[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees and strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a bi weekly case Good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. The attack on Iran by the United States and Israel demonstrated, amongst other things, the necessity of a rapid transition to renewable fuels like solar and wind.
The technologies for capturing and converting renewable energy into usable form are heavily dependent on what are called critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt and rare earth elements.
Critical minerals are driving a new wave of resource nationalism and extraction around the world, many of them being eyed by President Trump as potential regions of intervention and conquest.
What does the gold rush for these minerals portend for world politics and economics? Are we on the brink of a new era of colonialism and imperialism, or even resource wars?
My guest today is Dr. Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College in Rhode island who recently published Extraction the Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
Professor Theorio Francos, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:01:51] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Why don't we start with a short sort of summary of who you are, your book and your research, and how you came to focus on this particular topic.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: I'm a professor of political science. I also work closely with a think tank called the Climate and Community Institute. So I do kind of policy research in collaboration with social movements and other groups that are interested in one what more progressive approaches to climate policy might look like. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. But how I came to focus on this was a combination of scholarship and activism, I guess we could say. I, for a long time had, from a scholarly perspective, researched sectors that we call extractive sectors. So that's things like oil and mining. And so I've worked on that for over a decade. Really now, like 15 years in Latin America primarily. But I've branched out to other regions as well.
And then simultaneously with that work, as a kind of individual and as someone very concerned about climate change and the energy transition, I've gotten increasingly involved in climate advocacy and climate activism.
And those two parts of myself, I guess, came together in this book where I said I need to start thinking about that. The energy transition that I want to see happen also will involve new forms of mining. And how do I think about the connection between resource Extraction on the one hand and this kind of holistic energy transition that I'm promoting on the other hand. And what are the kind of thorny issues and dilemmas and trade offs that mining linked to the energy transition raises?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a, there's a kind of a blind spot that, that a lot of people have in terms of, of solar and wind and other kinds of new technologies. They don't think much about the, the front end, where the stuff comes from and that's really important.
Well, listen, over the last year in particular, so called critical minerals have been all over the news.
The play for Greenland, the deal with Ukraine, seabed nodules are becoming highly visible again.
So what are critical minerals and why are they important?
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Critical minerals are a broad and kind of ever evolving list or catalog of minerals that usually basically government bureaucrats and or elected officials think are important to the economy and to national security. And that's really basically the way the US government defines a critical mineral. A mineral that relates to economic functioning day to day production and consumption also has some national security implications according to people, you know, in the Pentagon and where usually there's some concern like can we access this easily? Is there enough of it? Are the supplies going to be disruptive by some adversary? It's a very national security framing. But as you just kind of mentioned, they've gotten this sort of broader array of people interested in them because the energy transition, the digital transition, if we want to call it that, like AI data centers, but also just the spread of digital technologies and also military hardware and military weaponry, all three of those things, energy, digital tech and the military all really need increasing amounts if they're going to kind of go according to plan of mineral inputs. And so mining has really taken center stage as all three of these processes intersect in a very geopolitically fraught global environment where there's a lot of conflict between different actors on the world stage. Critical minerals have become, in other words over the past few years a kind of battlefield symbolically and sometimes actually or concretely in these kind of great power contests around which country is going to dominate. That's often the language used the 21st century technologies.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: A lot of this is, is a repeat of what I think of as similar bouts of hysteria since the early 20th century or maybe the late 19th century. You know, there was the talk of running out of coal in World War I and running out of oil in World War II.
And, and always, you know, we have to control this place or that place or this straight strait of hormuz Right. Or that, or that strait in order to prevent our adversaries from gaining, you know, a leg up over us. You know, that's all classical geopolitics basically. There is, however, it seems to me, a different feeling about the current race for these resources. It's a mix of geopolitics and geo economics, but it's difficult to sort of tease out. And I wanted to add, you know, critical minerals are changing all the time in response to whatever the latest technology is. What are your thoughts about all of that? It's a big topic.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: Yeah.
These supply chains are so volatile and unpredictable because the kind of purposes towards which minerals are put are ever changing and the priorities of political leaders and also corporate executives are ever changing. So just to give an example of this from my own work, when I started this project several years ago now, in 2019 or so, my main focus was on lithium batteries and lithium mining because those set of inputs are really relevant to getting the carbon out of our transportation sector and also our energy sector. Lithium batteries can power electric mobility electric vehicles, cars, bikes, buses, but they also can help store energy on an electricity grid. So, so they're really like the MVP of the energy transition. That was the kind of origins of it. And that's still the reason I focus on lithium, because it illustrates this dilemma so well. But if we come to the present, we see more and more political leaders and again people in the corporate world talking about other uses of lithium. For example, lithium batteries are increasingly important in data centers that need 24. 7 power.
