Latest / The Nation Podcasts / The Green Transition Needs so Much Mining w/ Thea Riofrancos | Tech Won't Save Us

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The Green Transition Needs so Much Mining w/ Thea Riofrancos | Tech Won't Save Us · The Nation Podcasts

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were to ask Trump, why do you care so much about critical minerals?
0:03
[SPEAKER_01]: One answer is he just likes resource extraction, like I think he quite literally just likes minerals dominance as he calls it.
0:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But if he had to name the sectors that this is all supposed to support, it would be AI and military tech.
0:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Tech won't save us made in partnership with the nation magazine.
0:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Thea Rio Francois.
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Thea is an associate professor of political science of Providence College and the strategic co-director of the climate and community institute.
0:45
[SPEAKER_00]: She's also the author of a new book, Extraction, the Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Fiat, of course, has been on the show in the past, but I think it's been like a couple years since she was on the show.
0:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And in part, that's because she was working on this book.
0:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, I was waiting for it to come out to have her back on the show.
1:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So we could talk about it.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is a fantastic conversation.
1:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like we're at this interesting moment with notions of a green transition, what that is going to look like, both nationally and internationally, because it looks like in the west, things are largely slowing down.
1:18
[SPEAKER_00]: in that transition to a greener economy.
1:21
[SPEAKER_00]: But in other parts of the world, things are still chugging along and a number of countries are even seeing that getting off of fossil fuels, especially imported fossil fuels, is going to give them more leverage.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: make it so that they are not kind of subject to the whims of international oil prices and so solar panels in renewable energy are looking appealing not so much because of how they reduce emissions but because it frees them from that dependence on the global oil system needing to have US dollars to buy it and all that kind of stuff.
1:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's all to say that we go in many different directions in this conversation because there's so much interesting stuff in the as work that I wanted to explore.
2:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So we look at the kind of extractive element of the green transition, you know, where all these minerals come from that are needed for the batteries and the solar panels and the things like that that go into whatever this green transition is going to be, how it is actually going to look.
2:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and how there are kind of difficulties in a moment of transition in terms of what that means and how different industries are going to respond to that.
2:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course we see in some countries that means a pullback because the powerful industries like the fossil fuel and automotive industries do not want to move in this direction that might not work for them at least in the short term even if that means things in the long term are going to get more difficult for them.
2:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But then obviously the picture can be quite different in places like China, in other parts of the global south.
2:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, there are a ton of dimensions of this issue to explore, and Dia is the perfect person to dig into them with because she is so knowledgeable on this.
2:55
[SPEAKER_00]: She has been researching this for years.
2:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like we're at a moment where her research and her knowledge is more important than ever.
3:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The book is obviously fantastic.
3:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I would highly recommend it, but I also think you're going to get a good picture of what is in there and, you know, her thinking on these issues through our conversation.
3:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was so happy to have the back on the show.
3:16
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3:21
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3:25
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3:29
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3:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much, and enjoy this week's conversation.
3:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Thia, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.
3:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Thirl to be here.
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really excited to explore your new book with you.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: We've talked in the past about your work on extraction, you know, work that you've done in Chile, how you've been looking at the politics around these sorts of things.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, this new book feels like really bringing together a lot of the work that you've been doing for a while.
4:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm wondering what inspired you to take this specific focus.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And why is this what you wanted to explain to the readers about what is going on with this green transition and the extraction that that's covering it?
4:22
[SPEAKER_01]: This book is a product of a very direct intersection between what I've been interested in for a long time and then political events that I got really involved in at the moment that it was conceived.
4:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So for a long time now, I feel like it really dates me to say how long, but you know, for around 15 years, I've been interested in the politics of resource extraction, especially in the Global South and Latin America, but also more broadly.
4:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And extractive sectors are super interesting.
4:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They're extremely harmful.
4:50
[SPEAKER_01]: They're deeply related to the climate and ecological crisis.
4:54
[SPEAKER_01]: But they also have these very contentious, dynamic politics and economics and social movements around them.
5:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've long been drawn to kind of digging in, no pun intended, to these kind of very thorny, interesting sectors of our economy, which are in a way the underbelly of global capitalism, like when we think of like,
5:13
[SPEAKER_01]: what actually allows materially for capitalism to produce all of these goods and wear this capital kind of touch nature or touch the planet.
5:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Most directly, attractive sectors really show the kind of conditions of capitalist production, that they start in nature and in ecology.
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's kind of me and that strand of the story.
5:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And then in the late 2010s, there was a growing movement around the Green New Deal.
5:39
[SPEAKER_01]: and also just a growing movement on the left, kind of directly incorporate and address the climate crisis in our political strategies and our political thinking, ideas of a just energy transition or what would be the role of like workers and labor in, you know, in a new energy economy.
5:54
[SPEAKER_01]: What type of social movements would be necessary to confront fossil capital?
5:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And like how can we also think about
6:01
[SPEAKER_01]: the public sector and like the role of government in this process.
6:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So all of this kind of ferment around the green-new deal that I got increasingly involved in both through democratic socialists of America, also through some kind of more, let's say, like policy won't work that I also started to get interested in around that time.
6:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, this was the moment I was living through.
6:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And I very quickly like started to connect that dot,
6:25
[SPEAKER_01]: was difficult and initially uncomfortable for me.
6:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm someone interested in mining, very aware therefore of the ecological harm that mining causes, but also the extreme violence, the human rights violations, all of that, you know, it's a particularly nefarious economic sector.
6:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And then as I was starting to think about what decarbonization actually means, like in a concrete material physical sense, like what a build out of a new energy economy might look like, I started to learn about the broader supply chains that.
6:57
[SPEAKER_01]: allow for the production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and then my sort of two interests touched, but in this way that was not initially expected to me.
7:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not why I got into Green-U-Dale politics initially.
7:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I got into it out of a growing belief in the absolute urgency of the climate crisis, and then I realized, wait a second, I work on mining.
7:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, as I said a lot about the harms of mining, there's growing forecasts that the energy
7:26
[SPEAKER_01]: for in combinations of protests and policy pressure and all this stuff would actually require a bunch of new mining, according to at least the forecast and we'll come back to question how much mining but some degree of mining.
7:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I sat with that and thought, how can I promote a sort of domestically envisioned Green New Deal that would have implications at that point in my
7:49
[SPEAKER_01]: for, you know, so-called sacrifice zones or attractive zones around the world and maybe create new forms of devastation, new frontline communities that were being impacted by this positive policy development within the US, right?
