How do we reconcile the need to move away from fossil fuels with the need for new mines to build clean energy technologies?
Thea Riofrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, explores this dilemma in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
The book focuses on lithium — the metal at the heart of batteries for electric vehicles. Traveling through Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, Riofrancos meets with activists and residents to investigate what she calls “green extractivism.”
She argues that these “extractive frontiers” form the material foundation of a zero-carbon world. But they also warn us against “the temptations of technical fixes, escape-from-nature fantasies, or a purely post-extractive society.”
Riofrancos shows how proposed and existing lithium mines create conflicts with local communities and threaten cultural and historical roots. As she writes: “The energy transition is not a peaceful bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy, but a crucible where past, present, and possible futures collide.”
These conflicts raise fundamental questions about justice in the energy transition and risk splitting the environmental movement. “Ultimately, anti-extractive activists are forcing us to address an uncomfortable, but necessary question: What does it mean to defend people and the planet from extraction — when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?”
She also points to a potential solution: fixing demand. Do we really need to electrify oversized vehicles like Hummers, or can we drive smaller cars and invest in public transport? After all, future mining depends on how much we choose to consume.
In our conversation, we explored these tensions — and what they mean for the future of the energy transition. You can also listen on Spotify here.
Below is a transcript of our conversation:
Welcome back to "An Electric Revolution." I'm your host, Henry Sanderson. My guest this week is Thea Riofrancos. She is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the author of the new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. In the book, she visits and examines the lithium industry in Chile, as well as new lithium mines in Nevada and Portugal. She looks at how these extractive frontiers impact local communities and local ecosystems, and how they embody the power dynamics of the global capitalist system. She highlights one of the key challenges of the energy transition: Who will bear the costs of extracting more lithium and other minerals needed for clean energy technologies? And how do we reconcile that with the need for these minerals to combat climate change? There are no easy answers, so I was delighted to sit down with her to learn more.
Henry: Thea, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about your great new book, Extraction. It's really interesting in your book because you choose to focus on lithium. And one of the conflicts that is at the heart of the book is we need these minerals for clean energy technologies to help avert some of the worst of climate change. But at the same time, as you say, these extraction at these frontiers has impacts on local communities. There's a lot of hostility and pushback. Where do you sit on how we can reconcile these two things? One is we want to deal with climate change, but then we have the impact on the local communities.
Thea: There is an interesting historical irony: we have the confluence of rising opposition to mining, on the one hand, and rising demand for mining for the energy transition, on the other. When we look at Latin America, especially, Latin America is a place that is kind of often regarded as a mining powerhouse, a role that it's forecast to continue to play with the energy transition, but also a place where mining has been quite contested at the local but also national and regional level. In Latin America, particularly, but also elsewhere in the global South and the global North, it's harder and harder from the industry's perspective to win the kind of hearts and minds of mining communities who are more skeptical of mining than maybe would have been the case in the past, on particular grounds that are ecological and social.
If we looked a century ago at the politics of mining and the contentious politics of mining, labor would have been the main thing to talk about: Mine workers in the UK, in the US, in South Africa, in Latin America, were like famous or notorious, depending on your perspective, for being like very militant and very agitating in terms of their labor demands.
That's a different type of problem to solve in a way from the industry's perspective than rejection based on ecology or social rights or indigenous claims to sovereignty, which are perhaps in a more zero-sum conflict with mining.
You can pay mine workers better. You can even include mine workers in mining governance, but the mine can still continue. Whereas the politics today are like, should the mine happen at all? And that whole process of increasing militancy and kind of opposition has coincided, again, I say in a historic irony, with this new big mining boom? And so those are processes that have their own distinct causes to them, but they're clashing right now?
Thus at the very moment where you, especially based on typical forecasts and models, we need a lot more mining, there's a lot more opposition to it. I want to just say clearly that I don't think this tension or trade-off has an easy answer.
Some people seem to think that this is just a problem we can resolve with like better technology, whether better mining technology or a better procedure for consultation. Like I think that that is Pollyanna-ish. I don't think that we can just simply wish away this conflict.
I also have debates sometimes with with people that I'm more politically aligned with who are more skeptical of extraction and who think we can have some purely non-extractive economy. And I do believe in circular economy approaches that can reuse materials over time. Absolutely. And we have to lean into that more.
