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Extraction Behind the Green Transition w/ Thea Riofrancos / American Prestige · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hello, Prestige heads and welcome to American Prestige.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Danny Bessner here as always with my friend with Comrade Derek Davis and we're very excited to welcome back to the podcast today.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Aria Frunkos.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thia is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and author of the recently released extraction, the frontiers of green capitalism.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Thia, thanks for joining us once again.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me back.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why don't we start with the book's central problem as you perceive of it because like a good Marxist, not to say your Marxist, I don't know, I assume you're thinking dialectically, so what are the tensions, whether or the two theses that will need to be transcended so that we don't cook our planet.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you start with that and we'll go from there.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: there is a central dilemma that animates the whole book and then a bunch of subsidiary contradictions.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We might say that flow out of that, but the central issue that drew me to this topic is the contradiction between two desirable things.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: On the one hand, we need rapid urgent holistic climate action, and climate action is not just diplomacy.
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not just words, it's not just agreements or multilateral institutions, which are kind of going up in flames right now.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is actually concrete material deployment of technologies and infrastructures to completely transform the built environment to get to a zero-missions economy and society and
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: scenarios of global warming.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's one thing we need to do and would be a desirable outcome.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another desirable thing is to protect local communities from the ravages of resource extraction, to conserve biodiversity, which is its own crisis related to the climate change, but also with independent drivers to protect indigenous rights, to allow people to flourish in the places they
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is also a set of desirable things, that also addresses a bunch of social and ecological crises.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the problem is those two desirable things are intention, or at least in so far as the build out for them renewable energy transition involves new forms of extraction that are threatening the landscapes, lively hoods, cultures, and surrounding biodiversity of frontline communities around the world.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's really succinct and really quite fascinating.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably the central dilemma for people on the left going forward.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before we continue into the book, though, I am curious about what do you think about these issues of, I guess the question that has been confronting the left is this issue of decrothed.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: versus not.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is a bit orthogonal, but I do think it's important maybe to lay out the stakes of that debate.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: To be honest, I don't really have much of an opinion on it to be as just a layperson observing it.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It seems like difficult to be able to consume at the same level that has defined particularly American life.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is it?
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: 20 or 25% of the world's energy and enormous amount of plastic.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That seems not possible, and it also doesn't seem possible for other countries to consume at the same level of, you know, the bourgeoisie, which is what, you know, developmentalist politics in many areas, the world, that all want to do.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you may be laying on the stakes of that debate, because I think it's a good framing thing, because like, what are we going for?
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it possible in which the left one, Derek?
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought this was a pro-abundance podcast.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what you're talking about.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So why you're bringing up D-girls, but I'm sorry, go ahead.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Derek Thompson, I'm Block Me on Twitter.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, actually, I understand why he blocked me.
• 4:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I repeat, I'm like, this guy has three BAs.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, three BAs, and then he blocked me initially.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why can't, why won't any of these people block me on Twitter and Jesus Christ?
• 4:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're not mean enough, Derek.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not enough as a Vanessa.
• 4:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you gotta work on that.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You gotta work on that.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: No problem.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that there are a couple of different angles to kind of take up this question, but maybe one way to frame it a little bit differently and maybe even more meta than the degrowth versus like green growth or versus equal modernist debate, which are themselves like pretty esoteric terms to a lot of people.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: including, you know, educated leftists like yourself, you know, they, they, you know, what does exactly de-growth?
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does it mean?
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: What does the political movement look like?
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think if we kind of zoom out, there is a bigger question that the left has thought about quite a bit over the past decade at least, which is,
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: can we get to a more climate safe, relatively sustainable, like ecologically rational society without overthrowing capitalism or without, you know, dramatically upending the means of production and the kind of forms and habits of consumption that let's say at least those in the global north and those with some economic security are used to at this point.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: or is there a way to green capitalism to address our urgent climate and ecological goals but without, you know, going through a kind of revolutionary process.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, that's one way to frame it.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: How compatible is capitalism with climate action?
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think, you know, that, and that's a slightly different question than the deep growth one perhaps, the deep growth question just more properly understood is, you know, whether we should have an economic system, which could be capitalism, but honestly, we could even look back to like industrial forms of socialism and like socialist modernity, which were maybe not dramatically better on the front of like,
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: ecology, at least historically, but regardless, can we have industrial civilization without just completely ruining the planet or do we need to think about economic and social systems that dramatically reduce the kind of material pressures on planetary boundaries, on sources of resources, natural resources that we take from the planet, on the kind of so-called sinks, like the places that we kind of dump, you know, the waste of civilization, like what are the kind
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: to modernism, to kind of industrial civilization, whether capitalists or even another sort.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that is another entry point that maybe comes more properly from a degrowth position.
• 6:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But maybe to take up the first way that I framed it, I think that what we can see right now is that capitalism, or at least a kind of mutated form of state capitalism,
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: is completely able to deploy renewable energy technologies, to produce them, to have people consume them, to build out the infrastructure for them.
