There’s a paradox at the heart of the clean-energy revolution. It is impossible to decarbonize electricity, transportation, and other energy-hungry sectors without developing technologies that rely less on fossil fuels. At the same time, however, you can’t build these clean(er) replacements without extracting a lot of critical minerals and other raw materials. And that extraction is often both environmentally destructive and profoundly dismissive of the communities in which it takes place.
Navigating this contradiction and its implications is the project of Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which uses lithium—a material vital to technologies like batteries and electric vehicles that Riofrancos calls the “new oil”—as a case study in the perils and power games of present-day extractivism.
In a late 2025 conversation with Drilled, Riofrancos, a professor of political science at Providence College, described how the idea of green has proven to be a useful narrative for governments and corporate interests in their quest to bolster the mining industry; how the rationale for extracting lithium and other minerals, previously framed as part of the fight against the climate crisis, has increasingly become a cudgel for powerful nations to impose imperial dominance; and whether there are common tactics or strategies that have emerged among communities that have successfully resisted extractive exploitation.
The written version of the conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.
You mentioned in the acknowledgments to the book that one of the challenges was staying on top of all of the developments in the world of lithium and extraction and climate. From a reporting perspective, or even just an information-management perspective, I’m curious how you pulled that off.
There was certainly a moment where my book felt so perfectly timed with the Inflation Reduction Act, with Biden’s policies, with divisions within the Biden government around the harms of mining versus the need for green technologies. Then, of course, Biden doesn’t even run again for office. The Harris campaign doesn’t win. Trump becomes president. And there [were] a few months where I was concerned [that] maybe my book is about a bygone era in American politics and climate policy and supply chains.
Lo and behold, Trump is obsessed with critical minerals. What that teaches us [is] that critical minerals and the rush to mine them can be justified in all sorts of ways. That does not mean that I view the military or artificial intelligence justifications [for extraction] as the same as the climate justifications. I take the climate justifications much more seriously, and I think they come with real dilemmas. And yet we do see that there is a solid consensus among policymakers and political elites that these minerals are important, and that they’re shifting justifications for why they are important.
There’s a core paradox or trade off that you state up front, which is: On the one hand, extraction is necessary to save the planet. On the other hand, extraction threatens the environment, particularly at a local level. Can you describe that paradox and how it came to you?
This book originated while I was very active in the movement and policy thinking around a Green New Deal. Simultaneous to my work in advocating for a Green New Deal and helping to flesh out what [it] might look like, I had worked on resource extraction and the politics of extraction and the environmental and social impacts of extraction, particularly in Latin America, for a long time. I had been thinking about the politics of oil and mining in the Global South for about a decade.
At some point those clicked together. I realized that even under a best-case scenario—a Green New Deal, or even a less radical version—that didn’t mean the end of extraction. It just meant the extraction of different raw materials. Specifically, the technologies and infrastructures that are needed to furnish a zero-emissions economy and society themselves require resource extraction in order to be manufactured and built and deployed. That was something for me to sit with. I still believe that the climate crisis is the top existential threat facing the planet, humanity, ecosystems, everything that we should hold dear. And yet the technological “solutions” that will help us decarbonize entire economic sectors and realms of social life themselves require resource extraction.
[It] doesn’t mean that the trade off is a pure equivalency. It is urgently important to stop extracting fossil fuels and to move towards a renewable energy system. I say that explicitly because there are analysts and authors and activists for whom the environmental costs of the energy transition are too much to bear. They actually can become opposed to the energy transition because of its heavy mining footprint, for example. I don’t go there.
But that is only the beginning of the analysis. As I learned in researching and writing this book, and also doing a lot of community and public events and having these difficult conversations, there are a lot of different ways to transition from a fossil-based energy system to a zero-emissions energy system. There are different technological configurations. There are different distributions of costs and benefits and who bears both of those. And there are, as I conclude in the book, different levels of mining that can get us to zero emissions.