But at the beginning of a big build-out for urgently needed renewable energy technologies, there's going to be some upfront extraction. That the tradeoff cannot be wished away on either side of the debate.
There are few different policy recommendations that I suggest in various moments of the book. First and foremost, mining needs better environmental regulation that is up to date with the current scale and technological apparatus of mining. A lot of our mining laws are dated, especially actually in places that had mining a long time ago or have a long history of mining.
I'm actually thinking about the United States in this case. The mining codes are like from the 19th century. And mining was just a fundamentally different game in the 19th century than it is today. Not that it wasn't harmful then, but the scale is quite different. Some of the risks posed are quite different.
And just as an aside, but something that your readers or listeners might be interested in is that we might think that mining has gotten safer over time. We all might believe in some basic notion of progress, like we have better sanitation, better safety measures with all sorts of things. That's actually not the case for mining.
A great report by Earthworks that I cite in the book is that one of the most dangerous aspects of mining, which is when the piles of waste, quote unquote, fail or are breached, like so the tailings basins or tailings pools or sacks as they're called -- this is all the physical waste because the valuable mineral is a really small subset of the overall rock that you're digging into -- if those piles breach their containers or contaminate rivers or create avalanches, people can literally die and this has happened.
And those failures are increasing over time, not decreasing as we would like it to be. And I could get into why, but I'm already digressing a bit, but we'll just take that as an empirical fact, which suggests that we need mining regulation that is up to speed with the scale of mining with the specific hazards that it poses, right, and that also is not captured by the industry, which is so often the case, especially though not exclusively in jurisdictions where there's weak institutional or state capacity.
In many contexts, we see the mining industry itself setting the terms of its regulation or an even as in the case in Chile in like self-monitoring and then regulators are playing catch up because a disaster occurs and then you have to like take a legal action against the mining company to like repair the harm rather than the public sector or public regulation being in the driver's seat from the beginning to hopefully have prevented that harm.
So better mining regulation is absolutely needed.
The second thing, what we see going back to that protest issue that's come up a few times in our conversation is that the main trigger to community protests is not per se just the ecological impacts alone or the water impacts alone. It's those combined with a real sense that they've been excluded sometimes from legally mandated consultation procedures. So those consultations don't take place or they take place in such a superficial way or community members show up and there's many documented cases of this share a concern and they're basically told that concern doesn't matter and like, thanks, have a good day. And then it turns out that very concern actually does pop up once the mine is in operation.
So the concern, it turns out, wasn't so crazy after all. If you want to have governance that actually prevents quite violent social conflict, we need better governance. And to be clear: the violence usually being on the side of the state and the corporations and mining is notorious has the most deaths associated with it. Spefically, deaths of community members who are trying to protest or bring attention to their grievances, are outright killed or assaulted by mining companies or their security teams or whatever it is.
And so this is a life or death issue to have better governance because the lack of that is what creates the opportunity for then the repression of protests and then it's repression.
Both of those, the regulation and the kind of more democratic and inclusive and rights-based governance are things that need to happen where mining occurs.
But one of the intervention that my book makes is that it's not enough to just regulate and govern mining better where it happens. We also need to think about what drives the sheer quantity of mining in the first place. And one of my kind of contentions here is like, there is a connection, and this is borne out in the scientific literature, between the sheer scale of mining and its ecological impact.
And you can modulate that connection by better mining techniques and so forth, but you can't really eliminate it. More mining overall is more possible, in some cases irreversible, landscape change. Where that all leads me is that we also need to think of ways to reduce demand for mining.
Even knowing that there'll be an uptick in mining for the energy transition, we can either mine a lot more for the energy transition, a medium amount more or less more. There are basically different scenarios of how much mining we need and nothing is a given.
You know, we could make choices around recycling, around what type of mobility to prioritize, around even things like how we plan our urban landscapes, making them more or less dense and how much people need to drive. All of those types of things, as our research at Climate and Community Institute makes clear, can have quite dramatic effects.
Another key factor, for example, is the size of batteries. Do we need to make all these electric Hummers and electric huge SUVs? Or should we go the more East Asian or European route compared to the US and have more normative sized vehicles that are also safer for pedestrians?
All of these choices at the kind of other end of the supply chain in the built environments of the energy transition shape a lot the material demands and the material intensities. And that's, again, taking a kind of broad and holistic view of the kind of inputs and outputs of our energy transition and that for all sorts of reasons in addition, including cost affordability, less exposure to volatile commodity markets.