8:02
[SPEAKER_01]: If, you know, if Green New Deal were actually to be implemented.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, later on that got complexified because it turns out there might be also more mining in the United States.
8:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just an over there issue, but you know, we'll come back to that.
8:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know, I started to think like, I've always been drawn to extract of sectors because of the how interesting they are, as I said, but also because they pose unique challenges for the left.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's hard to think about how
8:26
[SPEAKER_01]: a political project founded on equity and justice and, you know, making a better society for, you know, the 99% grapples with sectors that in some ways can have a certain necessity to producing the goods and services we need, but also are tremendously difficult to govern well.
8:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I've always been drawn to that and I thought, you know, I'm not going to give up that interest now that there's like a new dimension added to this problem, which is the seeming clash between
8:56
[SPEAKER_01]: local communities and landscapes from the harms of extraction.
8:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to think through, like, is there a way to, first of all, explore and understand how climate action gets linked to mining and extraction, but also at the other end of that, maybe think through what better governance strategy is models of consumption and production and also social organizing strategies to make sure that we're not creating tons of new harm in the goal of an energy transition.
9:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that sets us up really well for the things that I want to dig into further in our conversation, right?
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like you're talking a lot about mining and the green transition there and maybe it's obvious, but maybe it's just worth digging into why mining is so central to getting off of fossil fuels and decarbonizing the economy, why that's such a central piece of this effort.
9:44
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a great question, and I'll expand a little more in what I was saying earlier.
9:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Creating a new energy system really is a physical endeavor.
9:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an endeavor of engineering, of design, of the kind of logistical coordination, of an energy grid, of the transportation sector, of businesses, and economic activities that rely on energy every day to produce all their stuff.
10:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when you think through like,
10:09
[SPEAKER_01]: have an energy system in the U.S. and in most countries in the world that kind of co-volved with fossil capitalism to use energy from coal and oil and gas and distribute that to consumers and businesses and that's how we run.
10:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And that central fact is actually why an energy transition is a much more radical proposition than it might seem because it involves dismantling
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: not just an energy system as like a feet of engineering, but like investments, financial investments that have been made in that, right?
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, okay, that's the kind of status quo of how we operate now in terms of energy.
10:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And in order to switch to, and we could call it as zero missions, we could say, you know, a renewable energy system, whatever word we want to use,
10:53
[SPEAKER_01]: We would have to change the guts and the hardware of how our built environment looks like, everything from the energy grid to transmission lines that distributes that energy to the forms of electric mobility that would be charging from that right to the way that businesses, including certain industries that would be quite hard to decarbonize, but we need to work on it,
11:22
[SPEAKER_01]: really carefully and rigorously about the material implications of an energy transition, it's an enormous change and like the physical landscape.
11:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say that all to say that all of those infrastructures, technologies, products, services that would enable the harnessing, the generation, the distribution, the consumption of renewable energy, all have their beginnings in mining.
11:47
[SPEAKER_01]: every single one of those products involves materials mind from the earth.
11:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And in some cases, when you do a head-to-head comparison, like you look at a traditional vehicle, which we absolutely need to phase out.
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are vehicles that run on gasoline, that produce really devastating emissions for, in terms of the atmosphere, as well as localized pollutants that are really harmful to communities,
12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, in order, you know, we need to face that out.
12:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no question about that.
12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: This book is not a defense of the status quo in any way, but when we compare that ice vehicle so harmful for the climate and local air quality internal combustion engine to an electric vehicle, it turns out the electric vehicle requires much more mining.
12:28
[SPEAKER_01]: all of the little parts of the electric vehicle from the electric motor to the lithium battery, also when we think about the charging stations and all the wiring and the copper that goes into that, it's a much more mineral intensive enterprise than a traditional vehicle is.
12:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And we can apply this to other parts of the new energy system as well.
12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And so while I want to be clear that,
12:52
[SPEAKER_01]: in theory, and in, you know, technical feasibility kind of language, like a energy transition that was thorough and holistic and actually left fossil fuels in the ground, and instead use these other technologies to harness the wind and the sun and geothermal, you know, another renewable energy sources.
13:10
[SPEAKER_01]: would actually reduce planetary extraction a lot because every single day, we're extracting many, many, many barrels of oil just to keep the transportation system running in the U.S. Like fossil capitalism is an extractive economy power excellence, right?
13:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not letting fossil capital off the hook.
13:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But when we turn and pivot to a new material system and a new set of built environments in order to create a zero missions energy system and society around that a lot of new sectors are involved like like sectors that may not be that as big right now as they would be in a fully electric future like lithium right so we're talking specifically about expanding a bunch of mining sectors and minds into territories and populations and landscapes that have not experienced mining before not at that scale
14:01
[SPEAKER_01]: or there's other sectors that are very important to contemporary capitalism as it already exists, like copper, but would need to dramatically expand to allow for full electrification.
14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not that like a fully renewable economy means more extraction than a fossil economy.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: but it's different extraction, it's new extraction, it's touching new people and places, it has new geopolitics around it and it's certainly not the case that moving into renewables just eliminates the problem of extraction.
14:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It raises it in a different form than it exists under
14:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's really well said and outlined really well, right?
14:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that, you know, we should think of the green transition as this move away from resource dependence, but you know, it kind of shifts the way that we look at it and we need to be aware of that as we're advocating for, you know, whatever is kind of coming next.
14:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In the book, you talk about this concept of the mid-transition and what it means for mineral and resource extraction in this moment.
15:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you expand on that and how we're seeing kind of patterns of where minerals are
15:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the mid-transition is a great concept that I borrow from other scholars that kind of gets at the thick of this complicated reality that we exist in this present moment, which is that fossil capitalism still in many ways reign supreme, like especially in the US in this moment of fossil fuel fascism, but also just generally in the global economy, like it's been a boom time for oil and gas, and now Trump is doing everything he can to also make a coal boom.
15:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll see if that's even economically feasible,
15:38
[SPEAKER_01]: regardless like in many ways the fossil fuel industry has never had it better and that's not just about like numbers and sales.
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also like the physical guts of the fossil fuel economy are growing like new LNG export stations, new pipelines, all of this is being built to like further the trade and investment in fossil fuels.
15:57
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's all happening.
15:58
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, there are initial and in some cases and some jurisdictions in the world really impressive investments in zero missions technologies, right?
16:08
[SPEAKER_01]: We can obviously go to China for where the vast majority of those investments in a global sense are taking place, but we can even go to the US.
16:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I just write an article recently in the newspaper that despite all of Trump's attempts to like totally clobber the renewable energy sector in the US, it continues to grow.
16:26
[SPEAKER_01]: In no small part and I know this is something you address a lot on the podcast because of how energy hungry AI is and Trump and his whole coalition is promoting AI a lot as our you know central Democrats and actors across the political spectrum unfortunately AI super energy hungry there's a back order and a backlog of gas turbines so gas power power plants are hard to build quickly.
16:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Cole is like an energy source that was actually declining, right?
16:49
[SPEAKER_01]: So like where are we turning for new energy to feed the bees to like feed the slot machine or whatever we want to call it and it turns out a solar farm is one of the fastest forms of energy to build and to get off the ground and to get generation you know within a year and a half from like initial investment.
17:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the mid-transition captures this contradictory reality that's contradictory and rhetoric in politics and economics and in the physical environment that we live in, where we can simultaneously seeing booms and record profits and the durable, never dies, zombie, like, you know, fossil capitalism at the same time that we see growing supply chains and investments in renewable energy.
17:30
[SPEAKER_01]: This is an interesting policy problem engineering problem like how do we actually not get stuck in this mid transition because there's a lot of ways that you know through the development of vested interests and path dependency and the way that physical infrastructures are built.
17:44
[SPEAKER_01]: That one to get stuck in this like all of the above like energy addition economy rather than a full transition and we see concerning evidence of that for sure in the US and we could go elsewhere in the world too.
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: But you asked me about the implications for resource extraction.
17:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that now, if the listeners along for the ride, like that should be clear, which is that we're simultaneously extracting oil and gas like never before, the US government is committed to like, again, like increasing how much coal is extracted.
18:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of extraction of fossil fuel deposits of hydrocarbons,
18:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Meanwhile, we also growing attraction of lithium of copper, of cobalt, of nickel, of graphite, of this whole periodic table of elements that's necessary for a new energy technologies, but I also want to add AI hardware and data center hardware, right, the growth of use of lithium batteries, not just for electric vehicles, but to stabilize energy provisioning within data centers and make sure that there's never a blackout that makes you lose tons of money,
18:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have this growing use of these technologies.
18:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And so right now, we're in a moment of expanded extraction in all attractive sectors.
18:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, one could rationalize this in their brain if we really knew that this was getting us towards the kind of horizon of a full energy transition.
19:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But it becomes harder to justify, as we see in some major economies and on point into the US, an increasing sense that we're just getting stuck in this all of the above energy and the all of the above extractivism that undergirds it.
19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it feels like, you know, you bring up AI and data centers there, and it really feels like the AI boom almost acts as a way of trapping us in this kind of mid-transition, right?
19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, as you're saying where you still have all the fossil fuels that you're depending on, the fossil fuels are potentially even growing, or, you know, we see them growing at the moment.
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But then we're adding all these renewables, but it's just in addition because there's so much additional energy demand that is created, and so you're not getting the actual transition that you're talking about in that we would want to see.
19:43
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely.
19:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I just want to add one other or two other really quick points to that, going back to the kind of extract of substrate of all of this.
19:50
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, it's worth pointing out that the hardware of data centers and of semiconductors and all the technologies that enable these large language models to kind of function.
19:58
[SPEAKER_01]: That requires a lot of minerals.
20:00
[SPEAKER_01]: There's minerals in all of those, and really dense, kind of, and broad use of minerals in all of these pieces of hardware, just so there are also in the military tech, right?
20:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So we see all these growing applications and kind of use cases for these minerals.
20:13
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, and this is a kind of interesting aside, but it's worth noting, given like the subject of this podcast,
20:18
[SPEAKER_01]: that AI firms are also promoting themselves as a way to solve the mining problem in a variety of ways, including using AI to create like large data sets of geological knowledge and surveys and academic work over like the past 100 years to help develop these predictive technology to basically say there's likely a deposit here, there's likely a deposit there.
20:40
[SPEAKER_01]: because as much as, you know, politicians and sometimes corporations talk about scarcity of minerals, there's actually a lot of minerals that we don't even know.
20:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, I could see again in theory the justification for using technology, but it's a kind of snake eating its own tail kind of situation, right?
20:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Because on the one hand, there's more and more mining demand coming from the tech industry.
21:00
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, the tech industry is like, we're going to also solve the supply problem.
21:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But
21:03
[SPEAKER_00]: how that exactly pans out and where ecology and communities and landscapes kind of fall in all of this I think is a very open question that doesn't surprise me at all seeing how they've also utilized AI tools to help oil companies find a better extract oil and gas and also on the flip side now that they're facing all this kind of criticism for their climate impact of data centers and generative AI and things claim that the AI will definitely help us solve those problems as well so don't worry about it right?
21:28
[SPEAKER_00]: No surprises also being deployed in mining too, but we're talking about this mid-transition right and potentially being kind of stuck in this kind of in-between period between the dependence on fossil fuels and also trying to transition over to a renewable economy.
21:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like in the past year or so there's been a lot more talk of this kind of...
21:47
[SPEAKER_00]: tension between petro states and electro states, right?
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: As there's been talk of China being this new electro state, I wonder how you think about those discourses and how that fits into the type of work that you're doing on an extraction.
22:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that on the one hand, it's a useful binary to think of states that are kind of betting on the continued future of the fossil fuel industry and kind of betting their entire political economies and political coalitions around
22:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, the U.S. has not always referred to as a petro state, but it is the number one oil and gas producer.
22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if it's not quite as reliant on those revenues, like the classical petro state, would be it has really shaped U.S. geopolitical and global market kind of interventions, including very much under the Biden administration, just the degree to which fossil fuels are growing part of the U.S. economy internally and externally, a growing part of its leverage.
22:43
[SPEAKER_01]: over its adversaries and over his allies, increasingly under Trump as well, right?
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I'm fine with calling the US a Petro state, especially under the current government and the commitments to that continuity.
22:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And electros state, you know, thinking about places not only China, but increasing number of global South and other emerging economies that see their own pathway to development,
23:05
[SPEAKER_01]: running through the mass deployment of these technologies as well as the mass industrial production of them, right?
23:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's increasing desire to think about are these green sectors a pathway to industrialization in low and middle income states, right?
23:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So we can see, and then, again, the US China kind of tension kind of dramatizes this idea that there's two energy futures for the world.
23:27
[SPEAKER_01]: two different hedge imons are attached to them and two different kind of geopolitical alliances as well as financial investments are kind of a glomerating around them.
23:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind of I think downside of this analogy is really relates to exactly what we were just talking about, which is it papers over the fact that
23:43
[SPEAKER_01]: when we look under the hood of the electric state, whether it's China's an electric state or any country that we want to call that, we see a lot of fossil fuels, right?
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'll name one example of that, which is Indonesia, which has an increasingly prominent role in batteries supply chains, due to how much of the world's nickel comes from Indonesia, and nickel is an important input in one of the key battery chemistries that use especially an electric.
24:07
[SPEAKER_01]: mobility and the Indonesian government has, we could say, very savly leverage that into a form of kind of supply chain based development and upgrading.
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And so they said, for the past decade or so, you can't just take our raw nickel out.
24:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You, you know, whoever the investors or buyers or traders of this nickel are, you have to develop it here, refine it, maybe make it into cathode materials, batteries, you know, kind of develop the whole supply
24:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's been successful in attracting a lot of investment, especially don't exclusively Chinese in the burgeoning battery industry in Indonesia.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So we could call Indonesia on electricity in many ways, right?
24:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But then we ask like, okay, what is the energy source that powers this growing economy of not just mining, but refining and processing?
24:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And folks that may be aware that refining and processing are really energy intensive activities.
24:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And Indonesia, what it looks like is like a proliferation of captive coal plants.
25:00
[SPEAKER_01]: What that means is a coal plant that's built only to provide energy to like a specific, you know, economic activity in this case, mining, refining processing.
25:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And so all over Indonesia, there are new coal-fired power plants in order to power the extraction and refining of inputs to the so-called like electro-economy.
25:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And if we were living in a perfect world, that would be like an engineering problem to solve like we could think through like what other energy sources could we use to power this, you know, there are technical solutions to these issues, but the fact that we're living in this mid-transition moments means that we see these kind of Frankenstein like hybrid economies that have electro and petro components to them.
25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: absolutely.
25:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And you see that in China itself, right?
25:44
[SPEAKER_00]: But I had no idea about that example of Indonesia that's fascinating to hear about the coal plants just to power the materials going into the batteries effectively.
25:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I did want to ask, you know, China has come up a few times.
25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And it feels like China is being positioned as like the state that is at least furthest ahead on electrification, right?
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They obviously still rely a lot on fossil fuels and all those sorts of things, but they've, you know, electrified a lot more of the transportation,
26:09
[SPEAKER_00]: they are doing these massive build-outs of renewables and I feel like for you as someone who was looking at the potential consequences of a green transition, are there lessons that we see in the approach that China has taken that kind of, are things that we should be aware of as our societies get further down this track of electrification because they are further ahead.
26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
26:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that you can see both like the tremendous harms that the extraction related to the energy transition can cause and those harms are within China.
26:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It's worth noting that China is one of the top four lithium producers just based on its own domestic lithium assets.
26:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But since China's like the top consumer of lithium, it's domestic lithium assets do not satisfy its own consumption.
26:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's also like the biggest importer of lithium, right?
26:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, we can look at the sheer kind of material requirements of what China has done.
27:02
[SPEAKER_01]: We can see how that's incentivized, Chinese mining firms and other conglomerates to like go around the world, seeking those assets as well as developing more of what China has within its own hinterlands.
27:13
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, you know, related to current geopolitical
27:15
[SPEAKER_01]: turbulence, there's a renewed push to also mind even more domestically within China to be a buffer against all of the volatile rights.
27:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So we can see all these different strategies playing out.
27:24
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we can see the fact that rare earth mining and refining in China has caused tremendous ecological and public health harm as well as being linked to, I think, quite credible allegations of forced or forced labor among ethnic minorities in China, right?
27:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, we can see the
27:44
[SPEAKER_01]: issues that the Chinese government has been sensitive to if only in a bid to like maintain its own internal hegemony and legitimacy.
27:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So there have been moments that the Chinese government has reduced the attraction and export of rare earths or tried to manage the rare earth economy in ways that produce less environmental harm or at least kind of manage and manage the legitimacy around that economy.
28:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
28:06
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a lot that China can teach us about the harms and also what governmental response might look like, especially in that political system.
28:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But also, and I would say this maybe to the people that are promoters of these supply chains or investors in them or the government officials like in the US and Europe that are trying to kind of copy China in their own way, just like the sheer amount of policy and fiscal and kind of coordinating support from the public sector that is
28:35
[SPEAKER_01]: create these supply chains writ large, and especially their attractive requirements, which can take a quite long time frame and time horizon and a lot of investment in very fixed sunk up front capital costs that are not the type of thing that contemporary capitalists in the so-called West, like like to invest in, like they want the quick turnaround, you know, they're interested in these like tech bubbles and kind of just appreciating their share assets, like the idea of like physically building hard stuff,
29:05
[SPEAKER_01]: and like digging into the ground and like the risks that come with a mining project that might take a couple of decades to be fully operational, to be fully profitable.
29:15
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the type of economic endeavor that planning and coordination and state support are pretty essential to, which I think global North policy makers are belatedly waking up to, but they're kind of torn between the kind of neoliberal underpinnings of our existing economic system.
29:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, as much as neoliberalism has been contested and problematized, both on the left and the right in the global north, it still remains like a fundamental orientation of our political economy and it's a fundamental limitation then to actually discipline capital put the state in the driver's seat.
29:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's not to say that China is like some fully socialist or let alone communist system, like there's a huge amount of economic competition and private enterprise in China, but there's a way in which the planning and coordinating capacities of the state, and also we should say out loud like the degree to which public institutions control and manage finance in China and have capital controls and the ability to leverage even like ordinary people's savings into these massive development projects.
30:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Like,
30:14
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the kind of administrative capacity and fiscal space and just dedication and political will that is necessary to build these supply chains.
30:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think, yeah, the dual lessons of tremendous ecological harm and the political risks that that can cause for governments on the one hand and on the other hand, like the amount of capacity policy administrative and fiscal that's needed to actually build these supply chains as rapidly as, you know, the energy transition
30:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, and on that point, you've kind of set us up really well to talk about the United States, right, if you're thinking about the kind of the global north response and what would need to be done to actually see a transition happen, and I feel like in the past decade we've seen this.
30:59
[SPEAKER_00]: turn against China in the first Trump administration that followed into the Biden administration.
31:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And it felt like, you know, we saw a real effort to try to start to shift the energy system in the United States under the Biden administration, most notably with the inflation reduction act.
31:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wonder for you what your assessment is of the efforts of the Biden era and what actually came of it and then also whether we see that continuing in the Trump in the second Trump administration or like whether this agenda has just been completely derailed by what Trump is doing.
31:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
31:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's such a great question.
31:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's good since you've given us some reference points over the past few presidential administrations to kind of just zoom out and look at like the patterns in geopolitics and in an energy policy in the US and in US kind of relations.
31:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So.
31:52
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, under, and I won't go through it in a lot of detail, but just to kind of sketch it out broadly, under Trump one, we have this trade escalating trade war with China and solar solar panels were big part of that right in addition, it's interesting to note that it was Trump's first term under which the US government desigated lithium and some other energy transition minerals as quote unquote critical minerals opening up the kind of
32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: possibility of more state support, but also like fast tracking and pushing through these projects and a bid to contest China's quote unquote controller dominance of critical minerals, right?
32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: So even under Trump one, though, you know, of course he's long been a climate denier and like completely against the energy transition, he started to kind of play into and escalate the geo economics of these energy transition supply chains, right?
32:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's one.
32:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Then we get Biden and we actually get a much more.
32:41
[SPEAKER_01]: targeted, but we could also say escalated version of this, right?
32:43
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's not, you know, Biden's like escalation with China is more specifically centered on the energy transition, rather than just like this broader trade war, but it's also really increasing the tariffs,
32:56
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we have 100% tariff on Chinese EVs right new tariff on critical minerals and batteries from China.
33:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's going all out in this idea that the only way that the U.S. can compete with China over over these supply chains that the Biden government agrees are key to the 21st century economics and geopolitics as well as to address the climate crisis that often kind of fell out even as a justification right, but that these are the strategic industries of our moment.
33:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That in order to battle with China, we need to engage in a mix of protectionism, so those are the tariffs and the kind of various form market that I just mentioned, but also domestic subsidy for domestic firms that will make these investments here, as well, and this is important to mention because of the connection to.
33:41
[SPEAKER_01]: mining as well as incentivizing domestic production to use domestic mineral content, right?
33:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So in the inflation reduction act, it's not just tax breaks and subsidies for, you know, solar firms and automakers to like incentivize them to make EVs.
33:55
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also to say, for all that stuff, you get extra tax breaks.
34:00
[SPEAKER_01]: If you
34:00
[SPEAKER_01]: you use US minerals and that kind of mix of a carrot and a stick actually was meant to increase over time to get the US to be quite self-sufficient in the critical minerals that furnish all of these supply chains, right?
34:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is the Biden moment and it was also an idea because your question is also a question about the politics of all of this.
34:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It was also a way
34:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It was meant to kind of, you know, thread the needle in a variety of ways, like we're going to do climate action, but we're also going to like increase the US's geopolitical stature in the world, right.
34:32
[SPEAKER_01]: We're also going to revive American manufacturing under the idea that what caused Trump won was deindustrialization, meaning the way deindustrialization.
34:41
[SPEAKER_01]: can fuel right-wing populism, and that's a whole complex conversation unto itself, but that's the prevailing wisdom among leaders in the Democratic Party.
34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's almost like you can achieve a lot of things at once by really using the fiscal fire power of the US, which with its dollar, the Gemini and other aspects of the US tax system and fiscal situation, like can really command quite a lot of resources if political leaders developed a will to use our fiscal resources toward some goal.
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this was all under the Biden administration.
35:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And one thing I'll say before moving to our current moment is that this involved climate, warrants and climate experts and climate advocates kind of aligning with the national security state.
35:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
35:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a lot of discussion at that moment.
35:28
[SPEAKER_01]: as to whether this was a good idea, whether it was going to further the cause of climate action and a rapid energy transition to kind of join the bandwagon of anti-China sentiment, of like hawkishness of the new Cold War, or, and, you know, just to say, I was among the people among, you know, others not me alone, that we're concerned about this Faustian bargain, about
35:49
[SPEAKER_01]: about linking these two things together about what that would mean for the fate of climate action if the Cold War actually ramped up more, like whether that would continue to be prioritized, also what it meant for the fact that, you know, not to sound like Polyannish, but a degree of global cooperation, even if it's not just like, you know, just nice diplomacy, but also like aligning the economic interests of different countries, like you need multilateralism in an economic form, in a political form, to actually get climate action happening fast
36:19
[SPEAKER_01]: right.
36:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And so the idea that we were going to double down on a new Cold War ran counter to the kind of cooperation conditions of thorough climate action on a global scale.
36:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was quite worried about this.
36:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Now we get into our current moment.
36:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a lot of different changes that are quite interesting.
36:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to pick up, you know, where I just ended, we very much see that the kind of national security imperatives around supply chains, around critical minerals, are more durable than the idea that this is all aimed towards climate action and the energy
36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: In other words, once you say that we're going to offer a lot of public support in terms of taxpayer dollars in terms of regulatory fast tracking, like whatever it is, to get these minds off the ground and to build out these supply chains, and we're going to do this all in the interest of a green transition, then you get a right-wing government in power, and they love the kind of like idea of the national security state and geo-economics and the geopolitical like underpinnings of our economy, but they don't care about the climate stuff, right?
37:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And instead, just to circle back to the strand early in our conversation, this is now all supposedly for AI and military tech.
37:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Like if you were to ask Trump, why do you care so much about critical minerals?
37:27
[SPEAKER_01]: One answer is he just likes resource extraction.
37:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I think he quite literally just likes, you know, minerals dominance as he calls it.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But if he had to name the sectors that this is all supposed to support, it would be AI and military tech.
37:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Ironically, those are actually pretty small segments of like the total markets for a lot of these things, like rare earths mostly go to electric motors and EVs and wind turbines, right?
37:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Like not, you know, it's a smaller slice for these for these other markets.
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the kind of situation that that we're in where we have absolute continuity of this what I call the critical minerals consensus, but unmoored for any kind of climate-oriented goal.
38:03
[SPEAKER_01]: The last thing I want to say on this point just relates to what you're asking about the state
38:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if Biden thought perhaps erroneously that the U.S. could like be China at its own game and use protectionism and subsidies and tax breaks to kind of contest and maybe transcend China's so-called dominance of these sectors.
38:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe that was a fool's errand all along.
38:29
[SPEAKER_01]: We should have just cooperated with China.
38:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, again, that would kind of be my position.
38:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was the gambit.
38:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Trump, actually, and the broader MAGA coalition, is like, China can have that game.
38:38
[SPEAKER_01]: China can do its electrostate thing.
38:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It can have its trade partners allies.