• 7:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't mean it's happening fast enough, it's happening holistically enough, but these things are occurring.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like solar panels do exist.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Lithium batteries do exist.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: People do buy electric vehicles.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so to me, it's less a question of whether
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Capitalist firms can be induced by policy incentives and tax breaks and guidance from a kind of all-seeing state.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm referring to China here, of course.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we could see versions of the elsewhere to kind of produce this suite of technologies instead of that suite of technologies.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: That seems fine, and we've had many technological revolutions in capitalism.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in those moments, some firms don't make the cut.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Others do usually the state is involved.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: and creating novel forms of technology, what there's not so much historical precedent for is destroying value outside of the context of really war or huge economic depressions.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason I bring that up is that
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: deploying renewable energy is only one side of the coin and it's really the easier side in a way of really getting off of fossil capitalism.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other side of that coin, as discussed in many books by, you know, for example, Andreas Mam, is that we need to destroy the property, the assets, the actual economic value of fossil investments because if
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: We just deploy the renewable and we don't deal with the fossil, then we have what many refer to as energy addition or in all of the above transition in which we continue to
• 8:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: new renewable deployment to kind of maybe address new demand for electricity, but we're not destroying the existing power plants that are doing the polluting.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so capitalism, sure, you know, Schumpader talked about creative destruction.
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are moments that through competition, capitalism might go out of business, might lose the value of their assets, but that's every day kind of normal forms of competition.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about the wholesale destruction of billions, trillions of dollars in assets, when we also think about the financial investments in these, not just the kind of physical assets themselves.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that I think could happen under a very modified version of capitalism with a lot more state involvement, with a lot more civil society mobilization, and with really channeling the finance sector away from fossil investments and towards something else,
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that's impossible in the theoretical sense, but we could see why a deep tension exists in the idea that capitalism would destroy value at that scale.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas I think the new green, eco-modern, you know, kind of like the new tech stuff, I think that's easier to do.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll be at you need a lot of state involvement to get it to happen nonetheless.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm gonna...
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: pushback and say that I don't think it's possible this can happen under any scenario in the current environment because at the same time that we're supposed to be making green transition.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're also now addicted economically at least to artificial intelligence and these massive energy, you know, expansive energy demanding data centers that need to be built everywhere.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: countries, China taking the lead, but other countries, you know, making the decision to build more solar, more wind, more renewable energy.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also this pressure to add more energy instead of replacing the fossil fuels to add more energy.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, in some places, even like turning back to coal, which had been on the way out in favor of natural gas for a while,
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... it it feels like we're going in both directions right like we're expanding uh... renewables on the one hand but we're actually going backwards in the fossil fuel realm uh... to even more heavily polluting uh... you know inputs partly because this is like we've just kind of you know hooked our wagons uh... to this new industry that takes up the that requires so much energy to function
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a great point, and I don't disagree, but let me bring up two counterpoints at least.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Which are none of which are to justify AI as an industry.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I just wanna make that caveat clear, but it's just to address your central question, Derek, which is, is it possible to expand the energy system to serve this new demand without, like, then increasing emissions by the same count, right?
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can we actually square that circle?
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: China, which is also undergoing a sort of AI boom, it looks different than the US-based one, and the kind of specifics of how that sector operates in China are distinct.
• 11:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yet there's a lot of AI, there's a lot of automation, there's a lot of robotics in China, so we can take China as an example.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason I bring in China is because China has proven
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: in the past year, uh, in a kind of, I would say it's a kind of world historic development that you can expand the energy sector to meet new demand, whether it's demand from households, your population, just grow, you know, and population growth, whether it's demand from new industries, whether it's AI, whatever it is, that you can expand your energy sector without,
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: expanding emissions.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, China has flatlined its carbon emissions from its electricity sector.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I just want to underscore that that is there's no parallel to that in world history.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's no parallel in world history on so far as we've used fossil fuels since, you know, the mid-19th century, where we see a dramatic increase, you know, just the level of new households, new industrial plants that are getting new energy,
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: while we've not increased carbon emissions at all.
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've held them steady in China because increasingly the new energy being provided is renewable.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, that shows that it is at least technically feasible with the right policy mix, with a certain configuration of political economy, with the right level of capital discipline, with state involvement at even at the ownership level.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: to expand energy provision without increasing carbon emissions.
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you kind of decoupled, let's say, not everything, but you decoupled the electricity mix from carbon to some degree relative decoupling to be super annoyingly precise about it.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that is possible, but of course, you know, then lots of questions are raised by by what I just said, how can other states that don't have the exact political economic configuration of the Chinese Communist Party of this certain version of state capitalism of the tremendous like.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: mobilization of social resources and, you know, just industrial mobilization that the Chinese, you know, whole society represents how can that be replicated elsewhere?
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that's tough.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's good to establish things as technically feasible.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because then we know the problem isn't in technical feasibility.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in lobbying interests.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in capitalist relations of production.
• 14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in geopolitics.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's in culture.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those things are no
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: easier or harder to change than technical feasibility, but I think it helps when we can say we can say the technical stuff, you know, is solved, what we need to turn our attention to our power relations of all sorts.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now let me bring in my second caveat, which is that
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alongside this very concerning development of the AI race, and it's concerning for a whole host of reasons, but very much including climate, energy use, water use, land use, and things very germane to our topics today, alongside that, there's a whole other development that your podcast has in super immersed in for over a month now, which is this horrific illegal brutal war in Iran and Lebanon.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the reason I bring that up is because, you know, according to all the experts, but also just common sense or any news reader,
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: While yes, we're going to see some temporary uptick in like coal usage, maybe some plants that were kind of idle or not at full capacity are now being, you know, kind of realized at their full capacity.