So the battery helps in the event of needing a backup if the grid fails or there's not as much energy supply at the moment that your large language model is running. Right. And so data centers are now an increasing use case, we could say for lithium batteries, military weaponry. The advent of drone warfare means that lithium batteries, lightweight batteries that can store energy on a drone or on a tanker or whatever the kind of mobile military tech is, are now also at the forefront of policymakers minds. So the reason I bring up these examples is just to show that the same mineral can be critical for different purposes and then those purposes conflict with one another. I mean, should we be getting lithium out of the ground with all the environmental harms that mining implies for the energy transition? Is that our real priority or is our priority data centers and militarism? And so we can just see how combustible, not just the literal geopolitics are, but then like what technologies are being prioritized, what, what the supply is being kind of driven towards, and then what social priorities that that really reflects.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Are these minerals literally scarce? The critical mineral discourse is always about we're running out, there's not enough, it's scarce, and yet there seems to be plenty of the stuff around.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: No, you are completely correct. I mean, I think we're both of the age that we've lived through at least one, if not maybe two kind of peak oil crises. Like I, you know, in the late 90s, early 2000s, I remember there was a real peak oil concern.
What happened next was the fracking boom, right? I mean, it's really interesting when you look back historically, as you just did in the prior question, and think of these moments where someone thought we were running out of something and then what happens? But the combination of capitalism and geopolitics and states are really good at innovating new ways to extract things. And so we then had this huge shale boom and that erased any concern about peak oil in the sense of supply. Of course, there's a different issue of peak oil in the sense of when is our demand and use of oil peaking. But that's different than geological supply. So with lithium, you know, if you just read the headlines or read what some policymakers say, you would think there's a real resource scarcity here. Or with rare earths. I mean, even the name rare earths makes you think they're rare, even though they're not geologically rare. They're just kind of low concentration, a little hard to extract and refine. But they're prevalent in the Earth's crust, as is lithium and nickel and cobalt and graphite, etc. What, you know, I will say is that there are many cases in these mining sectors where, sure, there's geological abundance. The planet is very capacious. It has lots of stuff in it, no matter much how much we take from it. There's a lot.
However, that doesn't always mean the thing is available on the market to actually buy and sell when it's demanded, right? So we do have these moments. We're living through one really dramatic one right now with oil and the actual physical curtailment of oil supplies due to controls over the Strait of Hormuz, initially by Iran, now by the US now by a confusing combination of the two. But we do have moments where due to geopolitics, due to market issues or lack of investment, there isn't enough supply to meet demand. And then we see those skyrocketing prices and profits.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: So, I mean, it's really a supply chain issue, right?
[00:11:42] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: There's plenty of oil in the world and there's a 20% so called shortage because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Right, right. And, and as you point out, when price goes up, then there's more incentive to explore in mine. But if too much gets onto the market, then the price crashes and all of those new projects shut down, you know, so there's, there's no particular regulation of what's going on. And that's sort of. No, I think that's another important point to make.
[00:12:14] Speaker C: Yes. I'm so glad you also explained it very well because the economics of that are a little complicated, but you explained it very straightforwardly.
I think one other way to think about it is these types of raw materials mining energy sectors are really subject to these dramatic boom and bust cycles.
And that can make planning for something policy, planning for an energy transition, or even if you're a corporation planning where are we getting our supply of this in a year or two.
It makes that really, really challenging.
We also should remember that moments of a price boom are really bad for consumers, but really profitable for corporations. So there are different interests on different sides of these upswings and downswings.
Maybe the last thing to keep in mind that not everyone knows about mining if they haven't studied it before, is it takes a very long time to build a mine and to get it operational. Which is one of the reasons we have these lags between supply and demand and these price spikes. Because you may not have the minerals available when they're demanded and then Maybe it takes 15 years to get that mine operational, by which point maybe the demand has disappeared or softened in some way. And so they're very chaotic sectors and now all of our advanced technologies are linked to them. And so we can see how that complicates some of the, the policymaking around an energy transition.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: The subtitle of your book is the Frontiers of Green Capitalism. But after reading it, I don't get the sense that you're a great supporter of green capitalism.
You can correct me if I'm wrong, but what do you mean by green capitalism and what are the pluses and minuses of that?
