The Extractive Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College, a strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. She is the author of three books, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, published by Duke in 2020; Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, published by WW Norton in 2025, which is the reason we’re meeting; and, before both of these books, she co-authored A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal published by Verso in 2019 with Daniel Aldana Cohen and Alyssa Battistoni and Kate Aronoff. Kind of a who’s who of cool left wing women.

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Protean Magazine || I am Laleh Khalili. I’m a professor of Gulf Studies at Exeter in the UK, and a great admirer of Thea’s work. So when Protean Magazine approached me to see if I would interview her, I jumped on it. I use Thea’s books for my classes. I reference them in all sorts of places, but this interview gave me a chance to actually read all of her work together, which is a very fun thing to do when you’re a nerd but also they are very urgent, very good books.

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So to begin, your first book, Resource Radicals is really wonderful. It’s an account of conflict between indigenous communities in Ecuador against their left wing government over what you call two different kinds of leftism. And I’m quoting from you, “on the one hand, the administration’s resource nationalism and focus on economic development, and on the other, the anti-extractivism of grassroots activists who condemn the government’s disregard for nature and indigenous communities.” That book has a really amazing puzzle at the heart of it, which is, of course, increasingly of significance to places that are subjected to extractivism. But A Planet to Win, the book that you’d written before that, was a call for a green New Deal. You’ve been really active in both grassroots and policy organizations. How did you move between those two books—one, a very scholarly book, one kind of very practical—and what kinds of things did they offer to your new book Extraction?

Thea Riofrancos: All of the books are related in this nested, iterative way. Before Resource Radicals was published, when I had already done most of the research and writing for it, I had an opportunity to go abroad to do new fieldwork. Meanwhile, I’d had some conversations that led me to understand the potential importance of lithium. And the reason these conversations emerged is because, as you just detailed, I already focused a lot on extractive sectors and was already interested in Latin America for a host of reasons. I’d also become active as an organizer for a just energy transition and for public ownership in the energy sector and other policies that would lift up those left exploited and polluted by our fossil fuel system. In that moment, I learned that lithium is at the crux of all of these issues. It’s an extractive sector, but it’s not just any old extractive sector. It’s one of the set of extractive sectors that is primed to become very salient and undergo a lot of growth, including in the sheer number of mines around the world, and it is related to something that I very much care about, which is climate action and an energy transition.

I started to think about how all of this connects, and I honestly started to feel a bit internally conflicted about advocating for what we began to call a Green New Deal in the US, knowing that a Green New Deal—if we think about the global supply chains that would furnish the inputs, the goods, and the services that would comprise it—we realize that those supply chains are sprawling across the earth. And if we go to their most upstream nodes, we get into some pretty toxic mining and refining and processing, not to mention the container ships which go around the world transporting very heavy ore with very polluting bunker fuel. You start to game it out, and you begin to think, is a domestic Green New Deal just the same old extractive capitalism for the rest of the world? That was my first way of grasping this topic. And as I was thinking about all of these things and talking about them with colleagues and comrades, and just starting to get at the edges of this dilemma, myself and the co-authors that you mentioned got the opportunity to write a book about the Green New Deal.

I already had the plans to go to Chile to start what I thought was going to be an academic project on the lithium sector in Latin America. But my first stab at this issue was in a popular book with a left-wing audience in mind for Verso, and the last chapter of that book, which we called “Recharging Internationalism”—a play on words about batteries and global supply chains—was the first time that, for a public audience, I really started to analyze how we think about this from the US left perspective. How do we align our principles of global climate justice and also global economic and political justice with a domestic transition that might have uneven, unequal, and exploitative and environmentally harmful impacts in the rest of the world?

Writing while I was doing field work was honestly one of the most intense writing experiences I’ve ever had. It was like being a journalist like reporting on the ground, having your story go out the next day while events are still unfolding. I felt a sense of both anxiety about getting this topic that was still new to me right, so to speak, and adequately representing its complexity, but also an awareness that events were going to overtake me. And in that moment, I decided that I very much wanted to continue to work on this for the then academic book that I was planning on writing. I started coming up with a provisional analysis, not of how to eliminate these contradictions, but how to think about them holistically enough from a critical political economy perspective that would create certain openings for ways that these tensions between our commitment to climate action on the one hand, and our commitment to protecting communities from the ravages of extractivism on the other, could be in more generative dialogue with one another, rather than seeming like a zero-sum conflict. That’s the origins of this book. Of course, eventually decided to not write it as an academic book, and I can talk about that more if you want, but that preference became very clear to me in the midst of doing fieldwork and writing about the Green New Deal.

LK: Actually do talk about that a little bit, because I am interested in knowing what made you decide to write this for a larger audience.

TR: There are two answers to that question. One concerns shifts in the real world, and the other concerns the nature of the topic and how that related to politics I was involved in. I started doing fieldwork in January 2019. But obviously I had to buy my tickets ahead of time, so I was planning this in 2018. I would tell people that I have this new idea about studying lithium in Latin America, a new extractive sector linked to the energy transition, and they’d respond, “What is lithium? I think it’s like a psychiatric drug” or “I’ve never heard of it,” and this happened even among relatively an educated milieu. But as time went on, it became a topic that I started to read about in headline news, a topic that is much more front and center, including for multiple presidential administrations in the US and multiple leaderships of the EU Commission, and China, and Latin America. Lithium and a whole host of other “critical minerals” for the energy transition became topics in the public dialogue. And it felt to me that that was where my writing should go, that that’s where the audience is.

The other thing was that an impetus for this book was the opportunity to witness an extractive sector, in this case lithium, rapidly develop into a much bigger market. Imagine if we had been around in the 1930s or 20s, studying the origins of the oil economy, a moment where you can see it on the horizon. This excitement of observing something important in its nascent stages combined and intensified my political commitments—the fact that I was wrestling with this as a real, practical dilemma for climate leftists in the Global North and everywhere in the world. I realized that the political motivations of the text would not shine through as clearly or be realized in any kind of practical intervention if I wrote a book for an academic press that is unaffordable to most and unintelligible to many more.

LK: It totally makes sense. And I think in a moment where somebody like Elon Musk will say, we’ll kill whoever we want to in order to get the lithium that we need, that the urgency of speaking to a larger audience definitely becomes clear.

I want to ask you about the fact that you focus on Latin America. I love reading acknowledgements, and so it was really interesting to read your acknowledgments at the end of extraction and the way that you invoke your familial connections to Latin America. Can you talk a little bit about that, please?