• 15:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't really see a lot of building a new coal plants, which would anyway take too long to serve the immediate issues.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: What we see more is a fuller utilization of existing coal plants.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that's concerning coal is very dirty in terms of local air pollution as well.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that said, the longer trajectory that the fossil fuel executives themselves are getting freaked out about.
• 15:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: The longer trajectory is that this war in all its brutality and I don't want to find silver linings.
• 15:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the clear thing is is that it's going to make renewable energy look like the right geopolitical decision.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Look like the right industrial strategy decision not.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're at a point that is a little bit contradictory from a climate perspective, which is that more and more
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: capitalist, capitalist actors themselves, governments, civil society actors households are going to opt for renewable simply out of quote energy security and simply out of a desire to like, eat out what's possible for economic development without being subject to the volatility of the fossil fuel economy and its attendant geopolitics.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are seeing the line move in the right direction in terms of more and more renewable uptake even the past few weeks.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's like kind of very fascinating data points about sales of EVs, solar panels, et cetera around the world.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: The issue though remains that
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: fossil capitalism still needs to be frontantly addressed.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that while we're seeing some fascinating developments where almost fossil capitalism is self-imulating, what I mean is we see the physical destruction of gas fields, of pipelines of oil fields in the Gulf, in this, you know, retaliatory back and forth, between the U.S. Iran, Israel, Lebanon, etc., all the parties involved, that, you know,
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't want to celebrate that that's people losing their livelihoods and being exposed to toxic chemical pollution as this stuff is destroyed, but, you know, that's at the margins.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We, we need to think about at scale and intentionally and in a way that doesn't involve brutality and violence, how would we actually face out these fossil fuel assets?
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I see less progress towards, but I do see progress towards more and more countries opting for, you know, a greener energy makes out of purely security interests.
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, let's dive into the book.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the second time we've had you on, and we should probably talk about the book at some point.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And why don't we talk about that?
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've had there eventually, yeah, and in five episodes later.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why don't we talk about lithium batteries because as you talk about the book, and as I understand it, these are going to be crucial to the great transition, and they highlight these tensions that you've been discussing.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, might even be interesting to talk a little bit about start with the history,
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: there.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The history is has a lot of present residents actually, which is interesting.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we were just talking about the current geopolitical scenario and what it portends for the energy transition.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a kind of parallel 1970s history that are the origin point of lithium batteries.
• 17:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so lithium batteries were actually
• 17:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: first or let's say the process that invented lithium batteries has its origins in exon and in the 1970s and in the US and that it might be unexpected to hear that an oil company was part of the process of inventing a non-oil technology but this was in the prior quote-unquote energy crisis of the early 1970s.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: when a combination of factors from OPEX negotiations with the Seven Sisters Oil Companies to a lot of nationalizations across global south oil producers kind of put upward pressure on the price of oil leading to what many felt was a crisis and pain at the pump and a lot of kind of concern.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: backlash or politicians in the West, in the U.S. and Europe primarily.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so in this kind of moment, oil companies were thinking, okay, what is the future?
• 18:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: We see people maybe like opting out of oil technologies.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's also was this recurrent concern about peak oil, because this is, of course, before the fracking revolution.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: When we thought there was a kind of like known quantity of oil that we could access under, you know, undercheck the technologies that existed.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, that ended up being incorrect, but regardless, there was a lot.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: happening including, you know, books written.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The old heads out there in the audience will remember Peacoyle because that was a big thing.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Totally wild.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: We had a Peacoyle like moment in our lifetimes and our lifetimes on this, you know, old millennial podcast or whatever, which is like I remember some time in the early 2000s, but there had been recurrent, you know, every 20 years there was sort of a Peacoyle freak out, you know, from the 1950s onward.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Derek's actually silent generation, but yeah, you and I
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: how ages.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyways, so okay, so we were in this moment and you know, just let's go back to the 70s in a couple of other ways.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: We had the first Earth Day.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We also have this concern including among capitalists about the so-called limits to growth.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have the, you know, these concerns that end up being unfounded about the co-population bomb and mass famine.
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it was a moment that again, it has a lot of echoes with our own around geopolitics, concerns about resource scarcity and an energy crisis.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so in that moment, Exxon, particularly, you know, having some foresight seeing the writing on the wall, is like, let's start developing some non-oil technology so that we can kind of branch out into these new advanced energy sectors that are kind of around the corner.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so in their labs in New Jersey, some scientists start working on this lithium battery.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: There have been previous battery technologies, but not a lithium battery.