It can even be in the interests of some of the end-use companies to reduce how much lithium their batteries require or reduce, you know, the total material intensity of their operations.
One just quick addition I'll make is that I often get the question: can't mining companies just mine in environmentally friendlier ways? The answer is yes, but then the question is who's going to make them do it? Absolutely you can use less water, you can have a smaller physical plant, you can be smarter about the way you prospect and survey to not disrupt landscapes before you even start mining.
But why would a company with incumbent technologies and the path dependencies associated with that? Why would they change when they are doing it the cheapest way, which is not always the environmentally best way? We do need to think about who kind of shapes the practices of mining and to make sure that the public interest is shaping them rather than just assuming that mining companies will adopt the best technology, which I don't think there's much evidence, especially legacy mining companies, that they would do so on their own.
Chileʼs lithium history
Henry: Well, I think that brings us on to Chile, which is a lot of the focus on the book because I think it's a fascinating history where the country went from nationalizing the copper mines in the 1960s, 1970s, Salvador Allende. And then even you make the point under the dictatorship of Pinochet, he actually created Codelco, the state-owned miner. But then you see in 2019, these massive protests in Chile and then the election of Gabriel Boric, first left-wing leader since Alende, right? And it did actually create change in the country.
And he came out with the national lithium strategy. And he did actually require now companies to use new technologies. But I guess my question is about Chile that in a way, yes, that that public revolution created change. But we still have the same two companies producing lithium in Chile, and he didn't go as far as nationalizing those assets. Can you talk a bit about what happened in Chile and what the results were?
Thea: Chile really captures a lot of the dilemmas and historical changes in mining governance. Like as you said, the fact that Allende nationalized what were American-owned mines, setting them up in a big way to be in conflict with the US administration at the time, which is not unrelated to their support for a coup? But then the fact that Pinochet, despite being, you the archetypical neoliberal, did not revert those to private ownership. He did do all sorts of things to create more private initiatives in the mining sector, but he left intact that nationalization and actually solidified it by creating a state-owned company, Codelco, which remains a major player in the global copper sector.
Oftentimes resource extraction or attractive sectors can prove an exception to otherwise market oriented governance. Like they are arenas that states intervene in more for a variety of reasons. In this case, because copper mining, mining revenues from that were a major income stream for the military, which was, and also that there was a really nationalist wing, especially early on in his dictatorship that saw these as nationally strategic sectors.
Fast forward to the present, you know, Boric is, is it is in his campaign and in his early days in office and to this day has emphasized needing to kind of re-exert national control over the lithium sector, which despite being named a strategic sector by Pinochet, that was due to its role in nuclear weaponry and this was during the Cold War, he didn’t establish a state-owned company.
Chile has had these two private sector companies, one is American, one is Chilean with the only two existing in operation lithium mines in Chile and they've had like a duopoly, you know, for decades really.
What's interesting about Boric's plan is that he both wants to like create more national benefit and control and ownership in the sector. He also in a way wants to like diversify the sector. So more companies come in, but paired with kind of the state in various ways. I think that there's dissatisfaction with the kind of reign of these two powerful companies, Albemarle and SQM, as well as wanting more specifically state ownership.
He also has made other commitments, for example, including indigenous peoples who live near the salt flats in governance more directly and dialoguing with them and respecting their rights to consultation, preserving a third of Chile's many salt flats for biological conservation.
And I'll just say this so that the tensions are clear, increasing the overall lithium extraction of Chile. Right. He wants more extraction, more companies, more state involvement, more indigenous involvement and more environmental protection. And we could see that there are tensions. And yet, we can understand the political and social reasons for each of those goals.
But like we can also see that it's hard to do them all equally well. And so that's like a first thing to note. And I don't say that to be dismissive of Boric or because the challenges are real. They're not, you know, and the and again, there are different political constituencies that want those different goals that are relevant to his government.
One thing to say, especially since you framed this question in such great historical terms, is that what nationalization means today is not what nationalization meant in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, right. That period, 20s through 70s in Latin America, as well as some other places in the world, was sort of the heyday of what we could call a classical nationalization.
And Latin America has the interesting history of being the first region outside of the Soviet Union where the Russian Revolution had recently occurred, the first place to expropriate or natural resources from foreign owners and order to set up state-owned companies to open up a new sector.