Mining is an extremely fraught process that results in irreversible landscape change and is associated with very high levels of social harm. You can’t just wish that away. Even a better-regulated mine, even less mining, will come with some of those harms. But what I learned in writing the book is that there are different ways forward. There’s much more extractive versions of the energy transition, and versions that intentionally try to reduce the material throughput and raw material usage and energy usage of the entire system.
That idea that there are not different options—the conventional wisdom, in some ways—gets at one of the most prominent themes of the book, which is this idea of narratives or stories. It’s a tool used by corporate interests in particular, [such as] the idea that the Atacama Desert in Chile is “just an empty desert, no life there.” Or, “brine [from which lithium is extracted] is not water.”
These narratives are sometimes very explicit. But there’s also a more intangible way in which, whether it’s extractive companies, other firms up and down the supply chain, governments, or even “green” companies, [they] rely on the idea that extracting lithium as much as possible as quickly as possible is the only path to tackle the climate crisis.
It might be counterintuitive to argue that narratives and language and framing and words are important when we’re talking about such brute material facts. Extraction is a material process. It’s a physical process. It’s technologically mediated. It involves human labor and machinery and stuff underground and long timescales of geological formation. All of these are things you can touch.
We could get pretty philosophical and say that despite the fact we can touch them, we only really apprehend them through the medium of language. The way those very material processes are framed, proposed, contested, deliberated around, has real material consequences. It matters whose framing and whose arguments and whose narratives win politically or economically or socially, in terms of how much stuff comes out of the ground, who gets access to it, where it is shipped, who profits from it, and who pays the environmental and social cost for it.
One of the fascinating things about studying the history of extraction, whether you frame it as a five- or six-hundred-year history, or a history on the span of a few decades or the last few years, is how contested it is as an economic sector, how much there are actors that have completely competing narratives about how extraction should be organized and to whose benefit, [and] how much those narratives can sometimes provide openings for real upheavals in power relations.
There are these moments where everything seems up for grabs in terms of the material substrate of the global economy. And that is because some group of people organized themselves, used words and framings to persuade one another, and then made a gambit in the global political [and] economic arena to reorganize how these supply chains operate under different terms. Usually that just results in a new round of struggle, where maybe the status quo or incumbent powers from the prior moment fight back with their own new narratives.
Just as extraction is itself this layered history of resources taken from similar landscapes over time, sedimenting one and another layer of extraction, often in the same places, like in Chile, there [are] also layers of language and ideas and narratives, where we get both sudden changes in how people think about things, but also the repurposing of historical languages.
At the end of the day this all comes back to power and power relations. You talk about how supply chains are basically just “vectors” for how power is imposed. The modern incarnation of what you were describing is what you call “green dominance” in the book. When I first saw that, I thought it [meant] the coming dominance of green, clean-energy things. But it actually [means] using the idea of “green” to dominate.
Green dominance is the idea that the supply chains for green technologies—whether lithium batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels—that are part of the process of decarbonization and thus labeled as “green” are themselves battlefields of geoeconomic dominance. “Geoeconomics”—a combination of geopolitics and economics—highlights the fact that economic activity can itself be part and parcel of geopolitical rivalry, and often actually is.
We’re certainly in an era where we have really intensified forms of great power conflict that relate to who is at the vanguard of different technological frontiers. Whether those are “green” technologies, artificial intelligence and semiconductors, [or] military technologies, this suite of technologies has become an arena of intense competition. One key form that that competition takes is the willingness of states—especially, though not exclusively, great powers—to use their state apparatus and their policymaking tools to directly intervene in the economy in order to, for example, promote domestic firms or the investment of domestic firms to ensure access to raw materials [and] advanced technologies.
What I noticed in the course of my fieldwork and research is that a set of technologies that climate advocates and energy wonks have been talking about for years as essential to get us off of fossil fuels, suddenly took on this geopolitical valence. Starting in the late 2010s, early 2020s, policymakers in the Global North as well as in China began to see a security framing over these technologies: Whoever could develop them fastest was going to be a major power in the new world order. There was a real fork in the road. It could have been the case that Western powers saw how advanced China was, realized that they were not going to immediately catch up, [and] realized it’s not necessarily a zero-sum game. China’s export exporting this stuff around the world. Let’s collaborate. Let’s do joint ventures with Chinese companies. Let’s invite Chinese scientists and engineers into the West so that we can learn from them.