[00:14:00] Speaker C: I'm glad you kind of picked up both on some of my political feelings, let's say, about green capitalism, but also on my desire to study it and understand it very closely. I sometimes had to put my own politics. I mean, I have pretty left wing politics. I'm a progressive, you know, whatever label you want to use. And so I tend to be critical of capitalism for its inequality, its exploitation, the concentration of profit and power. And all of that can apply to green capitalism. But I didn't want my kind of political, let's say, views of capitalism to kind of get in the way of me understanding its inner workings. And so when I thought about green capitalism, I wasn't satisfied with my own, like, knee jerk response, like, there's no such thing as green capitalism, Capitalism can't be sustainable, or it's an oxymoron. I mean that. Those are ways I feel, but they don't help me analytically to understand what's going on. And so what I did instead, you know, I processed all of that and I wrote some of it in the pages of the book. But what I ended up doing is thinking, let me just follow the actors themselves, actually talk to the capitalists, talk to the executives, go to their industry conventions, understand how these companies work, look at how they interact with governments and with communities, and get the sense at least that my analysis of them is informed by their concrete activities. And so in my book, ultimately what green capitalism refers to on a pretty, let's say, even neutral level is the set of investors, corporations, supply chains, economic assets and activities that somebody calls green. We don't even have to always get too critical about. Okay, what does green mean? Is it really green? But someone has labeled lithium batteries as linked to the energy transition. Scholars have done so, scientists have done so, official government verbiage has done so.
I'm kind of just looking at those economic sectors that are linked in some way to the energy transition, to climate mitigation and adaptation, and then asking rigorous questions like what are their ways of investing? How do they interact with consumers or communities that are affected by their operations?
What are their strategies for dealing with turbulent geopolitics? And what I found was interesting, complex, nuanced, contradictory. It didn't make me love capitalism. It didn't really change my underlying views, but it did give me an appreciation for how challenging it is actually to wrangle a capitalist economy and get it directed towards a socially useful goal, like decarbonizing our transportation system, for example.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Professor Theo Rio Francos, who recently published Extraction the Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which is primarily about lithium, but also brings up the whole issue of energy transition and critical minerals and, and what we're calling green technologies. Thea, you know, you mentioned the energy transition, and it's probably worth talking a little bit about energy Transitions.
You know, when, when I was getting into this, this field, it's more than 40 years ago, the conventional wisdom that was that new energy sources take 50 years to become, to completely displace the old ones, although the old ones never completely disappear.
Right. And we're right now in a kind of a, a tricky position. And as you point out, you know, it relies a lot on capitalism, which is really in the pursuit of profit and not in the pursuit of energy transitions per se.
So, you know, how, what exactly, how should we think about this energy transition? I mean, and this is kind of off the, the main trail here, but I'd sort of like to hear your thoughts about that.
[00:17:55] Speaker C: Absolutely. And, and, and you're actually kind of putting your finger exactly on the issue because I think there are aspects of the energy transition that capitalism is good at, usually with some government incentives or nudging, but capitalists can kind of rise to the occasion, let's say. And there's other elements that are not only challenging for capitalists to achieve on their own kind of motivations, but kind of antithetical to some of what capitalism is about. And so I like to kind of disaggregate a little bit. What I think capitalism can be good at is producing new things, making new technologies and goods and services that were meant to buy and marketing them to mass publics.
And so sure, we can see huge deployments in China first and foremost, of course, and we could get into what type of economic system does China has. But it's a mix of capitalism and sort of state planning.
We see mega deployments of solar panels, of lithium batteries, of new EVs, a new model every month or year there we can go to other countries and see at a lower level some similar dynamics. So when it comes to new products and selling new things with some government incentives like that, give some financial inducements to start marketing these new technologies, we do see capitalism doing its thing.
What I think is much harder is the actual transition part, which is we're not just producing new stuff or creating new technologies to harness renewable energy. We also have to stop doing the old stuff, because if all we do is add solar to a mix of oil, gas and coal, then we've diversified our energy mix. We might have made it more resilient against geopolitical shocks because we have more options. We might have made it more affordable by having more competition between different energy providers. But we have not dealt with the central issue of the climate crisis, because as long as we keep digging the oil and coal and gas out of the ground and transporting them around the world and combusting them in all of this machinery, from cars to factories to homes, electricity, power plants, whatever it is, we are contributing to a climate crisis that every year the research says it's even worse than we knew and it's going to be worse than we thought it was going to be in terms of what the effects of each degree of warming are.
And so I think what's difficult from the sort of constraints within the constraints of a for profit economic system is to destroy profit, is to destroy value, is to say this asset, you know, this coal field or oil field or gas power plant or LNG export station, whatever it is that you've invested in, it's going to lose its value because we're no longer doing oil, gas and coal anymore. And we've regulated that, we've legislated that, whatever.
That's something that capitalists will fight tooth and nail, totally rationally, because they're expecting for these types of fossil fuel projects decades of returns on their initial investments. And we don't have decades of a carbon budget. And so I think what we see is this kind of weird asymmetry where we get a lot of the new green tech, not enough of it actually, but in some countries quite substantial.
