Exploring Extractive Frontiers: A Q&A with Thea Riofrancos

A true green transition has to involve a massive project of electrifying transportation and scaling-up renewable energy storage.

That undertaking will require a wide array of inputs including copper, cobalt, and, maybe most critically, the lithium needed for the batteries that make both possible.

However, much to the consternation of environmental activists, extracting those necessary metals and minerals from the ground almost inevitably results in unsustainable water use and chemical pollution, harming local biodiversity and communities.

Thea Riofrancos uses lithium as a test case to work through this tension, exploring the communities and politics at the sites where extraction is happening, in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.

“What does it mean,” Riofrancos asks in the book, “to defend people and the planet from extraction – when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?”

Inequality.org recently spoke with Riofrancos, an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, and fellow at the Transnational Institute, about this question and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is out now from W.W. Norton.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: How did you land on Chile as a focus of this book?

Thea Riofrancos: Chile anchors the book, despite the fact that I also traveled to Nevada, Portugal, and other places to look at the politics of lithium. Chile was where I conceptualized the book because I have focused on Latin America as my main kind of region of interest for quite a while now, which is itself the reason that I work on the politics of extraction. It was in Latin America where I learned about the contentious politics and political economy of resource extraction, as well as the growing divides and differences of opinion on the Left — the clashes between those that primarily view the problem as one of ownership and nationalization and those that view it as a problem of ecology and indigenous rights and have a more anti-extractive approach. That’s how I got interested in resource extraction and these contentious politics in the first place.

In parallel, and as a result of my involvement in climate activism and thinking about a just transition and the politics of a Green New Deal in the United States, I started to think about what the implications of a transition here would be for mining and supply chains elsewhere in the world. If we were to undergo a rapid energy transition in the US, where would the lithium and copper come from? And one place that they may very well come from, and have come from, is Chile, which is the world’s number two lithium producer and number one copper producer, both of which are very relevant to the energy transition.

So I decided to do fieldwork in Chile to look at the intersection of mining and the energy transition in a regional context in which people were already thinking about the extractive implications of energy transition technologies.

CMR: What makes Chile an “extractive frontier” and what’s the benefit of understanding mining sites in this framework?

TR: Chile is what the industry would call a “mining powerhouse.” It has enormous copper mines and two mega lithium mines, and there may be more to come. It’s a fascinating place to understand the contentious and polarizing politics of resource extraction, as well as the very volatile economics of it.

Chile has been a major copper producer for many decades now and we have seen major transformations in how it has governed copper, starting with an earlier regime where American multinational companies, British and then American, basically laid claim to Chile’s resources. But beginning in the 1960s, a nationalist orientation in the Chilean government started to reclaim the country’s resource wealth and sovereignty, initially by taking partial ownership of those American mines. That process accelerated under Salvador Allende, who famously fully nationalized Chile’s copper mines in the early 1970s. That fact is not unrelated to the coup and installation of the brutal neoliberal Pinochet dictatorship. The US supported that coup in no small part because of the direct threats to US mining interests that Allende posed.

I want to make a minor point here that’s important for the present. Once he was in power, Pinochet did not privatize those copper mines, which we might have expected him to do as an arch neoliberal. Instead, he not only maintained them as nationalized, but established the state-owned company CODELCO that still manages them. That’s important to note as we see right-wing governments across the world, including in the US, engaging in what we might call state capitalism and blurring the boundary between states, markets, and private firms.

Over time, Pinochet courted more private investment, so while CODELCO continues to operate mines, its role has been diminished, with a growing proportion of privately owned copper mines. Regarding lithium, Pinochet played an important role in opening this sector up to investment by privatizing the company that now owns one of Chile’s major lithium mines. The other company is American, Albemarle, which shows us the enduring US-Chile relationship in the mining sector.

What does this all add up to? We can see big changes in governance, from nationalization to privatization and odd mixtures of the two. Chile is really instructive on that front. We’ve also seen growing socio-ecological consciousness and conflict in these zones of extraction — Chilean people are not quiescent about the impacts of extraction on their livelihoods, on their watersheds, on their indigenous rights. There’s been increasing environmental contention, protests, and pushback in some cases impacting mine operations, troubling financial relationships, and putting the industry on alert that they have to “engage local communities.” Of course, that engagement can be cynical and, in turn, divisive within the community.