• 20:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, then there's a longer story of how the battery ultimately gets developed that involves other collaborators from the UK from Japan and not to tell the entire story, but it's kind of interesting where it lands the first lithium battery.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's current kind of form was used for the Sony camcorder.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think in 1990 or 1991, that little camcorder, the some of us may remember from childhood birthday parties.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was the first use of this new system of mobile energy storage.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what's remarkable about the lithium battery and what made it a debt for that purpose is it's chargeable and rechargeable and it can do that cycle many, many, many, many times before, you know, it kind of reaches the end of its lifespan.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very energy dense.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's lightweight for the amount of energy that it provides.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when we go to electric mobility, it's also very power dense.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It can quickly ramp up and get you that power to acceleration.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And despite there being other battery technologies out there or on the horizon, like the lithium battery remains pretty hegemonic for these reasons.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, maybe just to say a couple of other words about it, we can discuss this in more detail if we want, but suffice to say that China was really critical to the mass deployment of the lithium battery, and that might seem obvious today, China has 85% of lithium battery manufacturing capacity, so it's clearly dominant now, but not everyone knows that this has been like decades in the making.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it was earlier in the 2000s that the CCP for the first time declared electric vehicles as part of their five-year plan.
• 21:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that itself was the product of the Chinese government wanting to, first of all, find a niche.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: in industrial development that wasn't already occupied by incumbent western firms.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, firms, auto manufacturers in the US and Europe had, you know, we're really dominant among traditional vehicles and the Chinese government wanted more traditional wanted more regular vehicles.
• 22:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Except, you know, at the time they were just trying to build an auto sector, but they quickly realized like we're not going to be super competitive where there are already these really behemoth incumbent powers we need like a new sector and new niche and at the same time as listeners might be aware there was this ongoing issue with with really really.
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: on healthy levels of pollution in Chinese cities and industrial hubs.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And people often misunderstand authoritarian regimes as like not caring about social consent.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's absolutely untrue.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, an authoritarian regime the last six months obviously didn't put a lot of effort into consent.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: An authoritarian regime that lasts for many, many, many decades has obviously figured something out in a combination of preempting and subduing descent, but also meeting
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: popular and social needs for certain basic goods and services.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the Ludwig von Mesa's point about how every society is democratic, because if it wasn't democratic, then it would be overthrown.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the argues are an omnipotent government.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, there's a, you know, I don't want to ratify Mesa's too much, but there's a truth there, which is that hegemony is not a-
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Germany, you know, the idea that you have what, you know, Gramshee defined as like a baseline voluntary social consent to the powers that be, is not the exclusive domain of democracies at all.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, you know, there are tools available to authoritarian regimes that can manufacture that consent or produce it, or, you know, uh, receive it even more voluntarily, uh, that that aren't always available to democratic states.
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we have to be a little bit more complex here.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is very, very, very, very, very quickly.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think this is interesting because then this phrase is questions about social guilt.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, are we old guilty for living in the American Empire?
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were lots of debates about this right after World War II, of course, with the relationship between the German people and the Nazi regime.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, we're the German people guilty, where they responsible.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is actually a key point.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's orthogonal, but we never ever talk about it.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just wanted to make it.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Please.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's fine.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, we can, we can absolutely then think about what that means in terms of like individual or collective complicity for the other actions of said authoritarian regime.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: But here we're kind of thinking about seeing from the state, you know, as the book title goes, like from the perspective of the state, how do you get a modicum of social stability to achieve then your other developmental or geopolitical goals as in the case of China?
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a big
• 24:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: and then there was latent discontent that maybe wasn't protest, but was creating enough instability.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then there's also just the literal human development cost of air pollution, like the Chinese state is aware that air pollution kills people.
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if you're trying to have a healthy workforce and an increasingly educated workforce, you know, in these new sectors with R&D and all of that, you need people to be able to live and breathe clean air.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And just as a little aside since you've already gone a couple of tangents, I'm going to indulge in one, which is that
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, when I was learning the basics of what we call comparative politics, like sort of comparing different regime types, comparing different economic systems when I was in graduate school, I read about this issue of China and both things like air pollution or famines or other public health issues and the kind of stated wisdom at the time was India and China.
• 25:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are the countries to compare.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're the two big populist global South nations that are on some kind of development trajectory and they're interesting to compare.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: because one is a democracy and the other, the authoritarian, and we can like sort of draw sorts of conclusions from that.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the prediction was that if anything, India would much more rapidly deal with its air pollution problem because it was subject to the pressures of democracy.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now you can look at the facts and see that China has just blown in the away, not to make it into some weird nationalist competition.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: But like, China has achieved reductions in air pollution that
• 26:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: All to say that the Chinese government was in 10 on reducing this air pollution problem, but they were also in 10 in industrializing and finding niches that they could exploit given their resource endowments and given their workforce and given kind of the global market structures.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: electric mobility ticked every single box.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a way to compete with more strength in the auto sector because incumbent Western firms were like super delayed and getting good EV models out.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a way to address this pollution problem by replacing, you know, now you go to a Chinese city, so I've heard, I haven't been and they're all quiet because everything is an EV and like that also means no air pollution from at least the transportation sector.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you also want a sector that has a lot of value add in the technical economic sense that like has a lot of innovation possibilities workforce upgrading value chain upgrading all these wonky terms, but they they saw they saw that very clearly you know starting in the early 2000s and so.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: that leads to this mass deployment, mass production, mass deployment of lithium batteries, which is another world's historic achievement because it dramatically lowers the unit costs of lithium batteries now making electric vehicles in China, for example, like much cheaper than internal combustion engine vehicles are.
• 27:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's the kind of history of where the lithium battery came from this weird story with like the 1970s oil crisis at its origins, but then like the more contemporary story of how they got produced at scale.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so how does that help us think about what the green transition should be?