TR: The reason that I got intellectually and politically interested in Latin America takes us all the way back to my undergraduate degree, which was entirely at the intersection of my family background and contemporary political events. I was in college in the 2000s in the early days of the Pink Tide, and as someone that already identified as a leftist and had been an activist in high school, I was really inspired by what was happening in Latin America, like many of us in the left at that moment. I was reading about it on Indymedia, or Upside Down World, these left-wing independent news outlets that were writing a lot about Chavez and Morales and the indigenous movements and the new constitutions etc…

I also had a very direct family connection. Argentina was a place where the economic crises of the late 90s and early 2000s hit particularly hard, a really devastating balance of payments crisis that snowballed into a financial crisis, and that affected the bank deposits of ordinary people—it was just a cataclysmic moment. And not long after the crisis, Argentinians elected a left wing government, and those forces achieved political hegemony that lasted for quite a while. My grandmother and aunts were living there, my dad, who was born in Buenos Aires and immigrated to the US as an adolescent, was at that time living partly in Argentina and partly in the US. So I felt very personally affected by what was happening, but it also felt like a much bigger political story. And I think that combination is very invigorating when you and your family, your kinship networks, your communities, are caught up in the thrust of history and the history is itself very interesting to observe. Neoliberalism and the political crisis that it prompted, then the crises within the left-wing governments—I’ve just continued to follow that story and realized how central over the years, increasingly, resource extraction has become to understanding political conflict and political change in the region.

LK: So let me repeat how utterly beautiful your book is. There is, in the opening chapter, an account of you going out to the Atacama desert and getting caught in a cataclysmic rainstorm, and these rainbows start popping up like cartoons over all the hills. But then you also follow that up with this incredible account of how these major thunderstorms, which create floods, end up shaping the lithium deposits and these saline lakes beneath the surface of Atacama Desert, from which the lithium is extracted. So utterly beautiful, also for a left brain engineer like I am, it was just really beautiful to see how it actually works, to see how those deposits develop. Reading that introductory passage reminded me of Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light, which also takes place in the Atacama Desert. So as you probably know, in the film Guzman talks about astronomers sitting in the famous observatory in the Atacama Desert, looking at light that has traveled millions of light years at the same time as mothers of the disappeared wander around the Atacama Desert looking for the bones of their children that were crushed and strewn across the desert. But he also talks about some of the workers’ barracks from 19th century mining.You mentioned some of this interconnected history when you talk about nitrate mining in the 19th century. Can you talk a little bit about the Atacama Desert and why it’s such a good lens for thinking about extraction today?

TR: I want to get into two aspects of your question. First, how I attempted to immerse myself in the landscape and describe it scientifically but also experientially; and then second, how I analyzed the political economic history of the region and why it’s so exemplary of extractive frontiers, a term that I use in the book that we can unpack a little bit.

There’s a challenge in visiting the Atacama as an outsider—in immersing yourself and trying to apprehend this landscape and then describe it for others—which is that there’s a real tendency to use extraterrestrial metaphors to describe it. It’s almost hard to escape them, because visually, there’s a lot of analogs: some of the place names are called Moon Valley, for example, to get at the lunar aesthetic of these expanses; in some areas of the desert, you may not see people around aside from the tour that you might be on. There is a kind of monochromatic aspect to the landscape. It’s also extremely dramatic in terms of altitude and depths, with low basins, super tall mountains, and these crusty, cratery, salt flats. And so again, it invites these outer space metaphors. The problem with those metaphors, as visually arresting as they might be, is that they are more than exoticizing. Exoticizing is an exotic place on Earth. These instead are fundamentally otherizing in the way that only the word alien can really capture. Treating a place as alien can often be a prelude to just saying it’s fundamentally Other, it’s environmentally and socially disposable, or there are no people here, it’s a terra nullius. So there’s a challenge in trying to relay the drama of the landscape in language that makes sense to people without falling into the tropes of a colonial genre of literature.

In fact, as I detail in the book, the Atacama Desert is an early example of the way that literature just depicted entire landscapes and entire civilizations as empty, meaningless, aside from their potential resource wealth. When I went back to read the Spanish chronicles of their own conquest and of their interaction with this landscape that they viewed as fundamentally alien and inhospitable to life and empty of anything, and then I read the scientific record—by which I mean the archeological record, the evolutionary biology record, the geological record—I realized how wrong they were. They did not see what was in front of them, hiding in plain sight, because of the colonial gaze and because of their limited knowledge. They couldn’t see that there had been, for millennia already, indigenous civilizations, not only discrete communities and cultures, but, and to invoke the perspective of World Systems Theory, all of these networks of trade, of logistics, of cultural exchange, of resource appropriation from the coast to the highlands; all of this was happening, but they couldn’t see it.

To get into the economic history a little bit now, the rupture in Chile, which was a real one, of independence from the Spanish Empire, did not lead to some egalitarian social democracy, but instead, as it did basically everywhere in the Americas, to a Creole dominated settler colonial state (Creole is often the word used in Latin America for the European-descendent political class that felt more aligned with an emergent global economic and financial elite than with the masses of their own society). Spanish capital exits; but enter British capital and enter American capital. These were the connections that were forged in terms of structures of corporate ownership, in terms of the financing of mining activities, in terms of forms of knowledge and expertise often imported from elsewhere to build the Chilean state through territorial conquest, resource extraction, cartography, by which I mean the mapping of the territory which established the state as a state, bringing the state into its more peripheral territories.

These exercises of mapmaking and infrastructural building and resource extraction then set the foundations of a political economy that was fundamentally based in extraction and export. The Chilean economy is built on the pillars of mining, agriculture and forestry. Those are different sectors, but they all share an extractive relationship to the earth and to communities, and are oriented to global commodity markets and global finance. Again, bringing in World Systems Theory, or theories of the rise of certain imperial powers, we can see the kind of salience of specific resources that were important to particular moments of capital accumulation, and then moments of substitution or disruption, where a resource that was really important, like salt nitrate, gets replaced with synthetic fertilizer, which creates ghost towns and economic busts. And you can see, I mean literally in the landscape, but also more figuratively in how we might narrate the history, that there are these layers of different moments of extractive development, some of which die away because the resource is no longer salient to capitalist production. But some are maintained, and then we have an additive process. The end result is that Chile is the number one copper producer on Earth and the number two lithium producer, along with those other extractive sectors that I mentioned that are more in the south of the country.

