Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is an award-winning investigative print and audio journalist. In 2015, she received a Rachel Carson award for women greening journalism for her role in creating a women-only climate…
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Most proposals to keep fossil fuels in the ground rely on taking new minerals out of the ground — especially lithium, a major component in the batteries powering electric vehicles. In Thea Riofrancos’ book, Extraction, she visits the communities most impacted by lithium mining, explores the mineral’s politics and history, and proposes a pathway toward harm reduction.
Reading list from today’s show:
1. Thea Riofrancos’ book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism
2. Amy Westervelt’s new book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy
Pushkin.
00:21
Speaker 2
Hello and welcome back to The Spill, Drilled's weekly newscast where we're bringing you a wide range of news, analysis, and interviews with authors, experts, and all sorts of other smart people thinking about climate from a variety of angles. It comes out every Friday in between our narrative seasons. Today, an interview Drilled contributor Adam Lowenstein did earlier this year with political scientist Thea Riofrancos about her book Extraction, which explores the arms race for lithium and other critical minerals. The book has been out for a while now, but everything Riofrancos wrote and said in this interview remains true. The race for critical minerals is on. whether it's for green technology, the AI boom, or militarization. In fact, today that's even more true. At this very moment, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and their bros are pulling off a soft coup in Argentina, where President Javier Millet is happy to give them both unlimited space to build data centers and unfettered access to the country's lithium stores. You can find a transcript of this interview on our website at Drill.media. And don't forget to sign up there for our newsletter, too. Here's Adam's conversation with Zia.
01:51
Speaker 1
One question I was wondering about, I don't know if this is necessarily of interest to The average listener of Drilled, but it's definitely of interest to me, you mentioned in the acknowledgments to the book that one of the challenges was staying on top of all of the developments in the world of lithium and extraction and climate, while also you went around the world for this book. There's a ton of history in it. just from a, like a reporting perspective, how did you, or even just an information management perspective, I'm curious how you pulled that off or if it was just like chaos until, until you couldn't edit anymore.
02:31
Speaker 3
I love that question and I'm glad you read the acknowledgements because I gave a lot of background to the process and the acknowledgements or I tried to kind of draw the reader in to like both what inspired the book, but also the challenges I faced and the resources and people that kind of supported me in dealing with that and maybe kind of break open the black box of writing, which is often seen as like such an individual exercise, but inevitably involves a broader community or social network. So yeah, I'm happy to talk a little bit about that. You know, there are kind of two points of entry to the question. One is like how I struggled with the perennial feeling of being... both out of date and prescient, which are kind of opposites. But, you know, inevitably, if you're working on something in real time, as you know, and the Drill Networks knows from all of the reporting stuff, if you're working on unfolding events, you lag, your analysis lags the events. And by the time your analysis is written down, the events might have changed. So that's one challenge. On the other hand, I also happen to like choose a topic that was when I chose it seemingly not as salient or important as it became. So in some ways I was like ahead of the curve, in other ways I was always behind the curve. And so that itself was something to grapple with and to figure out how I was like situating myself and my analysis in the trajectory overall. I have a couple more things to say on that front, but that's just like one way to think about it. The other is much more brass tacks. Like how do you actually organize information, collate it, keep track of it, and then draw upon it when you're actually drafting? You know, that might be a little in the weeds or granular. Like I could talk about how I use Evernote and like, you know, how I use photographs during field work as a way to like have more visual detail that I can draw on later. You know, so there are different... different means that I use to store information, but that became extremely important. In fact, you know, one thing maybe I will say and is relevant to fans of a very investigative style podcasts and news network like Drilled, where you're often like uncovering things that maybe elite or powerful actors don't want you to know or don't want you to dig into too much. Something that I found was indispensable was being able to track how websites change over time. And it became a data point. Corporations scrub their websites all the time. Government entities scrub their websites. And sometimes either