What does this tell us about the concept of extractive frontiers? What I learned in the Atacama Desert, where roughly 20 percent of global lithium supplies emanate, is that extractive frontiers are marked by all of the harms, violence, and colonial legacies that we associate with extraction. But they’re not only that, and that’s part of what my book wants to show. Extractive frontiers are designated by powerful people as places where resources are going to come out of the ground, and hopefully people stay quiet — even deploying the framing of terra nullius. However, when we take a grounded perspective and visit those places, if you travel a little away from the mine, there is beautiful biodiversity still worth stewarding and preserving. These places are not empty of people — they are surrounded by indigenous communities that have not only protested the mining but also engaged in alliances with environmentalists. We have interesting coalitions forming around these extractive projects to contest and, in some cases, stall them or change their framework of governance. So extractive frontiers are never only defined by extraction, there’s always more going on, and that’s precisely why people have a stake in whether extraction proceeds or not, and why communities are increasingly feeling empowered to put forth their own demands and visions.

CMR: You visit several extractive frontiers, like Nevada and Portugal, in the book. What unifies them? And you shared some pretty staggering stats about mineral resource proximity to indigenous communities, did that change how you thought about traditional North/South binaries?

TR: This was the biggest challenge to my research plans as initially designed and also my thinking about the global political economy of extraction, even on the cartographic level, the map where extraction takes place. I went into this project with it being a classic Latin American story of yet again being pillaged for its resources over people’s resistance. The only twist was that this all relates to the energy transition, so climate activists need to think about it. That was the story I had in my head and in broad strokes it remains true. But something changed in the early days of the research project, which was that Global North policymakers in the US and Europe were increasingly intent on onshoring or reshoring mining industries that had never really existed in these geographies, or had withered away due to lack of investment and a shift away from manufacturing to more financialized and service-based economies. I should make one caveat, which is that the US is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but in terms of mining it is mainly import reliant. And Europe is even more reliant on mining imports. The idea that some European policymakers shared with me in 2019 that Europe could be self-sufficient in lithium by 2030 is a very ambitious one.

I started to track this story of onshoring — or supply chain security — before it became big headline news during the pandemic era. Policy concerns about supply chain vulnerability breathed new life into the idea that we should relocalize supply chains, including those related to raw material extraction. Over the course of my research, in addition to going to Nevada and Portugal, I also visited Brussels and DC to speak with policymakers about what I viewed as a puzzling decision, since it previously seemed perfectly fine to import “cheap” raw materials from elsewhere in the world. I wanted to understand policymaker thinking and how communities based in the Global North would receive these projects. Would they believe what government officials and corporations said about doing things more responsibly and ethically than in the Global South? For the most part, in parallel with communities in the Global South, the projects were met with skepticism, alarm, and also resistance. I found that despite these mines being in very different geographies with very different communities and stakeholders, they were just as conflictual as the mines in Latin America. And in some cases, the types of people directly impacted were not very different — in Nevada, for example, we’re looking at marginalized, dispossessed indigenous communities with claims on a territory that have never been respected by the US government. That doesn’t look very different from what the Atacameño people have gone through in northern Chile.

CMR: You describe supply chains as “a set of ecological relations,” can you explain what we gain from thinking about them more holistically in this way?

TR: The typical way to think about the harms of extraction is as being localized. Biodiversity loss, water contamination, noise and air pollution, and also interventions into the social fabric and the exploitation of mine workers — all of these occur locally. That can lead one to think that the way to deal with these problems is also local: better governance at the local or national level, better frameworks to adjudicate conflicts over mining, better economic development policies. And that’s true: For example, we really need to improve the enforcement of rights in countries where mining is happening. Mining is the most violent vector in the world, based on how many people die every year simply trying to protect their land or water contamination, even if that protection just means going to public hearings or community meetings. If people feel at risk of bodily harm by simply attending a meeting to learn more about how a mining project might affect their livelihoods and communities, then we don’t have the basis of full civil society participation. So those local solutions are important, but they’re just half the story. We need a more holistic set of solutions to reduce the harms of mining.

Mining and its harms are not exotic features of the places where mining happens to occur. They’re structurally produced by the volume and rapaciousness of demand for inputs in broader networks of production and consumption. If it’s the case, for example, that we “need” a certain volume of lithium or rare earths each year for an auto industry that’s electrifying its fleet, then what’s driving the demand is at the other end of the supply chain. How we collectively design the built environment of the energy transition — what specific technologies and elements are “needed” — will determine how much demand there is. I say need in quotes because that’s something we can collectively and socially determine. If we understand that scale and harm are correlated, that large mines producing a large amount of minerals create more harm, then we need to think about what’s driving demand for minerals in the first place. Those decisions are currently not being made in extractive frontiers, they’re being made elsewhere in the global economy.