LK: This is just an amazing thing to hear, the idea of the air, the gaze and the practices are just so incredibly familiar. And it is interesting when, to me working on the Middle East, that the desert is what it invokes it, that it’s an ecosystem that is often imagined as being completely barren, as you say, not only of humans, but of life. And then that is used as a kind of a frontier, basically, in order to go forth and colonize and extract—this is exactly the story that can be told about oil.

But the other thing that you do, which is really wonderful, is that you also give us histories, not only of this incredibly rich place—rich economically and historically and politically, but also as a source of lithium. You go on to talk about lithium batteries, which is what is discussed in a chapter called Lithium Frontiers. Can you talk a little bit about both the making of lithium batteries, the history of lithium batteries, and why you use this frontier metaphor, please?

TR: I’m going to start with the frontier metaphor, because I realized that I hinted at it already, and it’s a good one to address off the bat, given that it’s in the title of the book. Similar to grappling with how to convey the beauty and drama of the Atacama Desert, and how to do that without the colonial gaze, I also grappled with using the words frontiers or extractive frontiers. It’s an analytic language, and there’s a ton of work in critical geography, as well as in other academic disciplines, about what frontiers are or hinterlands or, to go back again to World Systems Theory, peripheries. So there’s an analytic language, but there’s also an ideological language. “Frontiers” are part of the propaganda of colonial expansion and imperialism, the idea that you’re at a frontier where you’re encounterng the natives, and it’s lawless, and there’s a clash of civilizations to use Huntington’s terminology, or that there’s a space that is ungoverned, or a space that is empty of humans, empty of any ecological value aside from the resources.

Thus it’s tricky to use the word frontier. On the one hand, I think that it is a useful lens. On the other hand, how do you use it in a way that doesn’t reinforce those colonial imaginaries? And so I try to think about frontier both as a set of physical places, but also as a set of ideas about those places. Probably the person that’s influenced me the most on how to conceptualize what a resource frontier is was Julie Klinger, who wrote an amazing book called Rare Earth Frontiers, and the way that she defines a frontier, which I pick up on and cite her for, is that it’s a place that’s both strategic and sacrificable. It names a contradiction, and that contradiction structures the dynamic and contentious political economy of resource frontiers. Because, on the one hand, there’s something really valuable there, whether it is a subsoil resource like oil, copper, lithium, or maybe the soil itself makes it a particularly good place to grow a specific crop, and we’ve decided this thing is really important for our political economy. The place has something considered valuable from the perspective of capitalism and from the state. But it’s also a place that doesn’t matter, or it’s irrelevant who lives there, what the ecosystems are, who the communities are—all that matters is the resource, which means that you are implicitly or explicitly saying we’re going to get at this resource and get through these people and the nature and just raze them to the ground, relocate them, dispossess them entirely.

Frontier names a duality where the place is important but the people are unimportant. And that, as you can imagine, over time, doesn’t hold up. You can brutally dominate people, and you can do that for a while, and there’s many examples in history and contemporary politics of that, but people don’t like being brutally dominated, especially when they know they’re being dominated because they live on top of or near something really valuable. The same resources or geographic location that makes a frontier strategically important from the perspective of elites can also give some leverage to local communities, and because of that, that geographic position can become a chokepoint, potentially, in global supply chains and global production.

Part of the reason I’m bringing in this idea of contentious politics and the fact that communities and workers can use that strategic resource location as a form of leverage over capital, is that one thing I’m trying to avoid with the term extractive frontiers is simply referring to these places as “sacrifice zones.” I use that language sparingly in the book, mainly because other people who whose work I like and respect use that terminology. I want to speak to where they’re at. But I do find that terminology a bit problematic, and the reason I find it problematic has to do with what I’ve learned from frontline activists, some of whom do not like that terminology, because, as you can imagine, it paints the whole place as just a mute, passive victim. But in fact, when you go to these places, it’s way more interesting and heterogeneous and dynamic than that. Yes, some people are sacrificed, literally, people die in the daily course of extractive capitalism, people are killed actively by hired guns on the part of companies or states, by unsafe working conditions, by avalanches of mining rocks that breach their tailing basins. Death does occur. Sacrifice happens. But it’s not the only thing happening. There’s also worker resistance, there’s also community resistance. And there are also levels of working-class attachment—and we could call them complicity, if we want to be morally judgmental—in that there are working class people and indigenous people that align with the extractive economy, because they see that they get some benefits from it. There’s a whole array of dynamics, and that’s only at the local level, not even getting into national politics, global geopolitics. I find “sacrifice” simplifying and flattening and “extractive frontier,” I think, gets us to that idea that there is a territorial place. It’s where capital meets nature. It might also be a frontier zone, in the sense of near a border between states, and there’s a resource endowment of some sort, and all of that motivates an interesting political economy.

LK: That’s really fantastic. There is a tendency in academic literature to use these incredibly pessimistic terminologies, because obviously what we are doing is we are looking into the abyss. I remember 20 years ago when Agamben was all the rage and his discussion of the persons who had no personhood always rubbed me the wrong way, because it was always very much like a sacrifice zone, the sort of the person that is pushed out into nothingness, the muselman, the person living in the camps—it ends up actually completely flattening these processes of extraction and resistance to them. So I love the fact that you have spent some time discussing this.

Can I ask you a question that I think we obviously know the response to, but I would like for you to explain it, because I thought the explanation was absolutely brilliant. Is the extraction of lithium from the ground entirely governed by market forces, and if not, what is at play there. Can you talk a little bit about the politics of that?