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And actually, Theo, even maybe before you answer that, want to talk a little Marxist theory for a second, how does this reframe notions of use in exchange value?
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, so that that is obviously this sort of key distinction that Marx makes very early on and he's like, we're going to talk about exchange value.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, a little bit of use value, but it's really his theory is premise on really working through exchange value.
• 28:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is there a new way that this helps us rethink value to centuries after Capitale or a little less than two centuries after Capitale?
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's an really interesting question that I haven't thought about before, so I'm going to go off the cuff.
• 28:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think to start with... Let's do it.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: To start with the use value, and Marx was really specific about use value in the sense that
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: He didn't have some weird metaphysical trans-historical notion of what is useful to humans.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like today, Marks would probably say, yeah, like a smartphone has a use value because without a smartphone, like you can't achieve other things that might be helpful, like having a livelihood or communicating with people in long distance or whatever it is.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't mean
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: he would love Apple, but what my point is is that he recognizes that what is useful, which all relates to the concrete material qualities of an object are historically culturally and socially specific and change over time.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it's not like he's looking at like a basket of essential goods like you know, 19th century wool and like potatoes and like whatever they were was useful at that time.
• 29:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's helpful because today it is supremely useful for variety of reasons based on the purely tactile qualitative material qualities of these energy transition technologies to have more of them to have access to them, right?
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like a battery has certain directly useful functions.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: It can store energy, it can charge, and recharge, it can provide energy when you need it.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whenever you need it, it can provide mobile energy.
• 29:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it can move along with a vehicle, whether that's an ebus, an e-bike, an EV, whatever it is.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it has all these qualities that are basically electrochemical, and then with its engineering design, that then create certain use cases, we might say kind of useful things we can do with it.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The problem is to go to the exchange value, or I don't know if I'm going to say the problem, but the kind of interesting other way to look at this is like the economic value of the battery, or the economic value of the solar panel, which, you know, if you want to be kind of tricked or Marxists about it, we would.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: locate that value, the sort of origins of that value and the exploitation of labor, the extraction of surplus value from the worker.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we could add in other elements of how we think value is created at an economic plane, but regardless, we can just be straightforward for now.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in a kind of epiphonominal way, that's going to result in the price tag that we see.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, price and value aren't exactly the same.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We could get, again, very maxologist about this, but that's a form of appearance of value.
• 30:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think is the way that Marx would put it himself.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: What the trick is is that we need to intentionally, as a society, regardless of what our type of government is, like push through an energy transition.
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Capitalists won't do this on their own for reasons we've already kind of discussed.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like they're fine producing with whatever incumbent tech they're already producing.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you want them to produce something new, even if all the other end of that they would profit and be happy with it, you often will need to use the state
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: force that transition a bit.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, let's say you have that transition going and we start producing these things.
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is a fundamental question as to whether capitalist are going to receive enough high enough and reliable enough profit for what they produce to keep producing the useful things that society has decided it needs to have clean energy and a worth the worst case scenarios of climate crisis, or also now with the Iran War to have a more geopolitically secure
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: energy source.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so if there is a Mitch mismatch, meaning if there's like very high levels of social utility and very clear use values of these technologies, but the price is not right.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm directly quoting from Brett Christopher's book that the price is wrong.
• 32:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: If capitalists for whatever set of market reasons and other kind of reasons of what the cost of production are, can't expect a reliable and high profit stream for those products, they will not produce them unless we deeply subsidize capitalists.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: unless or if we had a different type of state arrangement and China has elements of this, if we really discipline capitalists and require them and exercise capital control, meaning actually control the finance system so that finance is only allocated towards the goals that are decided upon by the polity.
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm not sure if this answers your question, but I think we do see right now a kind of tension between
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: what would be socially useful on the one hand and what there's adequate kind of price signaling and profit margins around to incentivize capitalists for their own just self-interested myopic, you know, bottom line reasons to produce enough of this stuff.
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that gap is where really the state comes in and where maybe more forceful forms of industrial policy will also need to come in.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it seems to me like an actually existing reality.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What we are in practice wanting is sort of like a wise dictator in the United States or an FDR like figure who's going to centralize executive power but for the good is that what essentially we could hope for because that one of the things that that I'm thinking through right now and things for a long time is the power of the presidency and it's just obviously too much.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, it's just far, far too much for, I think we see where it goes wrong precisely with Trump.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it seems like, you know, we're not going to, all of a sudden, have a series of Soviets that are able, able to go into determine a wise industrial policy to discipline finance and industrial, the Korean capitalism or industrializing Korean capitals.
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that what we should go for that we want like why is President AOC to do this by issuing 4,000 executive orders like FDR did in the 1930s?
• 34:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean you and I and Derek I presume would likely want something more democratic than that but then just see this basically impossible at this point.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what are we actually advocating for like as a member of the scientific generation?
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't have
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But like this is, this to me is the big, the big issue is that that's what we're essentially hoping for, right?
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because again, your book, like a lot of my work, like a lot of work written by leftists, not like the solutions are so difficult to arrive at, you know, you do various types of things, you don't do this, you do that, it's a problem of implementation.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I would love to get your thoughts on that.
• 35:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I think it's a really good question.