CMR: I’d be remiss to not ask about the Strait of Hormuz here. What does Iran’s tightening of trade show us about supply chains?

TR: My book dwells on the 1970s because it offers us a lot of lessons about how geopolitical battles over energy resources play out, how the Global North might respond to a so-called “energy crisis” and how the Global South might try to assert sovereignty over their natural resource sectors. What we know about the 1973 oil crisis is that it was produced intentionally. Major oil producing Third World states in the Middle East, North Africa, and South America came together to coordinate on pricing and production with the establishment of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) in 1960, and, during the early 1970s, one country after another nationalized their oil resources. Both efforts intentionally put upward pressure on prices to retain more oil income in those countries. I said so-called crisis earlier because this was an oil boom and a development boom for these geographies. It was a crisis for Western consumers, but not, of course, for producers or their societies.

Today, it can feel like we’re reliving the 1970s in terms of pain at the pump and discussions of using oil stockpiles. But an important thing has changed since then — globalization and the interconnectedness of markets. An intervention in supply chains reverberates even more than it did in 1973. The interconnection of logistics, finance, trade and economic production means that something in one part of the world affects lots of other parts of the world. One other thing to add, drawing on the work of Adam Hanieh, is that the political economy of the Gulf has really transformed. It’s insufficient and wrong to describe them as petro-states. These economies have advanced, and now export things like petrochemicals and fertilizer, for example, which means cutting them off can cause price shocks across a variety of essential goods, including energy and food. In addition, according to all analysts, both the standstill at the Strait of Hormuz and the physical destruction of oil and gas assets makes this supply shortfall dramatically worse than either the 1970s or the more recent 2022 oil and gas shock (related to the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

CMR: How could this situation affect the green transition?

TR: I’m of a few minds about this because there are forces working in different directions. It’s also a bit hard to know in medias res, as history is unfolding. With that caveat in mind, there are some structural forces that we can analyze. A major price shock in oil and gas combined with the clear existence of alternative energy sources — technologies that are very affordable and very reliable, with solar panels and batteries being critical — will create a growing constituency for an energy transition. That is one positive outcome of a horrific and illegal war.

But there are forces that work in the other direction, and I don’t know what the balance will be. The first is obvious, which is that oil and gas companies are having a field day. You wouldn’t know that with how much of their discourse is about uncertainty being bad for investment or oil assets being destroyed. But the prices are really high, these companies are benefiting a lot in terms of shareholder value. When oil companies experience sudden surges in profitability they tend to cycle that money into political lobbying. Just look at the incredible amount of money flooding into the US political system during the last oil shock in 2022. So not only might oil and gas companies invest in new fossil fuel production, but they might also contort politics to make an energy transition slower.

The second countervailing force is just the incredibly recessionary, developmental, and inflationary impact of all of this on Global South societies that were really starting to see their industrial capacity grow. Now these places are rationing energy, which means a lot of factories are closed three days a week and people can’t get to work. Finances will be constrained, especially since the cost of capital is always higher in the Global South. Gathering the public or private investment needed for the initial fixed costs of renewable energy deployment will become harder. And, of course, fuel limitations have downstream effects on income, which has downstream effects on people’s human development and ability to survive. It’s a very tragic outcome for people with little to no power over Washington, D.C.

CMR: Lastly, you grappled with these contradictions between climate benefits and damage to the environment and communities from lithium mining. Where did you land after researching and writing the book?

TR: In writing the book and through research I did with the Climate and Community Institute, I became more convinced that there is not a zero-sum conflict between wanting to preserve landscapes and protect communities from violent forms of extraction on one hand and making progress on our climate goals and the energy transition on the other. I went into the book feeling a real sense of contradiction between these truly important goals. And I didn’t finish it feeling there was no tension. But a lot of the same approaches we need to take for a rapid and just energy transition would also result in less extraction needed to furnish the inputs. When we think about an energy transition that focuses more on mass transit, on affordable, dense, and green social housing, on publicly managed grids — which are all pillars of a more just transition, or a Green New Deal as we used to call it — those are all less resource intensive than privatized forms of individual consumption in the form of exurbs and hulking vehicles that many Americans can’t afford anyway.

That is hopeful to me, that the things we need to do for climate justice are the same things we need to do to reduce the harms of extraction. Since finishing the book I’ve been thinking more about the politics of how we implement these things in the United States. A lot of them are already in the mix with the new focus on cost of living. People want access to cheaper mass transit, to affordable housing, to cheap and clean power that is not reigned over by awful companies. These political discussions are not starting with mining, but fighting for them will make headway on reducing the total amount of extraction needed to decarbonize our economy.