TR: Yeah, extraction is absolutely not entirely governed by market forces. One of the things I like about extractive sectors, and I imagine you feel similarly from having read your work, is that they are really good sectors to understand political economy. It is impossible to do any kind of rigorous investigation of any extractive sector without having both the state and capitalism in your analytic view in some way. That doesn’t mean they’re equally powerful. It doesn’t mean I conflate the state and capitalism per se, but it’s just impossible to study these sectors without attending to both. I would say in my view that the state is fundamentally relevant to capital accumulation in all sectors, but I think in some economic domains it’s more salient, more visible and more unavoidable as a fact. And with extractive sectors, this is the case for a number of reasons.  Resource endowments or resource deposits are within the boundaries of states and within their territories, with the exception of so-called failed states—not a term I love—but with the exception of states that have difficulty governing their own territories. In most cases, any type of company, whether it’s a multinational shareholder-owned company, whether it’s a state owned, whatever the type of mining or oil company is, has to work through the state in some way in order to access those resources. In many cases—at least since the mid 20th century, let’s say, in the Global South—the state technically, although not always in a very substantive way, owns its resources. It owns a subset of resources that might be in a constitutional clause. It might be an ordinary law, regulatory decree, whatever it is, but the state is the owner. In the Global North, and especially in the Anglo-American sphere, that’s not so much the case; oftentimes the private landowners technically own what’s underneath. But those interesting exceptions aside, for the most part, you have to work through states just to get access to the asset. The asset is mediated by the state. In any other case, even if that ownership question is not relevant, you still have to go through the state to get permits and licenses. In other cases where it’s not only that the state owns it, but that there’s a state-owned company, and there’s a requirement for a certain kind of division of ownership, the foreign resource company needs to enter a joint venture with a state company.

Basically, the state is much more involved than in other economic sectors. And this is even true in the breach, or maybe especially true in the breach, because if the state were not so relevant to asset access at a fundamental level, then we wouldn’t have so much regulatory capture and corruption. If you want to get to this asset, and that’s your end goal—and then, of course, a profitable exploitation of it is your fiduciary obligation to your shareholders—and you have to work through this annoying bureaucracy and the state, you’re probably going to figure out how to infiltrate and permeate the state in all sorts of ways, whether licitly—not literal corruption—or through literal corruption. There was a lot of evidence for corruption in Chile around lithium that I detail in the book. And in general, the mining sector is notorious for having some of the most naked forms of corruption. We also see a long history of mining and oil companies willing to actually participate in pretty brutal forms of repression and co-participate with the state in order to make sure that their returns on investment on this asset get realized. And so you have all of these interesting and oftentimes perverse or morally hazardous interactions between state agencies, elected officials, political parties, state owned companies, contractors of all sorts, and then these foreign capitalists, multinational firms, international financiers, and to understand extraction, you have to work through the thicket of where state and capital interface, but on very asymmetric terms, especially in the Global South context. But I would say that asymmetry can also be the case within the Global North.

LK: I think that you’re absolutely right. Even in places where, as you say, for example, the sub-ground resources are supposedly owned by private owners, that is even also a site of encounter between the state and capital, between the state and private ownership. I mean, so many of the laws that are used to dictate everything, international treaties, parameters for extraction, actually emerged out of precisely that encounter in the United States. The laws emerge in the United States, for example, on how to define subsea oil, who gets to own the oil that sits offshore—the federal government or the Texas Railroad Commission gets to decide the parameters for the exploitation of oil. And then laws and regulations are written around that, and then they’re exported everywhere. And so the extractive arena really is the arena to see the way that politics works, the way that the state and capital encounter one another, the moments of clash, moments of collaboration, moments of competition.

Which brings me to a question that I had not included in these the questions that I had sent you but which you’ve referred to several times in the discussion. You said that you’re really influenced by World Systems Theory. How do you think your work responds to that older generation of what was actually quite a radical revision of political economic understanding of global politics. How do you locate yourself vis a vis that earlier literature?

TR: Some of the fundamental concepts I use come from World Systems Theory. The language of peripheries, which comes up a lot in the book, which I use somewhat interchangeably with extractive frontiers, depending on the situation. I also use language that comes from dependency theory, which was in a lot of dialogue with World Systems Theory. They’re part of the same intellectual genealogy. Another key concept is  unequal exchange and then the modifications of unequal exchange that came starting in the 1980s of unequal ecological exchange, which was an innovation on the original idea.

But to focus on isolated concepts, I think, understates the insights I glean from this tradition. One is that we need a planetary perspective. Like, no matter what scale on which we’re actually doing the empirical research. We could be spending a year doing a village ethnography, we could be doing multi-sited research, we could be doing a digital ethnography of how people interact online. It does not matter in terms of the scale or social setting of the empirics, your perspective is global or planetary, because you’re interested in something like the co-constitution of that place, that node, that locale, with broader processes that are inevitably trans-local, and maybe at the limits, like planetary or global.

LK: I love it, Thea. I totally agree.

TR: I thought I was speaking a little to the choir here on this point. As I’ve often had to explicitly say, first of all, “global” can’t just be an abstraction if we are actually going to study this scale. I mean, like, where are you in the globe? The UN, the IMF? Those are places that purport to have a certain globality to them, but they are in fact literal places where you would have to go interview people at the UN or at the IMF, or go into their archives. So even if you’re supposedly studying the whole world, you end up going to specific places to actually access your data or your research subjects.

That’s one thing. And then second is, the world is a whole collection of places. If you want to understand what the global conjuncture is, what global political economy is, you inevitably have to understand some particularities. And I’ve always found it very interesting how much of the world you can see in a place. And also when you do try to grasp or apprehend global processes, processes that are world-spanning—logistics, finance, trade, you know, the architecture of the political economy—you can see how much particularities of time and place inflect these grand political projects. I think that that’s not a unique insight of World Systems Theory, there are other versions of the global, the planetary. You know, there’s other social science traditions of how to apprehend those relations. But I do think that it’s the starting point—like Wallerstein said, the unit of analysis is the world system. I think that the starting point that there is an interconnected web of economic and ecological relations helps you understand the particularities of time and place without them becoming just exotic or esoteric features of some particular culture.

It also helps us check a variety of analytic cultural and political biases, meaning the over attribution of big dynamics to “oh reason that extraction is so hard to escape is because this one leader in the Middle East made a bad decision.” It’s like, well, let’s zoom out a little bit and see what the global pressures are on these places, or how they came to be. Which is not to excuse the complicity of local elites, but it is to at least put them in a perspective of the kind of contradictions and trade-offs that the global economy confronts them with.

I could go on, but I just want to add one other thing. This doesn’t always come out in World Systems Theory or dependency theory approaches, but it does in some of them, and it’s certainly something that we can take away in a more nuanced reading. Namely: these designations of periphery or satellite or hinterland, or whatever we want to call it, core or metropole, whatever, those relationships are not just at the global scale. You can divide the world up that way analytically, but inevitably, that is actually a bit simplistic. What we really want to do is understand that at every scale, from the most local to the most global, and everything in between, there are relationships of core and periphery, and that is actually very helpful, I think, to also caution against certain readings of like the Global South as monolithically oppressed, or the Global North as monolithically powerful. There’s a crude version of World Systems Theory that would just say that, but I think the best authors in that tradition, or at least the kind of conceptual architecture that they offer to us, can be made multi-scalar, and I think that gets way closer to helping us explain various political and economic outcomes. Like the comprador bourgeoisie, for example, is very relevant to extraction, to the oil economy, you know, looking at those local interests that align with global capitalist interests, and vice versa.