something you need is like on an earlier version of the website, or you actually want to show that elites are manipulating the framing of information and you need a way to demonstrate that. And so, you know, I learned a long time ago when I first did field work, like 15 years ago for my dissertation to take screen caps of websites so that I could capture them at a certain moment. But I also learned to use like the Wayback Machine and archive.ph to get prior versions, right? Maybe I hadn't thought to do that in the moment. And so it, you know, the information storage challenge also was a way that I conducted my analysis in a way. I'll say one other thing on the general feeling of being ahead of the game, being behind the game and kind of how I grappled with that. Maybe just two short points there. The draft of this book that I first wrote, I wrote during a very frenzied moment of the lithium market. So this was in like 2022, 2023, when prices were extremely high. There was really broad concern about market availability and market shortages. And those moments of like, you know, commodity booms, we could call them when commodity prices are really high and markets are really tight, inflected people's strategies, governments, corporations, even social movements, because they're orienting to this moment where there's heightened interest in a commodity and where there is this feeling of scarcity. And that itself played into the geopolitical dynamics that I track in the book. And so a first draft of this manuscript was written in a moment that was so thoroughly shaped by a feeling of scarcity or shortage. And I was smart enough to understand that that didn't mean lithium was geologically scarce. It just meant that there was a market imbalance. But if you're writing in a certain moment that has a certain kind of affective structure to it almost, you inevitably get caught up in that a little bit, just like I'm sure folks writing about the AI boom are kind of caught up in this idea of a kind of sector that's rapidly growing and seems like it's endlessly going to grow. And just by the nature of writing and editing, it turned it out that I needed to do more revisions on my book, which meant I sat with it a little bit longer. And by the time I was like ready with my second draft, that had really calmed down. And the reason I mentioned that is because, you know, at first I almost thought like, oh no, I missed the moment. Then I thought, oh wait, my analysis is really pegged to like a certain moment in the price cycle. Like that's not right. You know? And then my third thought, which ended up, I think where I landed and was the correct way to think about it was thank God in a way that I didn't publish it at that, of that really frenzied moment. And that I was able to have a more near-term historical perspective on the booms and busts of these markets and analyze both booms and busts, which are both like two sides of the coin of any commodities market. And so in a way, you know, my first draft not being perfect, so to speak, and therefore needing more revision, like gave me the chance to have some historical perspective. And just one other thing. You've really opened a can of worms with this question. I'll just say one more piece.
08:18
Speaker 1
There's a lot of stuff here that we're going to touch on. So it's a great introduction to a lot of topics I want to ask you about.
08:23
Speaker 3
Well, this might even be particularly germane to some of the political landscape changes that have unfolded while I was writing the book and since the book. There was certainly a moment where my book, as I was working on maybe at this point the final manuscript, felt like so perfectly timed with the Inflation Reduction Act, with Biden's policies, with divisions within the Biden government around mining, the harms of mining versus the need for green technologies. I felt like so in the moment on that front. Then, of course, Biden doesn't even run again for office. The Harris campaign doesn't win. Trump becomes president. And there was, you know, quite a moment, you know, of a few months where I was concerned, like, maybe my book is just about an era that a bygone era, almost an American politics and an American climate policy and supply chains. Lo and behold, like it turns out, which I kind of knew, but has been even more intense recently, Trump is like obsessed with critical minerals. And what that teaches us, and I was able to kind of sneak this in with some final edits in the manuscript, that critical minerals and the rush to mine them can be justified in all sorts of ways. That does not mean that I view the military or artificial intelligence justifications as the same as the climate justifications. I take the climate justifications much more seriously, and I think they come with real dilemmas. And yet we do see that there is a solid consensus among policymakers and political elites that these minerals are important. And what we see is that they're shifting justifications for why they are important. And that itself was helpful for me to learn, even if it kind of ran through the process initially of me thinking that this book would not be relevant in a Trump era or in the moment that we're living in right now.
10:22
Speaker 2
Hi there, Amy here.
10:24
Speaker 1
Guess what?