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me, as always, I'm gonna agree with parts of it.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna push back on parts of it.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you ask, is it necessary to have a green dictator, to usher through a transition, especially I think in the context of the U.S. where we're so deeply soaked and fossil fuels in every way shape or form, let's never forget that the U.S. is the world's number one oil and gas producer, right?
• 35:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's not just like, oh, we're addicted to oil
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: exporter of oil.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're like a major player in the oil and gas world.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have countries like begging for more of our LNG because of what's happening in the Gulf.
• 35:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so there's a real deep political economy behind this.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We don't necessarily need to call the US a petro state.
• 35:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: The usual definition of that is states that rely much more fiscally on the kind of oil income, which we don't as much.
• 35:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in many other ways, we're kind of novel type of petro state.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would say.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so this isn't just about like the ethosyncrasies of American car-loving culture.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's about huge American firms.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're lobbying relationships to the American government and in geopolitical position, that is protected.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what I've been actually saying, I've said this in my head, maybe I was my first time saying it out loud, is that like the US and Wineland gas sector is our iron dome.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: What I mean by that is it's a strategic asset like just like Israel has this iron dome that protects it from the consequences of its own actions, the U.S. is like iron dome of of of oil and gas production means that we can do all these things in the world that disrupt fossil fuel and energy supplies for other people, but we are protected from those consequences.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it's really it's hard to imagine the kind of rapid transition we need here without some major.
• 36:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: break some major upending of these power relationships.
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the place I want to push back a little bit is that it depends like who who is the kind of who are the subjects being ruled by this dictator in this imaginary because I don't think it.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is or would be unpopular on the part of many ordinary American voters from kind of like left to center broadly speaking, you can even pull Republicans in certain ways that like can get their support for like yeah local clean energy sounds good to me like
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't think that there's a major impediment at least for some of the easier aspects of the energy transition.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Easier I mean like just transforming our energy system from more fossil to more renewable, easy because it's technically available to us and we've already started to do it in certain ways.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, I think for the past year or so, most of our new electricity growth in the US was covered by solar and battery.
• 37:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like it's already even happening, even if chaotic and, you know, not holistic enough.
• 37:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And not as a level that we need.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I don't necessarily think we need a dictator to like win some modicum a popular support for a cleaner energy mix for example.
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think where it gets tricky is how do you deal with the capitalist and maybe most importantly how do you deal with the finance sector and the asset manager sector that is and the private equity sector that is increasingly
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: owning our energy infrastructure another, you know, in public, what should be public kind of social infrastructure and I think there it's hard for me to imagine it's hard for me imagine getting anywhere close to where we need to be without things that rely on executive actions or.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: court orders or regulations that don't involve like consulting with industry but kind of to some extent telling them what to do.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: The question is like how would capital respond to that and then what type of situational class conflict would we be in?
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do not think we need to presume that a dictatorship is necessary because this would be so unpopular.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the dictatorship type thing or kind of the strong arm of a developmental type state comes in because of capital
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: at least right now like extreme levels of social discipline that would be necessary.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you talk about resistance primarily on lithium frontiers, but what would resistance in United States look like if like, um, I mean, I'm just thinking through foreign policy like very few people supported the Iran war, you know, there's no mechanism for change, but what what would it be here or do you envision?
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not using this facetiously, but the equivalent of a bunch of Soviets somehow becoming influential.
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess what would be the mechanism of popular transformation?
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, it's a hard question because we're, you know, despite some optimistic news here and there, which I'm happy to talk about, we aren't like historically relatively low level of popular working class organization.
• 39:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that like that is
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: that is indisputable.
• 39:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: That doesn't need to make us nihilistic or cynical and nor should it kind of like take our attention away from where there are bright spots, which we should investigate and understand, like how did Zoron win, how did Katie Wilson win, how did this tenant union win, how did this labor contract, you know, this tough labor fight or battle, you know, get resolved.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like there are a lot of places where people are rising up and organizing and getting agitated and there's like a whole kind of wave, it seems, of left-wing, and
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: political campaigns which are very important to someone that believes that the left does need to enter the state.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's great that we have left wing folks running, you know, strong primer campaigns for Congress and Senate.
• 40:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: So and you know, those people in many cases have working class and and or labor, you know, support.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so there's not nothing happening, but the deeper difficulty is not so much how do we build
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: popular support for a green energy transition.
• 40:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to downplay that challenge and I can speak to it in a moment.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think there's a kind of like more foundational issue, which is just how do we get people to stop bowling alone, how do we get a more a denser social fabric bill, how do we reduce social alienation, how do we get people organized in their homes, their workplaces, their educational institutions,
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, in the institutional settings in which they have some leverage due to being members or workers or consumers or whatever it is.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that's just, you know, organizing 101 and Poly is not used to anyone on this call, but, you know, I think that the more organized the left is kind of not to say that directly
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: stronger labor movements with more leftist like in positions of power in those movements, whether rank and file or staff organizers, those are people we can talk to and ask, okay, how can we, how do you want to decarbonize your industry?
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you want to benefit from that?
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are conversations that have happened in a number of unions, but we need that at scale, right, or if we're talking to folks that
• 41:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: our renters and our worried about housing and security, how can we build a housing movement where the new housing is green and affordable, right?