LK: We’ve already spoken almost an hour, so I’m going to move to green capitalism–

TR: Can I say something really quickly? You’ve asked me a question twice that I still haven’t answered. I don’t know if it’s necessary or not, but it’s gotten wrapped up in other questions. The other part the question I have not answered is just, what’s the deal with lithium?

Lithium is an alkaline metal. The reason this book focuses on lithium is because it’s a great example of all of the tensions and contradictions and dilemmas that we’re talking about, which is that it’s an extractive resource that under current technological conditions is necessary for the decarbonization of an entire economic sector and part of another one. And so what I mean by that is that in order to decarbonize the transportation sector, which in the US, which is where I’m sitting, is our number one source of carbon emissions—globally, it’s the number two source, after the energy sector—in order to decarbonize transportation, at least ground transportation, the prevailing technology is the lithium battery, which allows mobility to function with renewable energy, or zero-emissions energy. You know, we can charge a car with zero-emissions energy, and then it can detach from that charging and move around and not create any carbon emissions while it moves around. And so that is like the way that we’re unlocking the possibility of a zero-emissions transportation sector.

I mentioned that there’s another sector that’s relevant too, which is the energy sector. And that’s because for variable forms of renewable energy—wind and solar, primarily—you need a way to store the energy, especially if there’s going to be a gap between peak demand and peak supply. There are many different storage approaches, but utility scale lithium batteries are one of them, and are becoming more and more prominent. And so lithium is this kind of MVP of the energy transition, in that it helps us tackle decarbonizing our two most carbon intensive sectors globally and within countries.

But the problem, as we’ve kind of talked around a little bit, is that extracting lithium, like extracting any mineral, produces a lot of environmental harm, especially under current governance structures, a lot of social harm, and is also embroiled in all manner of geopolitical conflict, which we’ll talk about more in a moment, perhaps. But that’s what’s lithium is, and why it’s so important.

And maybe just to say one last thing, we should keep in mind that these sectors, transportation and energy, are not just material bases of our economy that we need to get the carbon out of. They’re also major sites of financial investment and major sites of profitability for global capitalism. And so when we think about decarbonizing the transportation sector, particularly when we look at the auto sector, that is a multi-trillion dollar industry. So maybe to lead into green capitalism, we could see why the specific inputs relevant to these mega industries that also are the industries we need to decarbonize get into the political economic spotlight in various ways.

LK: One of the other things that your book actually taught me, which I did not know before, is thatI’ve always thought of fossil fuels as this incredibly precious resource, because it took millions and millions of years for them to emerge out of the compression of flora and fauna. But then you read about how lithium actually emerges, and it also takes geological time for it to develop, and so it is actually just as precious in its development. And so for me, that also made the urgency of the politics that you’re talking about that much more apparent.

TR: Absolutely, and I’m glad you brought that up, because it allows me to explain the way I frame these types of resources, as in, what is a properly extractive resource versus like other types of natural resources like water or soil or whatever it is.

What’s fundamental to extraction is two things: site specificity, the deposit exists in certain places, not in all places; and it is nonrenewable on human time scales. And I do use the human time scales because I’m not looking 3000 years into the future. Maybe there’ll be an asteroid that hits Earth and sets off some process of geological change in which a new type of mineral develops, or we get access to a part of the Earth’s crust. We never would have access if that asteroid hadn’t. I mean, you know, this is not just science fiction. It’s also like how geological change happened in the past, right? So it’s not that we could never repeat in theory some of these processes, but not in a relevant time scale, and not in a way that humans can onset. We can’t really think of how we would through anthropogenic processes just trigger the development of some subsoil mineral. So that those two facts are fundamental to understand actually quite a bit about extractive sectors and renewable resources, whether they are primary forms of energy or other kinds of resources we use.

LK: So let’s move to green capitalism. One of the things that you start with is how when you and your equally badass co-authors were writing about the Green New Deal, you became very aware of the way that greening in the Global North can ranslate into destruction, devastation, exploitation, and ecological catastrophe in the Global South. Can you speak a little bit about your criticism of the terminology of green capitalism?

TR: I’m going to set up the debate a little bit, because I think that this is one where reasonable people with shared politics disagree. And there’s been a little change over time too with how the left talks about green capitalism.

With green capitalism, I definitely don’t mean that we can have green capitalism in the substantive sense of a fully sustainable capitalism that would eliminate all the environmental problems that it has itself caused and blah, blah, blah. It’s a good faith question that I get all the time. And I say, no, that is not what I mean by green capitalism. I’m not talking about a substantive process or empirically valid process in which capitalism, day by day, is becoming less environmentally impactful. That is not what I mean. And I’m not sure that is possible in the fullest sense, meaning the idea of a fully environmentally sustainable capitalism would just violate too many strictures of private property, market actors, etc… to be feasible. And Alyssa Battistoni’s book is excellent in explaining all of that.

The other analysis is more dismissive, and I think rightfully so, but sometimes I think the dismissal then leaves us nothing to actually grapple with and study. That is, another way to think about it is that there’s no such thing as green capitalism, and that any claim to such is just pure greenwashing, and it’s just like a reputational game, or it’s about wanting to justify certain industries, and it distracts us from their actual environmental impact. And that’s true with a lot of so-called green industries: There are a lot of greenwashing operations, which, by the way, are interesting to study. Like, just saying something’s greenwashing, okay, that doesn’t get us very far. Why are they greenwashing? Why do they think it’s important to their reputational capital to make environmental claims?

We could take this to to Israel. I’m making a big pivot here, but just to get into the ‘x-washing’ stuff, you know, many critical scholars have thought about forms of pinkwashing, where Israel holds itself up as the most queer friendly or the most feminist, or like this or that. And it’s like, okay, that is totally false, and it’s a really destructive ideology. But why do Zionists feel the need to do that? Like, what liberal sentiments are they tapping into in order to justify their genocidal operations, right? And so I think the choice of justification is important, and it’s historically contingent. And there’s work by Boltanski and Chiapello on justification, these ideas that at different moments powerful actors really justify themselves in fundamentally different ways.