Instead, repurposing a very old imperial playbook where you just assume that the West is supposed to be on top, it manifested as a threat. Instead of a cooperative or collaborative approach to China’s rapid green development, policymakers sought to secure these supply chains, to dominate them, to bring them home, to territorialize them within the West, and to do so using a suite of economic policies ranging from tariffs to industrial policy to subsidies, loans, et cetera.
This put the climate movement in a really difficult position. I myself had a lot of very interesting but quite challenging conversations with colleagues in the climate movement during the early Biden years, because Biden framed China as an enemy of the West. He wasn’t the first to do so, but he reiterated that framing, and he sought dominance over these supply chains rather than cooperation with China.
I want listeners to understand that it was a fork in the road, that it did even divide the climate movement in certain ways. We are absolutely in a world in which energy technologies and computing technologies are domains of geopolitical competition.
You describe in the book how as part of this process, the idea of onshoring or controlling supply chains started out as a means to an end, the end being fighting climate change. But for a lot of entrenched interests, the end has just become dominance. You could probably describe what’s happening in the second Trump administration [as], scrape off the green and keep the dominance. Suddenly the end is just geopolitical or geoeconomic power.
Absolutely. I alluded to Trump’s obsession with critical minerals. Critical minerals are minerals that are considered vital to both economic functioning and national security, and that have some vulnerability in their supply. Minus his brief bromance with Elon Musk, he’s been pretty anti-renewable energy. He hates wind turbines. He’s no lover of lithium batteries for electric vehicles, but he has been very consistent in both terms in office in promoting critical-minerals extraction in the US, even when, again, it seems at odds with what their main use case is.
The main use of lithium right now and for the foreseeable future is electric vehicle batteries. Not even military hardware or other things that Trump is in favor of come close to how much EVs play a role in that market. So it’s odd. However, he’s very pro-mining. He’s very pro-extraction. The mining lobby is an important part of the Republican coalition. We could explain this in political economy terms. [During the] first Trump government, he adds lithium to the critical minerals list and initiates certain fast tracking and forms of deregulation in order to move certain [extractive] projects ahead more quickly.
One of those projects is Thacker Pass, [a huge lithium mine] in Nevada that was also very supported by the Biden administration. It was the Biden government that ensured that Thacker Pass had a Department of Energy loan that offset three quarters of its capital costs of construction. We have lithium declared a critical mineral under Trump One. We have the fast tracking of public hearings and the regulatory process for Thacker Pass. Under Biden, that mine gets an enormous loan. In Trump Two, that same mine and same company, Lithium Americas, Trump has taken equity stakes in. The Department of Energy under Trump is now a partial owner of this.
So we see this incredible through line where governments that are seemingly polarized on a ton of issues, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, all glom on to the idea of critical minerals, to lithium in particular, and to state intervention to make sure these projects move forward over and against significant community dissent. For Thacker Pass, there were multiple lawsuits, there were multiple protest camps, there were even protests in the capital of Nevada over it. There was significant local opposition. Despite that, a Democratic president was willing to move ahead. A Republican president, less shocking, was willing to move ahead.
Critical minerals themselves are elevated to this really important geopolitical status. It doesn’t matter if you are framing them for green purposes, as Biden was, [or] if you’re framing them for military or other technological purposes, or just the sheer love of resource extraction, as Trump is. It’s almost taken on a life of its own. I call this a “critical minerals consensus.” That’s bipartisan in the US.
As climate advocates, we need to be very specific about why a certain mineral is important, [and] under what regulatory and economic terms we support its extraction, rather than say, Of course, it’s a critical mineral, so it must be important. That is not thinking critically, no pun intended. That is just going along with what has become an elite consensus not only across the political spectrum, but across the public and private sector. We need to have our own ideas of what minerals are important, how much we need to serve social or planetary needs, and what form of governance is adequate to the extremely environmentally impactful nature of the mining industry.