So Latin America, like the history of resource nationalism and the history of Latin America are like very intertwined. And Allende was operating at the kind of maybe headiest moment of this. Where then called Third World states, had a lot of economic ambition to kind of reassert themselves, all the resource sectors and other economic sectors. He expropriated, and he did not compensate, those very powerful American mining companies.
That's not what Boric is doing. And I say that both to kind of deflate some of the over the top hyperbolic criticism that you get in Chile's, right leaning newspapers or in the kind of global financial press, which is like when leaders say nationalization, they don't tend to mean expropriation anymore.
Why is that? There's a really interesting story as to changes in the global architecture of trade and finance and investment that a lot of these countries are party to bilateral trade or investment treaties, as well as members of the WTO. And like there would be real and pretty immediate consequences to national lines, which is not me saying you shouldn't risk it necessarily.
You enter into investor settlement dispute, you might be shunned by finance, you might face capital flight. And so even during the pink tide in Latin America when Chavez, Morales, et al were in power, even what they called nationalization was often a joint venture or a renegotiation of a contract to create equity stakes for the, and similarly here, what Boric has referred to as nationalization or his national lithium strategy sets up in a subset of salt flats, joint ventures between the state and here we have Codelco back because there's no state owned lithium company yet.
So they're relying on the company they have, which is a copper company, which already suggests that the state might be in a weaker position because there's no way they Codelco has the same lithium expertise as a multinational lithium company does.
So yes, it's a joint venture, but maybe the foreign firm is going to have more of the technological expertise. And will they transfer that to the state owned company?
That's the hope. The hope is that the state owned company learns from the foreign company and that over time there could be a real state owned lithium company that maybe even does some of this on its own.
That that would be a future ambition. And so you get the idea that there are these competing goals of environmental preservation, indigenous dialogue, more overall lithium mining and more state involvement, while also certain salt flats are just being opened up in a more wild west way to go back to that term to just purely private investment. It's not like all projects moving forward are going to don't, there are certain salt flats considered strategic and those require a joint venture with the state, but not all of them do.
We should see how this unfolds, especially with a right-wing government likely coming into power. I would say the jury is out as to whether indigenous people, the ones that live near the salt flat, really feel included. There's actually been protests already over insufficient consultation. We'll see if the preservation of those salt flats, the 30% of them, is able to endure in a right-wing government or not, and we'll see how good that environmental protection is.
And then we'll see with the joint ventures, like, do we really get more lithium expertise and capacity in the state, or is it really a junior partner to what is basically like a multinational corporation? And then I think the devil is in the details on the technological updates and innovations that you mentioned.
Absolutely true that they are requiring, you know, more up-to-date methods of like direct lithium extraction DLE for new projects.
That doesn't change existing projects yet, though there are some big commitments, you know, that on the part of SQM. But we still don't know the environmental impacts of DLE. And there's been more scientific research that suggests that there are environmental costs to DLE, despite their main benefits supposedly being more sustainable, using less water, lower land footprint, et cetera.
I'm not trying to be dismissive. I would love it to be the case that there is a less harmful way to attract lithium. But we don't know that yet because we haven't tried these technologies at scale and they have their own water and energy inputs and potential impacts as well. So, we'll see if that kind of helps mitigate the environmental question of lithium. But that's how I kind of lay out the policy moves, how they compare to like past efforts at nationalization and what I think the questions that we should ask moving forward as we observe how this unfolds.
On-Shoring's Impact
Henry: Fascinating. And moving to the US, in your book, you visit the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada we see now Trump's second administration, they want to ease up permitting. They want perhaps even less scrutiny. What's the effect of that going to be in the US?
Thea: Yeah, great question. It's almost more complicated because in some ways, the Trump administration is taking more state intervention in mining sectors and in other ways, much less. it's kind of hard to put together and the combination defies some of our political coordinates. Because on the one hand, absolutely, they are fast tracking. And that's the kind of official language, meaning speeding the permits and regulatory processes to open new mines faster. That's an approach they took in their first government, which is when the Thacker Pass mine got its federal permits.
But it's an approach they're really doubling down on now, I would say, actually more concertedly. They have a whole list, and you can go to the Trump government's websites of all the mines that they are fast tracking. And lithium is among those.
So on the one hand, they are very in favor of more critical minerals mining. They have this whole set of executive orders around like minerals dominance. They are also using public money to that effect, like the Biden government did this too, but the Trump government's definitely doing it and helping with various forms of financing, get these projects off the ground. But on the other hand, they are busy dismantling the rest of the supply chain.