But I’m not just interested in justification. I do have some stuff in my book about greenwashing and green branding and stuff like that, but I’m also interested in what are the empirically observable phenomena that we can call “green capitalism?” And in that, I’m sort of taking, a somewhat emic view, as if I was an anthropologist studying these things, which is like, what do the actors say? Wouldn’t we want to study some of the sectors and companies and investments and supply chains that are being called green for some set of reasons? Maybe they got a green certification. Maybe it was like how the EU has a matrix of what counts as green or what doesn’t in order to access certain forms of concessional finance. Maybe an investment bank does it so that they can figure out what counts as a green bond or a green loan. That’s interesting in and of itself, as I’ve already kind of said, but it also means that there’s real economic activities to observe. And then we can say, okay, these are labeled as green, how do they actually work? What’s the gap between the actual materiality and labor relations and community relations of these enterprises and their so-called greenness. So, in order to even get critical leverage on the gap between performance and reality, we need to study the actual empirical phenomena alongside the justificatory languages.

Finally, there’s the fact that some of these technologies—and the lithium battery is very much included in this—are real technologies that we really need, and they really exist, and they really work. The way that they’re owned, the unequal distribution of access, the unequal distribution of ecological harm, of their production, those are real political problems that we need to confront collectively. But no one should doubt that a lithium battery can store solar energy. And even in an eco-socialist utopia, maybe most especially in an ecosocialist utopia, we probably need some localized forms of energy storage, right? And we will probably use lithium batteries unless we come up with something better. Now, we might govern their supply chains totally differently. We might get as much of that lithium from recycling as possible. We might, you know, have a different structure of ownership, all sorts of things, but the underlying technology is one that is helpful in moving away from fossil fuels.

Thinking in a pretty granular way about what counts as green and what doesn’t also helps us look at what technologies are reliable, good technologies that we just want to govern differently from the left, versus which are purely speculative or just vehicles for financial bubbles or which are purely greenwashing, and there’s really nothing to them. It helps us get more rigorous with our analysis. And the rigor is not just to use our brains well, it’s because we hopefully want to build a society that’s zero emissions, and that means we need to understand things about the materiality and what works and what doesn’t work. And a good way to start is to ask, what are the capitalists doing? And how do we respond and critique that? But also, what other type of world would we want to build that would be green and maybe not capitalist? Green post capitalist, green social democracy, green socialism, whatever it is.

LK: So there are several different things you trace when you’re thinking about the workings of green capitalism, one of them, for me, that was really interesting, was the way that the drive to compete with China over lithium batteries, and indeed, actually over also rare earth minerals, has reversed decades of laissez-faire globalization and that what we’re seeing is a reemergence of industrial planning in some places that one would have never imagined, for example, like the US. So can you talk a little bit about that?

TR: This relates to a moment when my plans totally changed based on unfolding events. As we were talking about earlier, I was writing the book in the thick of historical change, which was a bit nerve wracking, because I knew that I would inevitably get things wrong, I was taking risks and trying to give some fixity on the page to dynamics that were unfolding and unpredictable. But the flip side, and the positive aspect of studying events while they’re unfolding is that you can change your research design as events unfold. You can do that with historical work and archival work too, but there’s a way that like being face to face with actors that forces you in the moment, quite literally, to be like, oh, I didn’t think about it that way, maybe I should think about it this way, and maybe I should bring in these new field sites. And so what I ended up doing, totally unexpectedly to my own familial background and academic background, was for the first time, leaving Latin America in terms of my field work. The book is still anchored in Chile, because that’s where I spent the most time. Chile taught me the most about lithium and green capitalism and resistance to green extractivism and all of those things. And it’s fundamental to the book. But as I was working, I ended up in places in ways that were somewhat serendipitous, like having opportunities to go to Europe for a conference in 2019. This was at the end of 2019 so I’d already done a lot of work in Chile that year. I was in Brussels for something not directly related to my research. It was a Green New Deal conference, actually. And I was like, you know, I’m flying across the Atlantic. I’m aware of carbon emissions. I should try to actually make use of this time as research time. And I had been reading the Financial Times, as is my habit—

LK: As all lefties do.

TR: —exactly—I prevented myself from making the joke, but we should make it—and they had been reporting on the fact that Europe wanted to be self-sufficient in raw materials. And again, this is 2019, so it’s before the pandemic, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and energy shocks really accelerated that sentiment. It was a nascent development, but it was becoming newsworthy in the business press and it kind of threw me. I was like, Huh? Why? Why would Europe want more mines? It seems totally fine to just do the neocolonial, “free trade” thing where you just offshore the environmentally toxic stuff. You import it, you do the value-added pieces, and your companies benefit, because your multinationals are the ones in Africa or Latin America. It’s a very good system if you’re in the value-added part of the supply chain. Why change that? It really threw me, and it made me become more rigorous with different understandings of scale, of core and periphery.

It made me realize, of course there are resource peripheries in the Global North. Some of them have faded out of existence. But we should never forget, and I’m talking to an oil scholar, that the US is the number one oil and gas producer and exporter. And if you go to the places where that happens, those are huge extractive frontiers: Texas, the Dakotas, Louisiana for refining and petrochemicals. It forced me to think more complexly about the kind of map of extraction and the map of power in the global economy, and realize that there are certain conditions under which governments in affluent societies that are relatively powerful decide that it’s strategically beneficial for them to have more direct territorial access to strategic resources.

And the history of oil is replete with these types of instances where, due to challenges from OPEC or challenges from nationalization in North Africa and the Middle East and Latin America, Global North governments, particularly the UK and the US, but also others, started to develop their domestic oil and gas reserves in direct response to this threat of resource nationalism in the Global South. We see these historical moments where the Global North governments and firms are willing to take some of the downsides of extraction—the environmental harm, the political contention, the low value-added aspect of the economic activity—because it’s strategically useful for them, and we’re at another moment of that. History doesn’t repeat, but there is a bit of a rhyme.