But we don't really get that confrontation with the fossil fuel industry that, you know, political confrontation, we might say, that leads to actually phasing out the source of the problem. So, you know, we get more energy, but we're not really seeing the full transition that that could change, and I hope it does. And we could talk about counterexamples, and I'm, I'm very willing to entertain them, but, and there are some bright spots where we see real transition in certain countries or sectors. But on the whole we have energy addition rather than a real linear transition towards renewables and away from fossil fuels.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, it also highlights the role of politics and policy in the transition, which is never really.
People don't really pay attention to that. Right. If, if there's a new technology, there's a kind of a technological determinism about its penetration.
[00:21:57] Speaker C: Totally.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:00] Speaker B: Okay. Well, the term you use to describe all of this is resource nationalism. And, and I really like it because I haven't heard it, hadn't heard it before, as far as I can recall. And it really does capture a lot of what went on even in the 1970s.
[00:22:16] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Around oil.
Anyway, it's. The idea is that countries want to control their resources in order to reap the profits from development, technology and sales.
Can you say some more about this, about the whole idea of resource nationalism and how it's playing out?
[00:22:35] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a fascinating concept that I've been kind of thinking about for quite a long time now. It was also relevant to my prior book on resource issues in Latin America.
And I'll stay with Latin America because the origins of the idea of resource nationalism, which are sort of exactly as you put it, that a given country or society or government should have more control, more sovereignty over its own natural resources and should think strategically about how to use those resources rather than just handing them away to corporations or to global markets.
That whole notion has its origins in Latin America in the kind of early 20th century, in the 1920s, 1930s, depending on the country.
And just to kind of put a point on it, in Latin America we had the first cases of nationalization, meaning a government saying, we're actually going to take control of this energy sector, this mining sector, or set up a state owned company. That's the only company that can extract this or that thing. The only examples of that outside of revolutionary Russia, outside of the Soviet Union were in Latin America. So it was a very bold move to be making again about 100 years ago.
And this idea of resource sovereignty, of resource nationalism has, you know, it sometimes goes by the wayside, depending on the politics of the moment, but it has never gone away. And we see it coming up again a lot in the 1970s in Latin America, around the rest of the Global south, what we used to call the Third World.
And then coming back again, you know, in recent times, where a lot of governments in Latin America and Africa elsewhere are saying, well, we should have ownership over these critical resources for 21st century technologies. And that's how we can benefit from them rather than just being exploited for our resources.
Now that's one way to look at it. And that is a whole historical lineage going to the present. But there's another version of resource nationalism, or maybe we could call it also resource security, that comes more from wealthy or more affluent states, more powerful states.
And these two are connected. In fact, as I kind of show in the book, there are moments where Global south governments, and just to be clear, these are governments of places that used to be colonies of the west, right? So that's how they get their kind of current status in the global system is out of that history.
So Global south governments in the 1970s, as I said, and you mentioned this as well, they nationalized their oil, they formed OPEC in the early 60s and it became very active in the 70s. They did a lot of, to kind of insert themselves in the world of resources and energy and global north states, Europe, the U.S. the UK responded to that saying we need to figure out how to secure our own access. If these uppity global south states are going to be controlling their own resources, how are we going to get our oil and minerals? And so then you see like a version of this almost through the looking glass, like on the other side of that power relation you see more powerful governments with more affluent societies also taking forms of control over resources, not always through public ownership, but through ways of ensuring that they have that access, whether domestically or through allies or client states.
I'm just going to take it all the way to the present because I think one of the most interesting twists and turns of this concept has actually been with President Donald Trump who has done something historically unusual in the US which is direct government agencies to take partial ownership of a bunch of mining companies. There's no precedent for this in US history. Even in World War II where we had a lot more state control of the economy for the war, it didn't get that far. We didn't have that level of ownership. So now the US government and I'm almost losing track because it's six or seven different agencies, Department of Energy, Commerce Department, Department of War, so called the Pentagon now have ownership of economic shares of, you know, they have equity stakes in a variety of different mining companies that are now again linked very closely to the US Government's policies and priorities. So it's taken a very interesting turn in the present day. But it's an old concept and I think we can see why it's kind of newly relevant again.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Well, I mean that raises some interesting questions. Right. Donald Trump wants to the government, the state to control domestic resources, but also wants to extend the reach of the American state in order to assert control over others resources. Right. As a kind of a anti sovereignty property rights sort of exercise.
[00:27:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:16] Speaker B: Which is, which I is as you say, I think probably not unusual in history, but articulated in a, a kind of a incoherent way. One of the, one of the things though is that you know, if we start to rely more and more on what we can extract from U. S. National territory, the cost of production are liable to be pretty high. Right. Especially compared to available imports from lower cost sources.
So you know, that seems to me to cut against, I don't know, notions of green capitalism or, or you know, something about, about the way the market works.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
Yeah, it was really interesting to me. I started this project initially, the research that became the book with a purely Latin American focus by way of family origin and also just my prior research had all been on Latin America. But as I was starting to work on the project and already months into it, I got an opportunity to visit the European Union, to Brussels, the headquarters of the eu.