What's going to happen with all this lithium when like the US isn't producing EVs, at least not at the scale that was intended by the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, which they've mostly dismantled and in their recent, you know, One Big Beautiful Bill that came out of our Republican dominated Congress. Why do we need so much lithium if we don't like electric vehicles, right?
There's one way to potentially answer that question, which is that weirdly, you know, there are a few exceptions to Republicans’ general dislike these days of like clean energy or renewable energy. They hate wind and solar for various reasons, mainly China's, “dominance” of those sectors and also them kind of being embroiled in a weird way in a culture war that like solar is liberal and all this stuff.
Anyway, we don't need to go there. But there are certain zero carbon technologies that they like geothermal nuclear and batteries—but batteries for storage on the grid, not for vehiclesAnd they call these this suite of technologies “clean firm” energy because it's dispatchable and it's reliable from their perspective, but it's also clean because it's not carbon in any way. So, there is a subset of the supply chain that will continue to be supported by the government, which is these grid scale batteries, but otherwise they're kind of doing everything they can to take a hatchet to the electric vehicle supply chain, which is the main customer for lithium.
So already there's a weird contradiction there and it's not even like a coherent policy from an ideological perspective or from the perspective of the energy transition itself. But one other thing that's very interesting, which is that in, not in lithium, but in rare earths, Trump government is doing what the Boric government is doing in a way, which is that they now the Pentagon, as we refer to like the Department of Defense, is the biggest single shareholder in the US's only rare earth mine.
They recently purchased 15 % equity stakes in the Mountain Pass mine, which is owned by MP Materials, which is currently the US's only rare earth mine, though the Trump government wants to green light other rare earth mines, so it might soon have some neighbors.
That's a big resource nationalist move right there. And it's direct government ownership, which kind of like doesn't align with our perceptions of what Republican party orthodoxy is on economic policies. So, you know, again, to my point, similar with Pinochet and Codelco, that often extractive sectors have their own politics around them. Especially in this moment where we have all this geo-economic tension and battles over critical minerals, we see governments of various ideological stripes kind of aligning under what I've referred to in an FT column as the “critical minerals consensus.”
The consensus is that we need these minerals, they need to come out of the ground, we need to onshore them, we can't rely on imports, and we should use public money to prop this all up and push it and fast tracking to push it through. And that's an opinion you can get in the European Union among liberal, more liberal parties. It's an opinion you got in certain ways under Biden. I mean, with some differences, but not radically different and for sure under Trump.
Rising Resource Nationalism
Henry: So what we see is the continuity across the globe of rising resource nationalism. I mean, do you think this could delay, in a way it could help mineral supply, but in other countries it could delay potentially the energy transition if we don't see enough of these minerals come to the market to meet demand.
Thea: Yeah, I think it very much depends on the sort of specific content of resource nationalism. You know, if what passes for resource nationalism is basically public underwriting of private projects to help them deal with the investment and financing crunch.
Like we know that the main reason that mining projects don't move forward more quickly is not protest generally, though protest can have an impact, and it's not even necessarily permitting. Not to sort of downplay that permitting can be complex for mining sectors, but it's actually financing.
And we could say those are endogenously related because part of the reason the investors don't like mining projects is the permitting takes a while or they're subject to protests.
But without getting too complicated in our, in our explanations, like if you talk to anyone in the mining industry or go to their conferences or read the business press, it's clear that the mining industry has trouble attracting the kind of upfront and large finance that's needed to build a really capital intensive mine.
And so, you know, what the kind of benefit of so-called resource nationalist policies are, and I say so-called because they're not always really nationalizing or really expropriating, but anyway, the benefit of those policies can be that once a government makes a commitment to the mining sector, views it as strategic for security reasons, the money starts flowing.
The loans, the de-risking, the financial backstopping. We've seen this in the EU, we've seen it in the US and Canada. I mean, we could name lots of places that are already mining regions or are hoping to become them where this kind of state attention to the sector actually helps kind of lubricate investment. And in fact, when the state pulls back from investing or when something changes in the politics, the mining sector actually clamors for more state subsidy. We've actually seen headlines like this over the past couple of years or with the dip in lithium prices.