I became fascinated by this phenomena of onshoring. The US used to have a lithium industry, and it let it fade away, so in that context it’s more of a reshoring than an onshoring. But the geography is changing, and the subjected communities are changing. This phenomenon opened my eyes to thinking about extraction again at that global scale, and understanding that, on the one hand, the map of extraction can shift, but on the other hand, that is not itself a form of justice for the Global South. The idea that the US is going to have five more lithium mines in the next 10 years, or whatever it is, and that Europe, where the situation is even more complicated, has a lot of plans—that would be transformative for the landscape in those places. But when we step back, we would still have unequal exchange. We would still have resource flows from south to north. The north is not going to be “self-sufficient.” Autarky is not a viable option right now in our moment of global economy, or anytime soon. You can have more internal extraction in the Global North, you can have new resource frontiers and marginalization in the Global North, and you can have still continued neocoloniality in global economic relations.

LK: Basically capitalism is a shit system for anybody interested in any form of justice. So let me move to resistance, because that actually gives us some window into a more optimistic future. Your chapters on forms of pushback and resistance have some of the most sympathetic portraits of political actors in your book. Can you talk about some of these figures and what sorts of resistance are they engaged in? And what do you see their politics of resistance producing or achieving?

TR: There’s this unfortunate narrative, including among climate and energy experts who might be liberals or think of themselves as progressive, that any resistance or protest at any part of the renewable energy supply chain is just NIMBYism. That these people are just protesting or pushing back against projects that are necessary for our planetary survival, that are necessary for climate action. The framing of these communities here is that they are conservative, parochial, that they’re just thinking about their particular interests and don’t have the bigger picture in view. And the usual suspects will say this: mining companies or governments promoting mining. But I have unfortunately also found versions of this discourse among people who are really thinking through climate action and that’s been disappointing to me. So it was very important for me not to simplistically romanticize these movements, or romanticize the leaders of these movements and the activists that devote their lives to this cause. I don’t want to say they’re perfect and good and everything they think is ideal. It’s not about that. It’s more to say, let’s look at why these people don’t like these mines, or why these people are concerned about these mines. Let’s look at the diversity of political tactics and the repertoire of resistance that they use. And also, let’s listen to what they’re saying, their actual words, and what they write and how they communicate their grievances, their demands and their visions, because it’s actually not purely defensive in most cases, it’s not just “resistance.” There’s a lot of worldmaking and a lot of big visioning about what an alternative economy would look like, and an alternative relationship between humans and nature.

I have tried, starting with Resource Radicals and in work related to that project through to this work, to take these activists seriously as intellectuals, to the point where some of the terminology I use like extractivism and green extractivism is indebted to these movement actors who I think of as organic intellectuals in their context.

There are a few interesting things that I found in my direct fieldwork and interviews and ethnography, and in reading lots of secondary literature to check my own “anecdotal experiences” and see what the bigger picture of resistance looks like. First of all, resistance is not a mechanical reaction to environmental harm or to the threat of environmental harm. If resistance were mechanical, then every community would resist, because it would just be an automatic thing. But we know that oppression, exploitation, appropriation, harm, and violence can exist without provoking resistance or transformative politics. With resource extraction, there are multiple types of harms and also different types of community settings, and different elite configurations, and that whole terrain is what produces resistance or not. To say this a little more concretely, it’s not enough for a project to have a huge impact on, say, water contamination or even dispossession and take up a lot of land and have a big material footprint—it’s the combination of those types of concerns with concrete, lived experiences of exclusion, repression, and violence that we must analyze when considering the question of whether resistance will materialize.

Usually, in the big picture, community members had some concern about the environment, but then they had a bad experience, like they went to a public hearing and it wasn’t even in their indigenous language, so they couldn’t understand what was happening. Or they went to a public hearing on environmental impacts, and it was a PowerPoint presentation with the company and the government was in the back seat. There was no scientific objectivity, no obvious monitoring of the actual thing that was happening. Or even worse, they go to an activist meeting, and they get a death threat. Or, they go to an activist meeting and something worse than a death threat happens. So it’s these combinations of failures of governance, actual violence, and then concerns about environmental harm all tied together. And then you usually need one other ingredient, which is a community with some modicum of social fabric or organization. Because if your community is already very disorganized—and I don’t mean that as a failure of the community; I think of capitalism as a disorganizing system, it alienates, it individualizes, it makes it hard to create collective action—if that’s just your lived reality, and you haven’t overcome that, or your social fabric is already very frayed, or for whatever reason there’s just not a shared sense of belonging in your community or vehicles to collectively organize, then it’s hard to create those from scratch just in the moment when you get this threat. Not to make it a perfect recipe, but usually some combination of these factors is relevant, which I think just gives a way more nuanced view of how this resistance emerges.

It’s not people resisting climate action or resisting lithium batteries, it’s people resisting because they had a really negative experience with the company and their entire water system is at stake. And I think that in those circumstances, everyone calling these people NIMBYs or obstructionists to climate action would probably themselves go out on the frontlines if they were worried about the future of their water supply. And if they went to a meeting and got a death threat, they’d probably get organized too. And so I find it a real failure of imagination that, especially relatively elite Global North-based people, cannot really comprehend what it’s like to live in an extractive frontier, to be subjected to these forces, to be subjected to this level of violence, literal and figurative, and can’t think through what a just or humane kind of response to that at the governance level would look like.

So I felt an extra impetus to really set the record straight without flattening and romanticizing, because, as I show, some of these figures are complex. Or I don’t 100% share their politics or their exact motivations. Or there are uneasy coalitions where you have indigenous people and ranchers and conservationists—to get these resistance projects forward, you do need these coalitions, and sometimes they spread pretty wide.

The second and last thing I want to say is that what I learned from this—without simplifying Global North and South or equating them, which I don’t want to do—is that we do see a process of diffusion of activism and of repertoires of contention. And that the idea that we should resist extractivism, that there are certain ways to effectively resist it, also leads to bigger picture ideas of how to transform the economy. A lot of that took root in Latin America over the past couple of decades for reasons of the enormous weight of mining in the regional political economy and the experience of certain communities with various forms of resistance that prepared them for resisting these mega mining projects. And that’s now spread around the world.

These supply chains and extractive frontiers are not just ways that profits are accumulated or value is added or logistically materials are shipped from one place to another. They are also nodes of coalition building, of diffusion, of sharing, of resistance frameworks and intellectual frameworks. I’ve witnessed firsthand Global North activists—now that we have potential onshoring projects in Portugal, in Nevada, in some of the other places I went to, for example, and many more—using similar language that I first saw in the highlands of Ecuador a decade or two ago. We now see a very similar critique of extractivism in the Global North. And I think tracing, we might say, the supply chains of resistance globally, and seeing how these actors connect to one another—not always through explicit coordination, but just through learning, through the internet, through activist convenings—gives us a really interesting picture of global resistance across these frontiers.