You spend a lot of time in the book reporting on communities in the United States, Chile, and elsewhere that are trying to engage, and in some cases resist, the imposition of these extractive industries. The vast majority are indigenous lands or indigenous communities nearby who are most affected. Are there any commonalities or tactics or strategies that you’ve observed among these communities [and] people who are resisting extractive capitalism that have made them successful?
There are two ways to break down this question. One is what causes militant and well-organized protest in the first place. The other is what determines how successful they are in achieving their goals. It’s important to note that not every community resists mining. Also, that doesn’t mean that communities that don’t resist are happy with it. It’s just that certain factors tend to need to combine to get communities to take the risk of resistance, which is actually risky in a variety of ways.
There needs to be a combination of environmental and social harm that is predicted to happen or clearly going to happen as a result of the project. Maybe the project would majorly deplete local water supplies or reduce local biodiversity. Maybe it’s a more social issue, where the project would be sited in a landscape that is considered ceremonial or sacred or that overlaps with another use. Maybe there’s a more economic concern. These are different grievances or concerns that communities might have, but in and of themselves, that tends to not quite get to the threshold of active resistance.
With anti-extractive protests, it’s the combination of a concern about a specific harm—oftentimes more than one harm—and a feeling of being excluded from decision-making. That is a very combustible combination. You think your watershed is going to be depleted and you show up to a hearing that is organized by the local government or the company itself and you try to raise your hand and bring that concern and are shut down and told that you’re stupid because you don’t understand how watersheds work. Or the way that the information is presented is not in your native language because you’re an indigenous person and it’s in Spanish rather than your indigenous language. Or maybe you do things that look like protest and are repressed or get a death threat. It’s the combination of exclusion or repression or feeling shut out from the policy process, and there being very high-stakes harms involved, that tends to activate communities into more serious and risky levels of collective action.
And when I say risk, I don’t just mean the fact that if you put your body in front of a bulldozer, you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s not just the risk from the literal activity of protest itself, but also the fact that the mining industry is rightfully notorious for human rights violations and allegations, including outright killing of land defenders and environmental defenders. In fact, the mining industry or extractive industries writ large are number one—over agribusiness, forestry, a whole host of other nasty industries that also have bad reputations—for the number of people that die. This is a real risk, especially in Latin America and Africa and Indonesia and a lot of the hotspots of mining.
So [a] community needs to have a sense of shared purpose, have a sense that they have plans for how they’re going to manage that risk, feel okay with the physical threats that are going to be lobbed against them, and maintain a sense of steadfastness in the face of very sophisticated divide-and-conquer strategies that the mining industry now uses to try to undermine this process of collective action and popular unity. With all that in mind, you can already tell what would make for a more successful protest. If you do have a level of community organization, that shared social fabric, that sense of “we know each other, we’re going to meet one another, we’re going to set up these meetings, we have a shared social network.”
If it’s a community with pre-existing social contact and shared activities and shared common spaces that they tend to use together on the land that’s going to be affected, we see more leverage for that community. We also see that the earlier in the process the community gets activated, agitated, and starts resisting, the more likely they are to at least win some demand. If right away, from that first public hearing during early exploration, your community gets organized, that’s a very good sign about the possibility that you can actually shape decision-making, negotiation, [and] even prevent the mine, if that’s your goal.
Latin America is a place where at this point we have a lot of what we can call stranded assets, whether officially declared or not—mining projects that have not moved past the advanced exploration stage because there was such vociferous resistance to them that it scared off investors. Once the mining company loses the financiers, [it] really can’t move forward.
There can be real victories—whether it’s stopping the mine or stalling it to get better governance and better regulation; whether it’s winning economic benefits, resources for local environmental monitoring, [more] dignified work out of the mine, [or] whatever the community’s goals are. The more organized [and] the more unified at an earlier stage, the more successful they tend to be. And they really can be successful, despite the David and Goliath power relations.