There are various headlines that say, you know, mining sector asks for more government support because of the declining prices. And that government support is probably not going to be framed as like a handout to the mining industry, which is what it is. It will be framed as this is important for national security. This is important for economic development. This is resource nationalism.
I don't want to totally conflate because you do have more left-wing and more right-wing versions of resource nationalism and those differences are important to attend to. But you do have a way in which when the state gets involved, I would not say it crowds out investment or slows it down. I would say that even the mining industry thinks it's like essential to get the necessary investment moving forward.
The Ethical Question of Extraction
Henry: Interesting. If you look at Europe, I mean, your chapter on Portugal is really interesting and the scene where you're swimming in a local river. And of course, the local people you chat to, they've been farming for generations, right? They don't want a lithium mine to come in and destroy their area. So this whole on-shoring trend, especially in Europe, faces a real problem, right? In terms of getting communities to agree. And we've seen in Serbia, huge protests. But I guess my concern also is that then we go back to the old model of just offshoring the harm to Africa or other places. Do you see that seems to be the risk of what's going to happen?
Thea: Absolutely. It's a really good question. And it's kind of almost like an ethical question about who should bear these costs and like what the kind of almost ethical structure of such a nefarious industry should be. I mean, an industry that we know does cause harm and is connected to human rights allegation. Is it just for that to continue to be kind of relegated to the global south, to places that are former colonies of the West? There's a whole historical injustice layered onto that. Or should the West kind of internalized the cost, you know, internalized its own externalities in a way, instead of offshoring them?
And while on the one hand, I don't see the current paradigm of onshoring as a solution to that ethical or justice question on its own, I also don't see it as irrelevant to it. And so what I mean by that is that on the one hand, it's not exactly creating, you know, repairing issues of global injustice to say, okay, now an indigenous community in the US or in Sweden, you if we look at the Sami community, right, or small scale farmers in a country that's on the sort of semi-periphery of Europe itself, Portugal, like in terms of its historic relations to the rest of the European Union, like that to me doesn't feel like justice.
To put it really crudely, but to make the point, it's not like the mine is being built on Wall Street or in the City. The mine is not being built where the people who benefit the most from this whole operation live. It's being built in places that are themselves kind of the more marginalized parts of the West.
Which just reproduces maybe with a bit less violence, but still with the same kind of ethical issues, like the same pattern of mining goes to these rural peripheries, places where people are kind of marginalized with limited input into governance and they're left with the environmental harm. the minerals leave those zones, whether that's Nevada or Chile, go elsewhere into the value added supply chains and into the consumer goods and services that they create. And so that pattern can recur, and I call it fractal, because it can recur at various scales.
So if all onshoring does is subject the kind of poorer and more marginalized people of the West to mining that used to go to Africa or Latin America, then it's not really clear that you're really getting at the heart of the problem.
That said, the map of extraction is unjust and it should not be the case that people that have suffered as well past kind of extractive booms are like now again kind of providing the raw materials for an energy transition that they're not the primary beneficiaries of. Absolutely an energy transition has global benefit because of climate change, but I mean in terms of like the actual EVs that are being produced, who buys those and where are those going.
Not to silver-line it too much, but like one interesting outcome of on-shoring is that it has put this question of mining, extraction, that kind of substrate of our economy into more clear view in the West.
I think that there are ways in which that issue could just be ignored, but now we have to deal with it because it's people within our own country, it's our neighbors, so to speak, that are being subjected to this, and it makes it more of a domestic political issue, which I think has the benefit of like opening up needed debate over, you know, what mining is like, what it really looks like, the messiness of it, how to actually govern mining better.
And also, like I said before, how to create a renewable energy transition without the kind of alarming levels of mining that are forecast by all the mainstream forecasters through moderating or reducing demand or making our material, the materiality kind of more, more efficient.
And, and so, with onshoring, if we're not just like repeating kind of the unjust pattern within the West, I think it actually has something to offer in terms of more regionally integrated economies where you don't have to like ship really heavy mining ore across the world, which is a major part of like the climate impact of mining is like just these really heavy shipments, the container ships, the bunker fuel.
So you could actually have more localized or regionalized supply chains, which are more resilient given the geo-economics and geopolitics at the moment, but also given climate change and the way climate change makes like really sprawling supply chains more risky. There are all sorts of interesting reasons to think about mining and manufacturing and final consumption being like closer together, location-wise, or at least having a more diversified set of those supply chains. I just think that we need to do that in a way that's intentional, that doesn't kind of just reproduce the same dynamics at another scale.