And through that I learned really dramatically how invested European officials were in having resource supplies closer to home.
And just to put this in perspective, compared to the US even the EU is very reliant on imports for minerals. Like the idea that the EU is all of a sudden going to be 100% self sufficient in this or that mineral is completely unprecedented for the eu.
And the US is quite reliant too. I mean, we have more mining than the eu, but nowhere near the amount that we consume in our production and final consumer products. So both the US and EU for a long time now have imported minerals. And that, as you kind of alluded to, some of that has its origins in colonialism, imperialism, but also under the more contemporary global system, we just see import reliance. Let's go where we can get it cheapest and kind of ignore the negative effects environmentally.
But what's happened in recent years is this sea change in how policymakers in the Global north think about these mineral supply chains. As we've already kind of discussed, they've become so important to national security that governments want the mining within their borders. They don't want to just rely on buying cheapest, they can get on the market from whatever country far away.
That inevitably means, as you rightly point out, that the products could get more expensive. It is just operationally more costly to mine in the Global North. The land is more expensive, the labor is more expensive, the energy, I mean, everything about it. And so it raises one question, which is, are we, do we feel like it's important enough to have that resource security that we would spend more on what the final electric vehicle or solar panel or whatever it is? That's one question. But another question it raises that I think is as important is how does this interact with the environmental and social harm of mining? Is it more just from a global perspective for countries that have long just imported their minerals from other places, ignored the environmental impacts to actually deal with that closer to home?
Or does it just kind of reproduce the same issues, but internally? Because then when we go and look who's actually affected by mining, it's not Wall street, it's not Silicon Valley, I mean, just trust me on that. It is places that are more marginalized, more rural, usually more impoverished, more neglected economically. And so is it really more just. I mean, it's. And I mean this not flippantly. Like, I think about these questions a lot and I think that there are different reasonable answers to them. But the fact that we're even having this conversation was completely unpredicted by me a few years ago when I started this project. Like, I thought, of course, it'll just be the Chiles and the Congos and the, you know, Indonesia is exporting their minerals.
But I was taken by surprise that, that governments in these powerful countries were like, no, we, we want to mine here. Despite all the complexities that that raises.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Well, I mean, again. Right. The history of corporations in the United States leaving behind wastelands and, and national sacrifice zones. I think that was the, the term that was used at one time is nothing new.
And you know, whether, whether the shift to relies on, on imports and I don't think it had much to do with a sensibility, with the environmental sensibility. Right. Environmental justice was only sort of. Redis. Was discovered in the 1990s, although obviously it had been an, it was an issue for a long, long time.
I want to actually ask a little bit more about the rise and fall and rise of resource nationalism now. I mean, as we've mentioned, in the 1970s, when OPEC started to exercise its market power in the, in the global oil market, there was a real panic. Well, you know, I remember standing in line for gasoline and, and thinking that a dollar a gallon was an outrageous sum.
But it's that whole kind of new international economic order and you know, control of resources died, began to die down in the 1980s. Right. And why did that happen?
[00:32:39] Speaker C: Excellent question.
A bunch of different factors that all led in the same direction.
It kind of starts a little earlier in the 70s, but we might say it comes to its full flowering in the 1990s. This move away from more state interventionist, nationalist kind of responses to the economy and less of this sort of coordination and collaboration among then third world states. So, so what happens across the 70s to the 90s? Broadly, what happens is, first of all, we can point to some technological changes. We can look at the advent of the container ship, which facilitates international trade and is kind of the architecture of economic globalization. We can then look at changes in telecommunications and computing technology that also facilitate this kind of global grid of, of smoother trade in goods and services. And then also more of the rise of global finance kind of interconnecting the world reducing these national barriers and boundaries to economic activity. So some of it is that type of thing. Another and relatedly is the rise of what we call neoliberal policies, or we can call them free market policies, if that's an easier term. But what those intended to do with was actually dismantle those more interventionist forms of policymaking where you had more state involvement in the economy. And so we can look at the imf, the International Monetary Fund, the World bank, the wto, all of these institutions that promoted a kind of free market global economic order, again going against these more prior nationalist and more planning oriented ways of governing the economy. So we have neoliberalism, we have technologies of global trade, we also have the end of the Cold War. So that's what brings us more to the later 1980s and early 90s in which the US emerges as this sort of unilateral global hegemon for period. I wouldn't say that's the case anymore, but for a few decades it was. And the US government, whether it was Democrat or Republican, promoted these ideas of economic integration to a point of actually historical irony, because it was of course, under Bill Clinton that we promoted the accession of China to the wto, joining this world order of economic trade.