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so to me like the kind of fortunes of the climate left are tied to the fortunes of the left and that itself is tied to working really concernably on rebuilding the capacity for popular mobilization, which
• 42:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: which feels bleak, but I will say that people are mad.
• 42:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like people are not happy.
• 42:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like there is not that a lot of social consent for the current status quo.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is a great starting point.
• 42:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And maybe they're just bringing in since we talked about AI.
• 42:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, there's all of these local battles over data centers.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we can debate, okay, what's the bigger vision here?
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I personally think it's cool to see people rising up and going rising up and protesting these physical
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the connection to the tech oligarchy, whether people's ideology is clearly formed is like part of the reason that those protests are happening, and then just to take it back full circle to where you start of the question, we also in the US, you know, this is a more maybe marginal phenomena, because there's not so many new minds being opened in the US, but where new minds are being pushed by the government or corporations, we do see protests and we do see people with environmental and social consciousness.
• 43:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes those are places that otherwise protest is not that common or obvious, right?
• 43:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I'm thinking back to some of the research I did in Nevada and it was surprising to people there that like these movements were really forming and taking hold.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, I think that when people are directly confronted with these threats to their land, their livelihood, their energy, their water.
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when which that feels connected to some larger inequality or injustice, people are getting organized.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just that we need to think about the basics of kind of popular capacity at the same time that we think about like the kind of green edges of that.
• 43:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's talk a little bit about the global south and you could take this in any direction you would want, but obviously the Iran War has affected supply chains.
• 43:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's this longer question of the tension between developmentalism, however defined, defined differently elsewhere and a green energy transition.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what is the state of play now and what should people be looking to in the coming years?
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think to, you know, be a proper materialist as has been like a theme in our conversation about analyzing this, we have to think about the whole world.
• 44:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have to get outside of the US a little bit and think about where is the future of the world system?
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, where are we seeing population growth and like new young people getting new jobs or like kind of looking ahead to their futures?
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Where do we have the largest consumer markets?
• 44:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: looking towards the future like these are the places where we were of course we want to ensure that as much as possible the kind of greener option is chosen whether it's how people are getting to work, whether it's what's powering the industries that they're working in and a lot of that just sheer economic growth is going to happen outside of the U.S. just just and primarily obviously in the China but also in Africa and Latin America and the rest of the global south.
• 45:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: and economic development to like go together rather than be opposed.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And of course the reason that those two things have been intentioned for, you know, in prior years or decades is that for a long time, coal was like the cheapest and most reliable way to get not just your industrial process growing, but also your just basic energy system and electricity provision.
• 45:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was very concerning, of course, there was a historic justice in global south countries saying, that's what you all did.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Great Britain, the US, like Europe, that's, you know, we're going to recapitulate your past development, because that's the only one out there, is this coal fueled industrialization.
• 45:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And while that had a historic point of historic justice and fairness, it was extremely concerning from a climate perspective and also just from local deaths from air pollution perspective.
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're at a really different point in this equation now, without again ignoring the remaining many tensions between development and climate action, just on the front of the physical infrastructures and technologies of an energy transition,
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: now in some cases, the per unit cost is cheaper than the fossil fuel equivalent.
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's in large part, thanks to the kind of level and economy of scale of Chinese production, you know, what just, you know, a few months ago everyone was complaining still about dumping and overcapacity and all this extra Chinese solar panels.
• 46:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now what looks like dumping looks like a great critical reserve for the global economy.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because now those solar panels
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: where otherwise their energy would be simply cut off because of this crisis in the Gulf.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, we definitely have, I think, a different equation where it is cheaper, more affordable, more reliable.
• 46:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in some cases, more immediately accessible to go with the solar option versus the volatile oil, gas and coal option.
• 46:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that is good for kind of green development we might say.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, but, you know, the other way to think about this is that it's not just about global South states consuming this stuff as important as that is, if we believe which we may may not and we could debate that industrialization within your own country, like endogenous industrial development is important to
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: other forms of social human and economic development, then we might say it's simply not enough for a country in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, et cetera, to like import these solar panels, they should be making them themselves.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's where things get a little bit trickier and I talk about this.
• 47:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: quite a bit in the book in terms of like what options are available to global South countries to undergo their own processes of green industrial policy or green industrialization.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are some success stories and some senses I would probably signal out in Donetia.
• 47:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not a place I explore in first hand in the book, but I reference it and have read very deeply because it's quite interesting case where over the past 12 years they've banned their nickel exports, nickel is another key ingredient in lithium batteries, and they banned the exports of the raw material, which they control the majority of the world's supply of, in order to require firms to do downstream investments in refining processing, battery plans, etc.
• 48:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a way that you can leverage your raw material assets for more sophisticated forms of development.
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, there are two caveats here that are worth mentioning because they show what the tensions and difficulties are in other places.
• 48:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is that this has come at obscene and really intense environmental and social cost in Indonesia.
• 48:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I don't want to ignore that.
• 48:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are talking about the destruction of tropical and semi-tropical rainforest in order to do nickel mining.
• 48:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: the deforestation of that sort is the second cause of climate change after fossil fuel combustion and in addition to choice local biodiversity, in addition to all the refining and processing is all powered by captive coal plants, so we're then contributing to the climate issue, right?