10:25
Speaker 2
I wrote a book and it's out now, available wherever you get your books. That includes eBooks and audio books too. In Brought to You By, I've combined more than a decade's worth of reporting to walk folks through all the different layers of the information ecosystem and all the different ways it's been warped by corporate propaganda. Folks are describing it as both serious and well-researched and a fun read. If you're a listener of this show, I guarantee you'll like it. I also read the audiobook, so that makes it essentially a drilled season binge.
10:58
Speaker 1
Check it out.
10:59
Speaker 2
I'll link to where you can get it in the show notes. And thanks for the support.
11:04
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned AI because there were, as I was reading it, I was struck by some of the parallels between the world of AI and data centers and the inevitability of artificial general intelligence, at least according to these companies, and some of the same rhetoric and the narratives around extraction and mining specifically. And kind of as a starting point for folks who have not read the book, there's kind of a core paradox or a trade-off that you kind of state upfront and sort of work through over the course of the book, which is that on the one hand, at least according to the conventional wisdom, extraction is necessary to save the planet. On the other hand, extraction threatens the environment, particularly at a local level among communities. Can you just describe that paradox a little bit and how it came to you as something that we as a society, we're going to encounter at some point, even though that kind of sense of trade-off in most cases we have not confronted yet?
12:13
Speaker 3
Yeah, I think it came to me in a couple of moments. The first is the origins of this book, which originated while I was very active in the movement and policy thinking around a Green New Deal. And I was very active in that situated in the United States, the Green New Deal usually being understood as a domestic policy paradigm. And simultaneous to my work in advocating for a Green New Deal and helping to flesh out like what a Green New Deal might look like, what its policy content might be, I was someone that already had worked on resource extraction and the environmental and social impacts of extraction, particularly in Latin America for a long time. So, you know, by the time I was thinking about a Green New Deal, I had been thinking about the politics of oil and mining in the global south for about a decade. And at some point, those clicked together. I realized that, you know, even if under a best case scenario, a Green New Deal, or even a less radical version of an energy transition, the point of it is to leave fossil fuels underground, that didn't mean the end of extraction. It just meant the extraction of different raw materials and specifically that the technologies and infrastructures that are needed to furnish a zero emissions economy and society themselves require resource extraction and in order to be manufactured and built and deployed. And so that was something for me to sit with. And I still believe this and very much feel this way today that the climate crisis is the top existential threat facing the planet, humanity, ecosystems, everything that we should hold dear. And yet the technological advances solutions, quote unquote, we can come back to that word if we want, but the technological solutions that will help us decarbonize entire economic sectors and realms of social life themselves require resource extraction, which doesn't mean that the trade-off is like a pure equivalency. You know, I do think that it is just urgently important to stop extracting fossil fuels and to move towards a renewable energy system. And I think that despite the fact that such a system would create its own environmental harms, especially related to extraction, but also related to siting and deployment, depending on how well thought out a particular solar farm is and how it interacts with the given landscape. And so for me, it doesn't result in me opposing the energy transition. I say that explicitly because there are analysts and authors and activists for whom the environmental costs of the energy transition are too much to bear. They actually can become, you know, opposed to the energy transition because of its heavy mining footprint, for example. I don't go there. For me, an energy transition is absolutely vital. And it's also worth saying that we're not really in an energy transition right now. We haven't even gotten to a point where we're seriously leaving fossil fuels in the ground and pivoting more dramatically and holistically to zero emissions energy sources. So an energy transition is still something to advocate for. It's not quite happening yet. We more have a process of energy addition and a changing energy matrix globally. But regardless of where we situate ourselves vis-a-vis the transition, whether we think it started or not, or it's early stages or not, for me, the benefits of getting off of fossil fuels and abating the worst climate scenarios absolutely are worth it. But that is only the beginning of the analysis because as I learned in researching this book and writing this book and also doing a lot of community and public events and having these difficult conversations is that there are a lot of different ways to transition from a fossil-based energy system to a zero-emissions energy system. There are many specific pathways, there are different technological configurations, there are different distributions of costs and benefits and Huber is both of those. And there are for sure, as I conclude in the book, different levels of mining that can get us to zero emissions. And so while initially it felt to me as like a zero-sum trade-off, over time, It's not that the tensions completely dissipated. I think that there still are fundamental tensions because mining is an extremely fraught process that results in irreversible landscape change and is associated with very high levels of social harm. So, you know, you can't just wish that away. Even a better regulated mine, even less mining will come with some of those harms. So the tensions are still there. But what I learned in writing the book is that there are different ways forward. There's much more extractive versions of the energy transition and versions that actually intentionally try to reduce the material throughput and raw material usage and energy usage of the entire system.