LK: What a wonderful response. My final question: you ask yourself and your readers a difficult question in the book. If climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means? Should we mine more? What is your answer to this question?

TR: The ends justify the means, with very important caveats. Yes is my answer, but with like eight asterisks, each leading to a different footnote. Anyone that wants an easy yes or no answer should either not read my book because they won’t be happy – or else they should read my book to challenge themselves out of black and white thinking.

One of the things I tried to model in my book, partly because I think it’s useful for readers, but partly honestly, for my own sanity and sense of honesty and fidelity, was to show that these are real things that I am really torn about at certain moments, and that I really grapple with, and that I really don’t think that there’s one easy answer.

If we create a thought experiment as to what our ideal society would be like, really holding ourselves accountable, a society in which there’s no emissions energy, and there’s perfect equality of access to energy and mobility and housing and no racial or class hierarchy, whatever perfect place we want to think of, then: Where do we get the rare earths for the solar panels from? Literally, we have to have some solar panels in this perfect SimCity. I borrow that term from Malcolm Harris, who has this great quip about SimCity thinking where we’re just designing a perfect place—he means it critically, but I’m saying, okay, let’s go with that. If we wanted to build our perfect ecosocialist utopia, where would we get the stuff from, and who would make it? And would it all be autarkic? Would we have trade? As you said, capitalism and extractivism caused so many problems. They’re such bad systems. But if we had a perfect system, how would we do it differently? And I really want the Left to answer that question about everything, not just about resource extraction, because I want us to be serious about winning power and what we would do if we had it. It’s not just about resistance, and it’s not just about organizing in the current system. If we were in some way in charge of society—whether through elections, revolution, whatever the route is—what would we do?

I’m being a little bit roundabout, but coming back to what you asked me, I think that if we are actually going to transition way from fossil fuels—where we leave more and more fossil fuels in the ground, never extract them at all, and move towards zero emissions, and use, hopefully as much as possible, renewable energy—which we’re not doing right now, that would mean that we are reducing, by a lot, the amount of extraction that happens globally. Because something that is easy to lose sight of, including in reading my book, is that we already live, of course, in an extractive capitalism. It’s not that resource extraction for the energy transition would be a totally new thing, as if all of a sudden we’re mining and digging stuff up. No, we’ve been doing that for a very long time, and we do that every day.

A statistic I like to use is that something like 14 million barrels of oil a day are needed just to furnish US car transportation. 14 million barrels of oil daily for a subset of one country’s transportation sector. And so we live in a regime of just unfathomable levels of extraction, and it’s so wasteful because all of those hydrocarbons, those fossil fuels, when they’re dug up and refined and made into usable energy resources, they’re just burned. We never get them back. And not only do they burn, but in the burning, due to entropy and other inefficiencies, we lose some of that heat and energy. It’s a tremendously wasteful system.

But if we had, again, our perfectly planned society, if we have zero emissions and primarily renewables, well, we need all this physical infrastructure. We need to harness the energy with solar panels, with wind turbines, with geothermal facilities. We need to distribute the energy through transmission lines. We need to store the energy, if it’s intermittent batteries or hydro storage, or other types of things. So we need this whole physical system in its initial buildout. It would be materially intensive. We need to mine stuff for all of that. And the material siting of each of these processes also has impacts, including, for example, solar panels which have massive ecological impacts if they’re not sited and governed in the right way.

The really cool thing, though, is that once we’ve designed the ecosocialist utopia system, we could then recycle almost everything. So in this imagined trajectory—which again, is not what is happening in reality, I need to underscore that a lot—if we really transitioned away from fossil fuels, if we built out in a kind of Big Bang all of the kind of accouterments of our new energy system, and had a moment of extraction and physical construction in order to achieve that, and then we achieve what we needed to have satisfactory levels of energy access, then we could just keep using that stuff for a while, because those things are pretty durable physically, and to the extent that they’re not, we could recycle the minerals, and the whole result would be a much less extractive economy than we have now. The problem is that this is not what’s happening in reality at all, and but we need to hold on to that contrast, that better version of what a new energy system and society would look like in order to rigorously critique what’s happening and get as close to any of those more positive versions as possible.

Right now, we have energy addition, rather than energy transition. We have new sources of energy and dramatic growth in some of them—impressive global growth in solar and wind, in electric vehicles and lithium batteries. The problem is that, again, at that global scale, we’re also still adding lots of new oil, lots of new gas. Every day, new carbon bombs, as they’re called by climate experts, are being permitted and contracted. They have 30 or 40 year lifespans. If we have any hope of climate safety, we’re going to have to strand those assets. We’re going to have to violate the strictures of private property. It’s not possible to have 40 years of liquid natural gas in all of these places on earth and still get anywhere within a safe kind of parameter for humans and nature in terms of climate, of atmospheric and global temperatures. And so, we don’t have energy transition, we have energy addition, but we need to hold on to the concept of transition in order to have it, in order to advocate for it.

I’m reading the book More and More and More by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz now, which is amazing. And it’s a hard read, because he basically shows that we never had an energy transition in the past. If we were to do so now, it would be totally novel. What’s happened historically is addition. But even deeper than addition is symbiosis, where wood and oil and coal and steel and minerals and all of these things actually co-constitute one another as part of big industrial systems. So when we get rising demand for oil, we actually don’t get less demand for coal. We need it more. Why? To produce the steel oil extracting rigs and derricks and the logistical networks that transport all of that. We need to understand how revolutionary a concept energy transition is. If it were to happen, it would mean a type of rupture that we haven’t witnessed historically.

And just to make sure my answer to your question is clear: In order to achieve a real energy transition with redistributed benefits and much reduced environmental costs—because if we govern well, and we also did interesting things with technology, with architecture, with urban planning, with the built environment, we don’t need as much mining as some of the forecasts tell us that we do—and different scales and economic geographies of these supply chains to maximize their human benefit, then, yes, some level of near term extraction would absolutely be worth getting out of the enormously extractive system that we already live under. But until and unless that’s the case, I think we need to be really critical of what’s happening right now.

LK: I think that’s a wonderful way to end this interview. Your energy and your intellectual brilliance and curiosity is just so inspiring, Thea. And so here’s to revolution.♦

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Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador and Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, and the co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal.

Laleh Khalili teaches at the University of Exeter. Her books include Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring and, most recently, Extractive Capitalism.

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