38:43
[SPEAKER_01]: There, whatever it is, that's China's domain.
38:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Our domain is fossil fuels.
38:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And we are going to actually, instead of trying to be China, it's game.
38:51
[SPEAKER_01]: opposed to the world this other future in which we just double down on fossil fuels, right?
38:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, both with adversaries, but maybe even especially with allies, use our fossil fuels, our exports, our position as the number one oil and gas producer, to kind of strong arm transactionally, whether it's Europe, Japan, these deals that have been made that say in order to get access to the US consumer market for your exports, you have to buy our energy exports,
39:20
[SPEAKER_01]: you know how that's going to play out is really questionable.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that that itself is a kind of almost nihilism and almost death drive like a sort of like abdication of the idea of futurity and the ability for the U.S. to compete and like the 21st century economy, but it also represents, I think in certain ways, diminished ambitions.
39:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're going from the Biden liberal hawk, like US China, one-on-one to US dominant in its sphere.
39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: The Western Hemisphere, China can be dominant in its, or US dominant in fossil fuels, China, dominant in renewables.
39:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And those are just, that's like a balance of economic and political power instead of a direct attempt to take over China in these supply chains.
40:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I find it interesting trying to see as well how like Canada and Europe are trying to like thread this needle, you know, they want to be close to the United States because they're so dependent on it Canada for example has approved a bunch of new fossil fuel projects recently LNG in particular because I you know, I think that that is in part around like.
40:20
[SPEAKER_00]: where short-term economic gain, where can we kind of get some cash in the short-term?
40:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But then also the Prime Minister Mark Carney was just over in China, we're reducing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles now, trying to work more with China on even production of electric vehicles.
40:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was this question that the Prime Minister Mark Carney was asked when he was in China by Bloomberg about like a new world order that was forming.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was fascinating to hear him talk about like,
40:46
[SPEAKER_00]: shifting multilateral institutions, potentially the world trade organization, and these organizations not playing the role that they used to in the past, and even like opening the conversation of the Chinese currency, playing a greater role in international transactions and stuff, I don't know, it's really fascinating seeing like those discourses starting to come from like Western leaders as well as they're also trying to not like anger the United States, you know.
41:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's such a crucial point and I think brings up another element of the kind of Biden Trump contrast on on these issues, which is that the other aspect of Biden's bid for the U.S. to battle China on these new supply chains was that we were going to do it like multilaterally with our allies,
41:28
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of global north, front, create these new economic partnership and alliances between the US, Europe, Canada, all of these countries to kind of further not only a kind of countervailing economic force to China, but this whole discourse of like autocracy, verse democracy, and like that there was like,
41:45
[SPEAKER_01]: a political civilizational flash, like, of course, Trump doesn't care about any of the democracy for his autocracy stuff, but, you know, under Trump, like, in this kind of erratic, arbitrary, esplatory way, constantly threatening other countries with tariffs, trying to get other countries to buy our fossil fuel exports, all of this, and the breakdown of sort of traditional US alliances transatlantic and across an US Canada, Trump is kind of providing an opening for these global
42:14
[SPEAKER_01]: countries to kind of think through like, who is the more reliable partner, which is a set of thoughts that interestingly is kind of foreshadowed and pressaged in global south policy discussions where there's been a real sense of like, should Latin America or Africa, out.
42:29
[SPEAKER_01]: like, you know, in this new Cold War dynamic, ally more with the US or China.
42:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the outcome there is pretty clear.
42:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, we have more and more trade, finance, loans, all of it, you know, infrastructural investments coming from China into the global south.
42:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And like the direction of that is pretty clear.
42:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was still, as you said, like then an open question and a kind of nuanced question about how Europe and Canada would land.
42:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And we see not only the example of of Carney that you just brought up and the kind of warming of relations between China and Canada and just to borrow someone's post on social media recently like
43:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The idea of, you know, Canada right across the border, not just from the US, but specifically from like the upper Midwest and like the deindustrial, like where a lot of the, you know, auto manufacturing is and the idea that we're going to have BYD is just like driving across the border to like visit Detroit or whatever, you know, just on a.
43:16
[SPEAKER_01]: road trip and like Americans are going to see these China, that actually could have some interesting implications.
43:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But joining that, I was just reading the financial times this morning that Germany is going to unveil new subsidies for electric vehicle purchases like rebates for consumers and they're going to be agnostic as to where those vehicles are from, meaning German consumers are going to be able to use publicly funded rebates and use that towards the purchase of a Chinese EV, right?
43:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And so
43:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to overstate it because we also see all sorts of ways that Europe has been like timid, including in this moment that we're in with with the Greenland configuration.
43:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I has been like a little bit cautious around Trump, we're trying to still use transatlantic diplomatic channels that have all but broken down, but the Europeans are still very committed to it.
43:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet we see, you know, especially in particular member states like increasing relations with economic relations with China and just an increasing sentiment that
44:09
[SPEAKER_01]: we might be entering into the Chinese century when I'd be leaving the American Hegemon kind of moment of very much so and and there might be a new Hegemon in town that we need to think about how we orient to.
44:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it feels like things are evolving so quickly now as well that even this conversation in a few months we might be talking about things that are completely different, right?
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And just on your point about reliability, Mark Carney was asked when he was in China, who's the more predictable partner right now, China or the United States and East
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: you know you were talking about the global south there right and how global south countries have been relating to this moment but also a lot of extraction mineral extraction has long been outsourced to the global south instead of happening in global north countries and as we see this transition kind of being undertaken and as we see greater demand for mineral extraction you know you mentioned Indonesia earlier and some of the policies that they've undertaken and I
45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of your work has really looked at Chile in particular, but what are you seeing with how countries in the global south are reacting to this moment?
45:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it creating opportunities for them or are they being locked into kind of the same kind of colonial imperialist relationships that have long been there?
45:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like I'm answering every question this way, but it's both.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, in the sense that there's a continuity of attractivism in its most classic sense, not only that, but there's a renewal of resource imperialism, in a way that harkens back to gunboat diplomacy and to kind of earlier stages of imperial resource grabs.
45:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So we see that very clearly in Venezuela, but the threats to Greenland, but we could see it happening elsewhere, would be quite easy to imagine.
45:49
[SPEAKER_01]: the global norths use of its own state power to kind of enforce that is is absolutely happening at the same time as the Indonesia example illustrates and and I'll get into a couple of other examples.
46:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We are also seeing increasing opportunities both in the sense of these new sectors and supply chains that are important but also in the very fact of US China competition
46:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We are sometimes seeing openings for global south states to kind of bargain up rather than race to the bottom in terms of how they're interacting with trade partners or what types of finance they're accessing.
46:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just pure like where you have to deregulate and like go to the lowest common denominator in order to get investment.
46:27
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there's like multiple great powers that are interested in us.
46:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we can play them off against one another and you know that.
46:33
[SPEAKER_01]: that might be more in theory than in practice, but we can definitely say examples of that as well.
46:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a contradictory moment for the global south.
46:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe just to step back a little bit and situate this, global south countries and entire continents, are forecast to be the main places where these important critical minerals come from.
46:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And so even as we're seeing absolutely,
46:55
[SPEAKER_01]: more resource extraction in the global north, as I said in this bid to kind of domesticate supply chains and have mine to factory within the global north and can test China.
47:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have mines opening up in the U.S. Europe, new mines, I mean Canada's already kind of a mining powerhouse, but we have new mines and lithium and other critical minerals have opening there.
47:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that is all happening, but that should not trick us into thinking that the so-called west or global north is about to be self-sufficient and mining.
47:22
[SPEAKER_01]: the majority of these minerals, whether we look at copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, et cetera, are coming from Latin America, Africa, and Indonesia.
47:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's just kind of like the raw data and what the forecast suggests will continue into the future.
47:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And so these global South societies have
47:40
[SPEAKER_01]: potentially major role but also one that might be alarming if we think about what the impact of attractivism has been.
47:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Ecological, you know, we have the contamination of waterways, we have the pollution also of soil, the difficulty having other agricultural livelihoods or other livelihoods of any sort like while the mining industry kind of takes over.
47:59
[SPEAKER_01]: We have very volatile boom and bust market cycles so that countries that rely on these exports like might find themselves
48:09
[SPEAKER_01]: or lithium, or they might find themselves in boon times, but those can also be difficult to govern well.
48:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I already mentioned, the human rights and sheer violence issues, right?
48:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So mining is the most violent sector on earth in terms of how many land and environmental defenders literally get killed trying to defend their land from the predations of extraction.
48:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So these are concerning sectors that global south governments, especially if they're progressive or have some degree of like the public interest at heart, are wary or want to be thoughtful about how they expand.
48:38
[SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, having these resources is potentially a way to upgrade your supply chains beyond extractivism, and that's the kind of Indonesia route that governments around the global south are looking towards and kind of copying.
48:52
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've had a few African countries now that have implemented export bands following Indonesia's model, including Zimbabwe, or we have the Democratic Republic of Congo,
49:06
[SPEAKER_01]: precisely because the price of cobalt was going down, which posed threats to their economy, and they've actually been able to lift that price back up.
49:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So that shows them doing what we can call market craft based on the fact that they have a vast majority of the world's cobalt supplies or in terms of the current market dynamics.
49:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We have Chile instituting under a progressive government, new public private partnerships.
49:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We can call them like a state-owned company and copper, but that's interested in lithium, partnering with a shareholder-owned firm and inserting the state more into the lithium economy, but also with the goal of expanding it and the goal of also having battery manufacturing and Chile will see, you know, if that happens, but we see all of these different positioning, starting from the
49:49
[SPEAKER_01]: fact of the resource deposits that are in these countries, the history of colonialism and neoconialism that they want to avoid repeating, the continued ambition and desire for industrialization and the fact that some of these sectors in terms of the
50:04
[SPEAKER_01]: the tech that they produce, the solar panels, the lithium batteries, the electric vehicles, are really useful products for global south societies.
50:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it is much cheaper and more reliable, actually, to have an energy system that has a lot of solar panels as part of it than being a low-income global south country that has to import oil, which is like super volatile in its pricing and can be geopolitically controlled by a variety of actors.
50:28
[SPEAKER_01]: If instead, you have,
50:29
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just solar panels on rooftops as well as solar farms.
50:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you have coastal access offshore, whatever it is, like you can have a more domestic energy system that's more reliable and meets the need.
50:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And we should remember how many people around the world, like black access to energy and electricity, likewise having lithium battery power, electric buses, which are common around Latin America and other parts of the world, is a great way to deal with the smog issues.
50:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a much better and more equitable way to move people around versus individual vehicles, whether they're electric or otherwise.
50:59
[SPEAKER_01]: These technologies we shouldn't forget can be quite socially useful, especially from like also an economic development perspective, but the question is how you connect the fact that you have lithium nickel cobalt copper underneath your soil to the kind of developmental and socially beneficial use cases of the supply chains writ large and how you navigate all of that in a fraught geopolitical environment.
51:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, really, really well said and it has been fascinating to see these discussions about countries in the global south trying to adopt more renewables, you know, I know Pakistan is the example that so often used of, you know, really installing a lot of solar energy in a short period of time, but how they're does seem to be this growing conversation around.
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: adopting renewable technologies, electrification, and it's not so much about, you know, addressing climate change.
51:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about making sure that you're off for an oil imports and trying to have better control over the domestic energy economy, right?
51:55
[SPEAKER_01]: absolutely and deal with the fact that in some global south societies pollution is also a major issue of political risk for governments, right?
52:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And we can see how the Chinese state kind of managed its own pollution crisis and partly through the mass deployment of electric vehicles.
52:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that I think that's another thing to bring in and the fact that these supply chains when you look at their entirety involve a lot of innovation, technological development, opportunities
52:24
[SPEAKER_01]: like there's a lot of ways that if the collaboration can be equitable, which is a lot to ask, under conditions of global capitalism, if you can get that technology transfer, if you can get something for your own workers and community is out of this bargain, there's potentially a lot there, which is why a number of emerging economies have actually said to China, we don't want to just be the kind of dumping ground for cheap solar panels, as useful as those can be,
52:51
[SPEAKER_01]: We also want to manufacture them, right?
52:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So we have increasing alongside trade, we've increasing amounts, and this goes back to some of our other questions, of Chinese firms in the private sector, doing direct investment in building factories and assembly plans within the global south.
53:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we also are seeing a slight,
53:09
[SPEAKER_01]: let's say de-concentration.
53:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to overstate it because China is still 85% of battery manufacturing capacity in the world is concentrated in China, but we're seeing a slight movement towards other manufacturing hubs within especially emerging economies who do to their own consumer markets and labor forces have a bit more leverage with China and can implement their own policies, strictures to ensure that they don't just get trade, they also get industrial
53:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think this is going to be fascinating to watch in the coming years to see how it develops and the other so many other things that I could ask you about in relation to this book like it's so fascinating and digging into the scope of all this but I wanted to end by asking you because you know you've also been doing all this work at the climate and community institute looking at what a transition should actually look like and you know very much informed by the research that you've been doing for years right so after doing all this after looking into all this for so long what is this tell us about
54:06
[SPEAKER_00]: the type of transition that we should be doing to address climate change, you know, what are the trade-offs that we're going to have to consider?
54:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And what is the right path if we're trying to reduce the the harm or the extractive necessity that is going to come of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels?
54:23
[SPEAKER_01]: As I mentioned earlier, the Green New Deal moment was really pivotal to my initial conception of this whole book and project, in the sense that I wanted to take seriously the Green New Deal principles of social justice at the heart of climate justice, of involving workers and communities and materially uplifting them in the process of an energy transition.
54:46
[SPEAKER_01]: of using the public sector and the powers of government to usher through a coordinated and plan transition, rather than leave it to market forces or the kind of whims of Wall Street or finance.
54:57
[SPEAKER_01]: All of that is still relevant today, and I'll say a little more about it, but what I wanted to say about my thinking at that moment is, how do we internationalize that?
55:06
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that I think we can't, in a world of global capitalism, in a world of fraud and interconnected geopolitics,
55:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't suffice to think in terms of one country as if it's an island.
55:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think for principles that animate us on the left and on the progressive side of the political spectrum, internationalism and solidarity and not stopping your values at the borders of your country, knowing that whether for just purely principled reasons, which are my own reasons, but even for more strategic reasons, like all of these international configurations actually make domestic
55:40
[SPEAKER_01]: amplifying the role of the security state, you know, including domestically internally for repression as we're witnessing right now with the ISIS murders of, you know, people engaged in an activism against this clamp down on immigration.
55:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, it is really clear more than ever that we need to be rigorous about the international perspective that we bring to climate politics.
56:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other thing that is clear is that an approach to climate politics that doesn't take seriously the economic needs of working class communities, wherever they are, including in the U.S., is not going to create the conditions for its own political continuity.
56:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And sorry, that was a slightly complex statement, but just to say that the inflation reduction act, as much as it represented by the very low standards of recent
56:25
[SPEAKER_01]: U.S. history, like the greatest climate and energy investment that the U.S. government has undertaken, you know, as much as that is true, it was actually not targeted to address the material needs of ordinary households in the U.S., right?
56:38
[SPEAKER_01]: The assumption was, oh, you're a wealthy person in buying an EV, here's like a $2,000 off of that, right, or you're a wealthy person that owns your home and can install solar panels or heat pumps like here's a tax break for that.
56:50
[SPEAKER_01]: but not everyone is an asset holder or even if they are an asset owner, they might be pretty low income or middle income and not have the ability to make these types of investments on new assets or on retrofits even with some governmental help, right?
57:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So it really did not address what was already becoming a crisis in affordability in everyday needs and therefore missed the opportunity to show that green policies, that climate policies, can also be policies that
57:17
[SPEAKER_01]: uplift the material circumstances of ordinary people in the 99% use that populist framing.
57:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And in not connecting those dots, it is one of many, the way that climate policy has been enacted in the US is one of many factors that has provided opportunities to the right wing, to kind of
57:35
[SPEAKER_01]: present itself as the ones that are going to save Americans from the affordability crisis and then even worse to also say fossil fuel expanded fossil fuels are better for energy affordability, which is not even true given what we talked about earlier about how much quicker and honestly cheaper it can be to set up a solar farm than it is to expand the fossil fuel economy.
57:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is the position that we find ourselves in as leftist, as climate leftist.
58:00
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to, I don't want to say start over because I actually think that the Green New Deal principles were really solid, but we need to think about an our current geopolitical and economic environment had a deep in the connection between green and what is economically beneficial to most Americans.
58:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We also need to be clear that
58:20
[SPEAKER_01]: the resource intensive way that we've been going about the energy transition poses a ton of risks, meaning that, you know, I haven't gotten the opportunity to say this yet, but I'll say it now that the idea that everyone's going to individually own a Tesla or an expensive electric vehicle,
58:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't make sense from an equity or justice perspective, as I just said, but also is the most mining intensive way to go about the energy transition compared to and transition that would rely more on public and mass transit on shared forms of mobility on affordable housing and the density of that on reconfiguring our societies to access and fully leverage the benefits of renewable energy for everybody.
59:01
[SPEAKER_01]: and all of the economic opportunities at that also presents, right?
59:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, we're also seeing that these resource intents supply chains are sites and arenas of geopolitical competition.
59:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more we kind of double down an idea that
59:16
[SPEAKER_01]: We need more and more of these minerals, whether it a fuel AI, military, energy transition, whatever the next excuse for it is, we also increasingly imprecate ourselves in supply chains that are ecologically harmful, but also geopolitically quite sensitive.
59:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that there's a lot of reasons, and we're seeing this playout in real time now.
59:36
[SPEAKER_01]: to rethink in a way from the ground up or even below the ground, from the sub-soil up, right, from the kind of underlying resource deposits that our Earth's press contains, to the supply chains and all the way to how those reach consumers and communities and touch down on Earth.
59:51
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of, I think, reason to rethink what type of energy transition we want, what type of economic tools that would involve, how we can minimize the ecological impacts of that, how we can maximize the economic benefits of that.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_01]: to working class people and renew and create a new climate left paradigm for how to address the most important crisis of our moment.
1:00:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And as upsetting as it is to me that even the quite imperfect and suboptimal inflation reduction act is being dismantled,
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to quite call it a silver lining, but the reality that that creates is that like we have to rethink all this, but not abandon our Green New Deal principles or abandon some of the major insights of climate justice or internationalism that the left part of the climate movement has developed over years.
1:00:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And instead, we tool them for the moment that we're in.
1:00:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think actually argue with more confidence that they're more relevant than ever.
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think of really great point and something that people need to be thinking about, you know, as we continue heading into this moment, as we continue to think about what a green transition is going to look like.
1:00:56
[SPEAKER_00]: As I said, there's so many more things that we could talk about in relation to this.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all the more reason for people to check out the book and, you know, to follow your work, but thank you so much for taking the time.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I really appreciate it.
1:01:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for your great questions, Aras, it was a pleasure.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The Oriofrancos is an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the climate and community institute, and the author of Extraction.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Techwell and Save Us is made a partnership with the nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Production is by Kyla Hussen.
1:01:25
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1:01:30
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1:01:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.