring minerals in the first place. I don’t want to be too full circle and neat about things, but it is the Chinese “threat” to U.S. economic primacy that has encouraged or propelled policymakers in the US on both sides of the political aisle to say, “Wait a second, we need to onshore these supply chains. We need more direct territorial access to certain resources. We need to copy some of the way China has done this holistic industrial policy.” But that’s actually a sign of U.S. weakness, not strength.

ASC: You’ve anticipated in part where I wanted to go next, as China is often very vexing in these kinds of analyses. In the terms you were just using, they are net exporters of embodied labor, energy, etc., even if they are also a rising power, certainly dominant in energy transition production. I am curious how you deal with this, especially because you give a fairly kind—or kinder than I would—hearing to the Biden administration and to the Europeans. And a lot of the policies that you endorse—planning first, efficiency, demand targets and caps, and so on—the Chinese have reams of plans for this stuff and are actually enacting a lot of them even while, importantly, they are far and away still the global center for manufacturing.

When I look at EU policies and firm examples, they’ve mostly faltered or failed. Even if the Biden administration’s policies had succeeded—which they didn’t—it would have been exactly the problem that you identify in the book: it’s an electric vehicle in every driveway, it’s the American way of life times ten. In that very brass-tacks way you were discussing EVs, China has already built the green global production network, with all those related material costs, all that extraction. They’re basically making what the world needs. So now the United States is going to build a redundant, parallel system? I’ve had this exact quandary posed to me many times as ecologically, it’s so irrational.

TR: I want to start with this idea that I give Biden and EU officials a “fair hearing” because it’s interesting to me that that’s how it reads. My curiosity was genuine—meaning, as someone that had primarily studied resource extraction in the context of more peripheral places in the world economy, I really found it immensely puzzling that European and U.S. policymakers would endeavor to onshore a whole set of mining sectors that for many, many years they had happily imported from in places where their own imperial forms of power had cheapened labor, cheapened nature, and cheapened communities such that they could get relatively cheap access to raw materials.

I truly wanted to know what these Western political elites were thinking. I wanted to understand this turn to geoeconomics and supply chain governance and dominance and how it relates to perceptions of how China has dominated these sectors. There’s a whole set of stories that Western policymakers tell about the ways that China did things the wrong way, but we’re going to do them the right way, even if it entails exactly what they accuse China of, i.e. manipulating markets and distorting trade.

I was genuinely interested in the kind of rhetoric of the West, just as I was also interested in learning from real scholars of Chinese history and Chinese industrial policy. I do not consider myself a China expert, but I did want to figure out how China actually came from a position of being part of the Global South to become at forefront of every major technology that we have, whether it’s the energy transition or computing. I wanted to understand what their paradigms of industrial policy are, specifically with lithium extraction. And now, fascinatingly enough, after a period of seeking lithium assets around the world, on top of a preexisting domestic lithium sector, China is also embracing “onshoring,” returning to expand domestic lithium mining because they, too, are concerned about geopolitical turbulence and the way that that might affect their own global supply chains. In a sense, it rhymes with why Western policymakers are belatedly onshoring.

I would like more industrial planning. I’m not sure I would like more authoritarianism. I’m saying that cheekily, but then there’s a really difficult question of we should democratically do planning. How do we plan with more state capacity, but in ways that actually involve forms of democracy, of worker control or input? These are extremely challenging questions that I think we can only ask by taking super seriously what Chinese political economy has achieved—but also if we have political commitments that are in tension with aspects of that political economy.

ASC: This opens onto a whole series of super thorny questions, from northern consumption to southern development to basic political definitions. What is democratic? What is authoritarian? I’m happy to say that China is illiberal—but I would also say that we’re not particularly democratic. If we think of democracy as responsive to popular demands or opinion, China is rather democratic, and we’re pretty authoritarian.

TR: These binary categories that we use as shorthand in political science do a real disservice. Most countries are in between. One of the several reasons that China went down the path of electric mobility was responsiveness to protests over pollution. And we have not seen the scale of responsiveness to pollution in the United States, in the black and brown communities that it affects and harms. Where is the government response to that? I don’t see it.

I also think there’s a way in which responsiveness does not always take an electoral form. There are ways that a regime like the Chinese regime is actually quite sensitive to discontent—maybe because it wants to control it, maybe because it wants to preempt it, but it’s sensitive to discontent, and it’s a real motor for political change within China.

ASC:  You end the book with this really beautiful utopian—in the best sense of the word—thought experiment about transportation and urban design which demonstrates just how much lithium mining could be reduced through careful planning and broader social imaginations. This builds on what’s almost a thesis statement in the middle of the book, where you basically say: minimize extraction, maximize public good. I love this. A pitch-perfect maxim.

At the same time, very early on, you make a distinction between the ecomodern and degrowth approaches, and you are fairly hands off, which I actually get. These debates can really draw you into a rabbit hole, I know. That said, the vision that you lay out—how do I put this—is simply incompatible with any ecomodernist position. In contrast, it is compatible with some degrowth positions and, well, reality. And you don’t come back and just say that the ecomodernists of all stripes are arguing for the other thing. They’re arguing for EVs in every driveway; they’re arguing for domes of air conditioning on everything, whatever magic, fantasy thing they’ve made up. So I’m wondering—pushing back a bit on the skepticism you voice about zero-sum dilemmas—why you don’t just say so? You make a compelling case that, that no one wins perfectly, and I think we have to be honest about that. You can have some tradeoffs that are less binary than, say, climate verses biodiversity, right? Or extraction versus no extraction or extraction versus energy. But of course, a whole bunch of people, including the groups I just cited, are going to be pitted against your ideas and vision, and politically, we usually call that zero-sum. There is no middle ground between those positions.

TR: We definitely need to extract less—and if we want to call that degrowth, I’m agnostic. And that’s a theme in this conversation, in the sense that I am agnostic about political vocabulary because I’m really committed to winning political movements. And that means that you must have an openness to, well, is degrowth the label we want to use for x campaign? There are different ways to name that, but it’s absolutely clear to me that we need to reduce how much pressure our economy puts on a variety of planetary boundaries. Period.

But even in a perfect version of ecosocialist utopia that we’re probably not gonna have any time soon, we are going to need material stuff from nature. And so these questions only become all the more live and all the more interesting thing in a world that is governed by the left or in which left-wing social movements have a lot more political power. Where are we going to mine for the input for technologies like publicly owned windfarms or community solar or electric busses? That stuff still has a supply chain. We still have the question of who’s going to work and make those busses and under what labor and regulatory conditions. Should local communities be the ones with final veto power over extractive projects, or do we have a more kind of multiscale or approach to democratic planning?

The questions actually only start to get interesting once you just make certain statements like “we should not have e-Hummers” and “we should ban private jets.” But those bans, which I’m in favor of, do not actually solve the question of extraction—they put it into sharper relief. We need a serious left project with all of its material underpinnings about what type of energy system we would like to build or what type of green ecological society we would like to build. Our left project is still going to have these thorny questions, and we’re just going to hopefully have better answers to them.

A lesson that I learned from Astra Taylor’s work on democracy is that if we were to live in such a political system, a real democracy, it wouldn’t be the end of social conflicts. It would instead be the political condition of having actually interesting, meaningful debates about how to collectively organize society.