Who Decides Which Mines Go Ahead?
Henry: Yeah, so I think in your Nevada chapter, you make a really good point where you quote someone saying it's not as if he's against every lithium mine. It's just the question of which lithium mines should go ahead. But we don't really see anyone in charge of that overall process, right? Who gets to decide which ones go ahead and which don't? That's part of the problem, isn't it?
Thea: Yeah, it's a really good question. And because you're such an expert on the matter, it's one that you see clearly, but is often missed in the debate or discourse around this, which is that very much so in the United States and in a lot of places on earth where mining happens, not all of them, but for the most part, really private industry is in the driver's seat in terms of ‘we want to mine this, we want to mine that, we apply for a permit.’
Yes, there might be a lot of government rigmarole to go through, but the initiator of who discovers the deposit and who decides the kind of spatial contours of it and where they want to mine and what technologies they want to use.
And the whole kind of infrastructure around that, around the energy needs, the water needs, all of that is planned by a private corporation for their specific needs. I mean, if they're a shareholder-owned company, it's about their fiduciary obligation to maximize value for shareholders, right?
If they're privately held, they're also probably trying to maximize value, though, you know, the dynamics are a bit different. They could be, you know, a company that, in some cases, you have Chinese state-owned companies operating elsewhere in the world.
They might have a slightly different logic where it's more about acquiring the resource than boosting shareholder value. But whatever it is, the logic is not rational land use planning. Like that's not what a mining company does, because that is a meta-level question. That's not about one project or another, but it's about how these projects are situated in a pre-existing landscape. Also vis-a-vis one another. You know, in many mining regions in the world, you have harms and conflicts that are exacerbated because you have mining companies operating like in the same place, both drawing from the same water system in a way that's totally discoordinated. Sometimes they get into legal battles with one another.
This has happened in Chile where one mining company accuses another of, and in lithium when it's a liquid deposit, when it's brine, like it's sometimes the lines of the kind of property, the private property of each mining company are hard to even adjudicate. So you really get into a situation, again, going back to our frontier as a place that is like inadequately governed.
There is no overarching public sector or public interest driven view of the map of mining. What is the place where we can mine with least harm? Who should draw the boundaries of a given mining project? Who should be responsible for the energy and water inputs? And transportation, you know, requirements. And just taking that bird's eye view. You could take some examples from China just because they have such a different political economy.
I don't want to like sound like I'm romanticizing mining in China, which has been linked to egregious, levels of cancer and also human rights issues, especially the rare earths mining. So I'm not trying to paint a pretty portrait, but there is a different approach to planning in China. Where the state or the public sector is more involved.
And in fact, at certain moments due to concerns over public health issues, the Chinese government has actually limited rare earths mining or change where it happens. Which again, I'm not trying to just be Pollyannish about that, but to even be able to do that, like speaks of a different approach to governance. And I think, many of the actors that I encountered on the ground in Nevada, interestingly, both in civil society, like the person you're quoting, who's from an environmental group, but also in government in Nevada said, like, we don't know what's going on.
Like, we don't even have one registry of all the mining projects. Like that is there's not even a place, a website where you can go and see all the mining projects or, you know, a secure database that a government like that, that just doesn't exist. And so there isn't even, you know, one of the most interesting things when I work on the mining sector, and this is in Chile, in Ecuador for a past book that I previously published, or in the US of all places where we think there's so much state capacity before the Trump administration dismantled it at least, you know, we would think that like state actors would have baseline knowledge over sectors that they call strategic, but often that knowledge is really in the mining companies and there are contractual clauses that protect that knowledge being privatized.
So like, to plan, have to have basic information and the states don't even have that. And so I think an interesting innovation for governance is to just ensure that that knowledge is public. This is some of the, you know, transparency initiatives and things like that, but to really write that into law, not just like a vague commitment, but we need to have knowledge of what mining companies are doing and we should have a state level kind of ombudsman that proactively plans rather than reactively just permitting things or not permitting them.
Henry: Well, thank you so much, Thea, for your time and it's fascinating to hear about your book. I'll include a link to the book in the show notes as well as your interesting research about how we can reduce demand for lithium by using public transport and smaller cars. Thanks so much for your time today.
Thea: Thank you so much, Henry. It was a pleasure.