And with the idea incorrectly that that would somehow lead China to become like a Western liberal democracy. A very egotistical notion that of course they're gonna just become like us because they're trading with us.
And also I think a thought that China would not become so economically powerful, it would sort of stay as some kind of lower or middle power in the world. Now that bargain or that gambit has shown itself to be completely incorrect. And instead China has become economically and politically an extremely powerful actor in the world and really upended the notion that there's US hegemony in the global order, which itself now poses challenges to this free market idea, which the US never fully subscribed to, even itself. Right. There was always hypocrisies in it, but it was really pushed on a lot of other countries. So a lot of different forces, technology, economic geopolitical diplomacy that have kind of converged, let alone like, let's get to ordinary people. Like, there are a lot of reasons that ordinary people around the world, I mean, working in middle class people, people that work for a living, started to get discontent with this kind of deregulated, free market, corporate led economy.
And that discontent can fuel populism. Right, populism. Left populism. It creates a lot of political turbulence. We're seeing this right now in the US and so I think there are different ways to unpack it. But again, lots of forces moving in a direction where we're actually seeing the return now after this kind of neoliberal period of state involvement in the economy, of calls for more types of intervention, whether to protect working people from economic distress or to, like, win a geopolitical battle with China.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipchitz. My guest today is Professor Thiero Frankos from Providence College in Rhode island, who has recently published the Frontiers of Green Capitalism. And we've been talking about international mineral issues and scarce scarcity and, and energy transitions and stuff that I really love from my time in graduate school. Let's, let's turn to lithium.
You've told us a bit about lithium, and maybe you can tell us, you know, where it comes from and how much there is and, and how it's extracted and processed.
[00:37:30] Speaker C: So this will. I'll try not to be too technical, but we're going to have to get a little detailed because lithium is such a weird element and so fascinating in its kind of diversity.
Lithium is, of course, a single element. You know, it's third in the periodic table. It's an alkaline metal. You know, we could get. That means it's a very lightweight metal.
That relates to its ability to store a lot of energy without a lot of, you know, physical weight to it, which is why it's so useful for mobile battery applications, meaning a use of a battery where you want to move in space.
The first example of this was in 1990 or 1991 with the rise of the Sony camcorder. That was the first time a lithium battery, and we might remember those from childhood birthdays or whatever. But the amazing thing about, well, my childhood at least the amazing thing about the lithium battery in the camcorder was, you know, you didn't need this whole crazy setup. Like, you could just have this handheld lightweight thing. And the reason I'm emphasizing this again is one of the most important things about lithium is lightweight energy storage, which is why we put it in cars and laptops and cell phones and all the things. Okay, so that's just some basics about lithium batteries.
But lithium is an element, as we noted already, it's relatively abundant. I think it's the 30th most abundant element in the periodic table in terms of its occurrence geologically in the Earth's crust. Crust. It takes all these different forms because part of being this type of alkaline metal is that it's very reactive. What that means is that you never encounter like solid lithium metal in nature. It binds in these different compounds with other elements that help stabilize it. And the implication of that, and I think this is as jargony as I'll get in this radio show, hopefully, is that it takes a really diverse form of deposits. We can find lithium in hard rock, Spodumene, Leopold Light, all different types of hard rock formations. That's our more like traditional mining kind of idea, like where we're like you know, picking at rock or whatever. So that's, that's hard rock. Lithium. We have lithium that binds in clay.
So some of the new lithium mines that are being opened up, including in the US are going to try to leach that lithium out of a softer kind of clay material that it, that you find it in. We can have lithium in water. So the lithium ions can kind of be suspended or dissolved in a liquid format. So some of the mines I looked at for my book are underground brine formations. That's salty water that has lithium floating around in it. You pump it to the surface, you evaporate that water as much as you can, then you get it into chemical refining. And then just as one other one to throw at you that's interesting is you can also have lithium and geothermal brine. So that's naturally geothermally warm brine. And then you can potentially get a two for one geothermal electricity and get the lithium out. And so, you know, those are not even the whole list, but you get an idea that there's many different forms of lithium and then many ways to extract it, which then relate to your other question. Each of these has different social and environmental impacts associated with it. And I won't get as detailed here, but I'll mention a couple of things. Australia is the number one producer of lithium in terms of global markets.
That lithium is all hard rock. And basically, you know, it's traditional mining. They get the, they get out the rocks and in with very little processing. All those rocks kind of go on a ship to China. Like 98% of Australian lithium just goes to China. What that should indicate, if you know anything about international shipping and we were just talking about containerization and the global economy is that's a lot of dirty fuel. Those ships run on bunker fuel. That's a pretty dirty, polluting type of fuel product.
So we're putting all this heavy or on a bunker fueled ship to go to China.