18:06
Speaker 1
That idea that there are not different options, which is kind of the conventional wisdom in some ways, gets at what to me felt like one of the the most prominent themes of the book, which is this idea of narratives or stories, or I think, as you put it at one point, logics or languages that we sort of just accept as true as the only way that things are. It's obviously a tool used by corporate interests in particular, you know, the idea that the Atacama Desert in Chile is just an empty desert. There's no life there, or brine is not water. Some of these narratives are sometimes very explicit, but there's also a more intangible way in which, whether it's extractive companies specifically or other firms up and down the supply chain or governments in some cases, or even quote unquote green companies, rely on the idea that extracting lithium as much as possible, as quickly as possible, is the only path to tackle the climate crisis. So I'm wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the role of narrative and story in essentially It's upholding the status quo in the sense that it's the same powerful interests who are winning now, who have been winning previously. I guess it's not quite the status quo in the sense that they're talking about it in a green context versus just pure fossil fuel extraction.
19:30
Speaker 3
It might be counterintuitive to... argue that narratives and language and framing and words are important when we're talking about such like brute material facts. You know, extraction is a material process. It's a physical process. It's technologically mediated. It involves human labor and machinery and stuff underground and long time scales of geological formation. And so are the markets and economic activities and supply chains and logistics and shipping. All of these are like things you can touch. They are material. We could get pretty philosophical and say that despite the fact we can touch them, we only really apprehend them through the medium of language. That would be a general point I would make just about how social life works. But a little bit more specifically, I think that there's such an interesting, almost counterintuitive way in which the way those very material processes are framed, are proposed, are contested, are deliberated around, has real material consequences. Like it actually matters whose framing and whose arguments and whose narratives win politically or economically or socially in terms of how much stuff comes out of the ground and who gets access to it and where it is shipped. and who profits from it, and who pays the environmental cost and social cost for it. And one of the fascinating things about studying the history of extraction, whether you frame it as a 500 or 600-year history or a history on the span of a few decades or the last few years, is how contested it is as an economic sector, how much there are actors that have completely competing narratives about how attraction should be organized and to whose benefit, how much those narratives can sometimes provide openings for real upheavals in power relations. Even if then we revert back to the more status quo, there are these moments where everything seems up for grabs in terms of the material substrate of the global economy. And that is because some group of people organized themselves, used words and framings to persuade one another, and then made a gambit, you know, in the kind of global political economic arena to reorganize how these supply chains operate under different terms. And then usually that just results in a new round of struggle where maybe the status quo or incumbent powers from the prior moment, you know, kind of fight back with their own new narratives. And so we get these... Just as extraction is itself this layered history of resources taken from similar landscapes over time, sedimenting one and another layer of extraction, often in the same places, like in Chile, there's also this kind of layers of language and of ideas and narratives where we get both sudden changes in how people think about things, but also the kind of repurposing of historical languages. So let me give just like one or two examples to make that less abstract. One way into this is to think about the recurrent intention on the part of global North governments to make resources easier for them to access and secure. Oftentimes in direct antagonism or conflict, with Global South countries that are trying to do their own thing with their resources, whether fund economic development, secure fuller forms of economic sovereignty, coordinate with one another to change the pricing and market dynamics, right? And so here, to an educated listener, they might be aware that I'm kind of hinting at this moment in the 1970s where there was a big conflict between the then called third world and the first world, you know, again, then called over who was going to control the raw materials that really fueled global capitalism, specifically oil, but also other minerals. And in that contest, there was really a whole decade, at least, in which global South countries gained a tremendous amount of leverage