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there are a lot of ecological contradictions of the battery industry in Indonesia,
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the second thing is that it's hard for global south producers of some of the other minerals, whether it's copper or lithium just to take two, to copy this playbook because those markets are more fragmented and every individual country has less leverage.
• 49:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: They can't, you know, Chile or to say,
• 49:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Global markets, you can't have our lithium unless you all set up shop here and produce batteries with it.
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then they just go to Argentina or they go to Zimbabwe.
• 49:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: They'd go to Canada.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's lots of other places to get lithium.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that dynamic of do of enough leverage to force capital to do what you want, really varies market by market.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I guess the last thing I'll say to bring us full circle with the war is that while the war is helping, I think to propel
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: more interest and renewable energy technologies and all evidence points in that direction, it's also inaugurating in much of the world a statization crisis, which is really not auspicious for the types of loans and finance that global south countries need to deploy all the stuff for their ability just to maintain people's basic livelihoods, let alone like undergo more dramatic energy transitions.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: If the financing was there, this would sort of be a perfect movement forward towards re-energy, but the global South states, a lot of them, especially in South and South these days are, are going to be an economic recession, and without redistributive help and financial help from the outside, I think we're going to kind of stall some of this progress, and then we'll see kind of how it picks back up in the years to come.
• 50:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the local environmental point is really important right because that the market like the way things work now is you send us your minerals and we'll send you back a solar panel like it's not it's not Chinese rivers or American rivers or whoever's producing these things it's not that they're rivers that are going to get polluted by lithium mining or, you know a nickel mining or whatever you know processes being done it's still it's those
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: local countries that you want to adopt this technology in a major way that are going to feel the environmental.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 51:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Brunt of it.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And unless you figure out some way to get
• 51:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or unless you manage to get production into those countries controlled by people who have some vested interest in preserving the local environment and maybe a populist reason for not wanting to piss people off by poisoning their drinking water, it feels like that's just going to be a continued problem.
• 51:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: yeah i want to say something about that if that's okay i don't know i know we were like including but but let me let me throw in something i think you're right
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: but dot dot dot.
• 51:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sorry, I feel like that's literally the way I answer every question, but here we go.
• 51:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not the case that that communities in China and the US at Al don't feel the brunt of lithium mining.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one of the chapters of my book is about this whole on-shoring and reshoring process.
• 51:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So actually, we're seeing mutating a kind of mutation in extractive sectors where to some extent.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: global North countries and other places like China that are major producers of this technology want domestic mining as much as possible, which means that it is to some extent communities in the U.S. or in Europe there's a number of projects that are being proposed from France to Serbia to Portugal to Germany at different stages.
• 52:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: for, you know, more localized lithium production there.
• 52:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then in China, China's the fourth largest lithium producer domestically.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then it's also the number one lithium importer.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: So China is working all ends of this equation in terms of producing its own lithium, for its own supply chains, and importing because its own supplies are insufficient.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that the picture will get increasingly complex around who is subjected to environmental harm, and what the kind of contours of the attractive map are.
• 52:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: However, the central point still holds because even if we have more mining in the U.S. in Europe, which is nowhere near displacing the amount of mining in Africa, Latin American, Indonesia, etc.
• 53:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're still going to have imports, we're still going to have all the global south mining.
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: But let's say we have more mining closer to home and so U.S. communities are among those frontline groups like bearing the brunt of this.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Does that change your basic point?
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: No.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because the thing about the inequality between core and periphery to use those like dependency theory ideas about like the places where raw materials come from and then the places where the industrialization and the profit and the benefit concentrate that kind of you know two sided point of the global economy that's a multi scalar thing.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have peripheries in the U.S. We have hinterlands or kind of resource extractive zones within the U.S. You can go to Cancer Alley in Louisiana.
• 53:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can go to the Gulf of Mexico.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can go to the declotes and fracking.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can go all over the U.S. and find places.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Again, we are the number one ONG producer where especially for fossil capitalism, there are a lot of frontline communities.
• 53:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have this growing mining sector on top of that.
• 53:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have a reopened rare earthmine in California.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have the lithium-ion under construction in Nevada.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nevada, we have a bunch of mines that were just fast tracked by the Trump government.
• 54:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, but the thing is, those communities, right, are exactly as you said in the global South.
• 54:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not exactly.
• 54:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't want to over-exaggerate.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not as poor.
• 54:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're not as subject to violence, et cetera, but they are receiving the environmental harms without always getting the immediate, you know, social environmental and climate benefits.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: of those technologies.
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think that inequality of corn periphery is multi-scaler, you know, it's at sort of every level.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's going to be increasingly closer to home and harder to ignore.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not an exotic over-their problem with geopolitics and state capitalism and on-shoring.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Lots of societies on earth are going to confront this attractive dilemma.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a good place to leave it.
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: See, thank you so much again for coming on the program.
• 54:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like we did actually talk about your book this time, which is a positive.
• 54:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: The book is extraction, the frontiers of Green Capitalism.
• 54:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We really love having you on.
• 55:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So any time you want to come back, we look forward to it.
• 55:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd be happy to come back, argue a little more, hear more about Marx and Mises and Keynes and whoever else Danny wants to bring up that me and you know the green dictator AOC of our future.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all, it's all interesting.
• 55:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, again, in show up.
• 55:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: All right, indeed.