And the implication of that is that Australian lithium creates a Lot of carbon pollution compared to other types of lithium extraction. Now let's go to Chile and I'll kind of close it out here. But in Chile, where I said I did research on this beautiful salt flats, the Atacama Salt Flat, third largest salt flat in the world, two thirds of the size of the state of Rhode island where I live, enormous salt flat. Underneath it are these huge lithium reserves, some of the largest lithium reserves in the world. And that is pumped to the surface arrayed on these evaporation ponds. Now, less carbon is involved in that process. It doesn't involve as much CO2 emissions. However, you are evaporating all this water in the driest desert on Earth.
Now, what the corporations would say, oh, it's salt water. No one drinks salt water.
Well, first of all, there are organisms that live in that saltwater and there are bigger animals like flamingos that we might care about that eat those organisms. So there's a whole web of life connected to that salt water. And there are saline lakes all around the world that host life. And so it's not true that, you know, nature doesn't care about salt water. It serves no purpose. But what the science has shown, and we have more and more evidence of this even after I publish my book, is that sucking out all that salt water from the center of the salt flat to draws down the freshwater aquifers around it makes them less accessible to human communities that, that rely on that water. So there's a whole set of water impacts with brine mining. And so that just to give a sense of, you know, we have to look at each mine, what are, what type of mine is it, what impacts, and are there ways to mitigate those impacts?
[00:42:54] Speaker B: Can you, while we're on it, can you tell us a little bit more about the Chilean case? It's, it's Altiplano, right?
[00:43:00] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. It's in the highland, you know what, what's also called the kind of Andean plateau. So it's a very high elevation area. If listeners have never visited the Andean mountain range, I can't recommend it enough. It's just an absolutely stunning, you know, feat of nature. These super high cliffs, volcanoes, and you can get views from all these different angles because of the topography. So it's really quite striking. So the Atacama Salt flat, which is one of many dozens of Chilean salt flats, most of which probably do have some lithium in them, and there's exploration in some of the others. But the Atacama salt flats, the big one, surrounded by these andean mountains. And it's called a poly extreme environment, which is a term I learned in the science literature that I kind of latched onto and think is helpful. Poly extreme, what that means is it's extreme on many different dimensions.
It's extremely high altitude. It is extremely arid, meaning extremely dry, extremely high levels of solar radiation, extremely high temperature variation. If you've ever been to a desert, it's boiling during the day, it's freezing at night. That, you know, the Atacama Desert is like the most, you know, range of temperature of deserts. It's very windy. I mean, just all sorts of, like, everything, every possible, like, parameter of what, like, an environment might be are at the extremes. Oh, and it's extremely saline, very salty. We've already gone over that. So on the one hand, it's a setting that's challenging for organic life.
Organic life likes to have water, likes to have chill temperatures. A nice equilibrium of temperatures doesn't really like high saline. High altitude is hard. We don't have as much oxygen to breathe. So these are challenging conditions for biological life. And yet, as a stupid cliche, but but names a reality, cliche goes like, life finds a way and life finds a way in the Atacama Desert. So you actually, in this very adverse environment, have an extraordinary array of, whether it's microorganisms or megafauna, whatever kind of scale of life, whether it's indigenous communities that have figured out how to irrigate in this challenging environment.
And it's just to kind of maybe like, make this concrete. The Atacama Desert is one of the top visited tourist destinations in all of Chile because it's so beautiful, right? And so you have this confluence of extremity of beauty, of a sort of exotic environment, yet a place where this crucial mineral comes from. And it really condenses a lot of the beauty of nature, but also the environmental harms of mining and how those get socially conflictual. So we've seen protests, we've seen all types of social divisions in the region over whether mining is good or bad, whether it should be stopped at all costs, whether it might be economically beneficial. And so I found Chile very instructive into these larger issues.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: What about political and economic control over the sources?
You write about that, about corporate involvement and the like. And that might be also very useful
[00:46:08] Speaker C: to hear about in Chile. For a long time, we've had the dominance of two major lithium corporations, and they're two of the most important lithium corporations globally, SQM and Albemarle. You know, there are other important ones, but, but they're on the top, you know, list of top five top 10 lithium companies. And one of them is headquartered in Chile. It actually used to be a state owned company that was privatized and the other is a US SP based company. But both of them are shareholder owned. Their shares are sold on Wall street or they're publicly listed companies. So they're major multinational firms. And these two companies have basically two very large scale lithium mines almost side by side. I mean, to the point that there have been disputes between the two that you're pulling where our brine's supposed to be, or there's like territorial or property disputes between the two companies because they're pulling out of the same liquid deposit that is dynamic, it moves as it's being extracted. And so that's the kind of corporate footprint. But you can imagine with what we might call a duopoly, almost like these two big companies that have had a long presence in Chile and whose presence in Chile actually dates to this really brutal dictatorship, the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship that ruled for nearly two decades, that they have quite a bit of political influence and also quite a bit of influence in the local community and local government.
And so what this really illustrates is how politically corrupt, I mean, I'll just say it without mincing words too much, the mining industry can be. We see this really particularly with the case of SQM where there's a lot of documented economic and political malfeasance, including the U.S. security Exchange Commission fined them for illegal financial activity. They've been found in violation of their own contract multiple times. They've had to settle out of court with the state of state.
And this, you know, SQM exemplifies this, but it's not unique in the world of mining. What we often see, you know, you asked me about control, political control, economic control. What we often see is that mining companies, once they sink their claws into a specific site, they put down their physical operations, they construct that mine, they start getting the stuff out of the earth, they're very reticent to leave those operations. They're reticent to not enjoy the full profitable fruits of their asset. Which means they tend to get involved in government in various ways.
And they tend to, whether it's lobbying, whether it's campaign finance stuff, whether it's backdoor meetings, or influencing legislative or regulatory processes. It's very common in the world of mining as well as in the oil world, for there to be a kind of porous boundary between corporations and the state. And Sometimes it's hard to know who's really in charge, like who's the authority here in this landscape.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: I mean, it gives pause to the whole concept of resource nationalism.
[00:49:04] Speaker C: 100%.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: We're just about out of time, so. So my last question is, can. Can the world get beyond this kind of extractivism?
[00:49:12] Speaker C: Yes, it can. And it's actually a very interesting moment to ask that question.
You know, there's a lot going on in the world of extraction from. You know, we've mentioned what's happening in Iran, kind of new energy crisis that we're currently in, all of that stuff. But I'm going to take us to Santa Marta, Colombia, where listeners may or may not be aware of, but I think listeners of the show would be very interested to read a bit more about it. 57 countries just met in a conference called like, Beyond Extractivism or something like that. I mean, that might not be the title. Or Beyond Fossil Fuels, something along those lines. It was hosted by the Colombian government, which has a progressive president in collaboration with Norway.
And so those were like the hosting countries, but 57 countries in total attended, including many countries that rely on exporting fossil fuels, like, for example, Nigeria and then many other countries that are major importers of fossil fuels. So kind of both sides of that equation. They all sent delegates and the whole point of this conference was how do we move beyond fossil fuels, but also how do we move beyond this extractive relationship to the earth's resources?
And it's kind of amazing that in our current moment, with all of the death of multilateralism, the kind of death of diplomacy, all of this great power conflict, this kind of neo imperialism, that there's still a desire in some governments and many societies and communities to come together and talk about, what does it look like to have an actual set of concrete policies and timeframes to get off of fossil fuels 1 and 2, to not reproduce the harms of extractivism as we moved into a new green economy. And that was exactly what was discussed. A couple countries came away with pretty concrete plans. They're gonna hold another one of these conferences next year.
And it was all accounts of all the reporting I've read is that it was really inspiring. It felt very different than the kind of UN copyright, you know, conferences that don't tend to really go anywhere. It felt more concrete and a lot of social movements and grassroots groups were present. So it wasn't just government. So I think there are. There's desire in a lot of civil society and some governments around the world to kind of carve a different path. The issue is that the people on the other side of that are enemies, we might call them, or the opponents of that kind of progress are really powerful. And so it really comes down to who can out strategize the other. And can we actually collectively build a different world?
[00:51:41] Speaker B: Well, is there anything else you'd like to mention that we haven't addressed? I mean, there's a lot, but there's a lot.
[00:51:46] Speaker C: I mean, the last thing I think I'll say, which is probably a different way to answer the same question you just asked me, is that one of the things we can do in the US to reduce how much harmful mining needs to happen for an energy transition, which I remain 100% in support, is to think about how do we build mass transit, how do we build affordable, dense metropolitan regions so people don't need cars to get to work?
How do we think about cars that are not huge, vehicles that are more normal sized so that the batteries don't need to be so big? Can we recycle these batteries? Yes, we can actually get all the lithium out of recycled batteries. So there's a lot of policy decisions we could make in transportation and urban planning, in recycling to minimize how much mining is needed for an energy transition. And that's explored in the last chapter of my book.
[00:52:37] Speaker B: Professor Thierio Frankos, thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:52:42] Speaker C: Thanks so much, Ronnie.
[00:52:44] Speaker B: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Professor Thea Riofrancos, associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College in Rhode island, who recently published Extraction the Frontiers of Green Capitalism, a book about the search and extraction of lithium for green technologies. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now and Spotify, YouTube and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K SQUID your community radio station and keep it going. And so until next every other Sunday, Sustainability Now.
[00:53:33] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now.
Tempered zones and tropic climbs and n through currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees Strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good plan.