through political ideas, such as resource sovereignty, such as anti-colonialism, such as we should not be so dependent on the global north for our own economic functioning. And through those ideas and those languages and those framings, they coordinated among one another. There was a spate of nationalizations of oil and also minerals in the 60s and 70s. There was also the emergence of OPEC, which today we can justifiably see as a bad actor, but at the time was a real force of perhaps anti-colonial kind of economic sovereignty. And so, you know, these were ideas. They were also material practices and new forms of economic organizations. And in response to that, the global north, specifically the US as well as the UK, says, okay, wait a second, we're starting to lose control of the global economy. And this is not how it's supposed to work because we colonize these places and we colonize them in part to get their resources. And now they're like rebelling against us and changing the rules of the economic game. And so it was in that moment that global North countries, you know, they couldn't do the most explicit or standard or classical form of imperialism, which by that point, like, was outlawed by international law. Not to say it never happens, but the world had changed after 1945. And so they had to make use of other means to secure their interests and to secure these raw materials. For sure, they helped support some military coups and other more interventionist modes of getting what they wanted. But they also had to think through, well, how do we actually ensure that we have resources ready at hand and close by? Maybe we should exploit more of our own domestic resources. And that was, again, particularly in the oil economy. So that's when Alaska got super opened up to more oil extraction. That's when the Gulf of Mexico became a really hot oil frontier. That's when the North Sea of the United Kingdom became a site of offshore oil extraction. And they justified this in language that sounds so familiar today. resource security, energy security, energy independence. We can't rely on these third world countries, these unreliable governments that are nationalizing and disrupting markets. We have to have these resources at home. Today, this is called onshoring. But you can see how the logic was first birthed in this moment of real turbulence and of competing narratives and competing power relations over how the world's resources and really the global economy itself was going to be governed. So it's just one example, but I think it shows that language matters and that different ideas of how to organize these resource systems actually have quite concrete material And also just maybe the broader point that resource extraction is a heavily contested arena of the global economy in a way that not every sector has this amount of open conflict between North and South, between communities and corporations, between the great powers themselves, and sometimes even between different corporations that have opposed interests.
27:02
Speaker 1
That idea that at the end of the day, this all comes back to power and power relations is a pretty consistent through line in the book. You talk about how supply chains are basically just vectors for how power is imposed, how power relations play out. And then the modern incarnation of what you were just describing, what you alluded to there is what you call green dominance in the book. And when I first saw that, I thought it was describing that term green dominance was describing like, the coming dominance of green things, clean energy things. But it's actually using the idea of green to dominate, which gets back to this idea of power relations and how the global North countries, to again, use an oversimplifying term, wish to maintain the status quo as far as sharing power and who dominates the global economy. Could you describe a little bit about what green dominance is and how it ties into what you were just talking about there.
28:05
Speaker 3
Absolutely. The idea of green dominance is the idea that the supply chains for green technologies, whether they be lithium batteries, electric vehicles as a whole, wind turbines, solar panels, that the supply chains to produce those technologies that are part of the process of decarbonization and thus, quote unquote, labeled as green, are themselves battlefields of geoeconomic dominance. Geoeconomics may be a new term to some listeners, but they probably can intuit that it's a combination of geopolitics and economics. And so geopolitics We often think of, in terms of whether it's diplomacy or war, but we think of it as like a political kind of concept. Geoeconomics highlights the fact that economic activity can itself be part and parcel of geopolitical rivalry and often actually is. And we're certainly in an era where this is really out in the open, where we have really intensified forms of great power conflict that very much relate to who is at the vanguard of different technological frontiers. Whether those are, quote, green technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence and semiconductors, whether it's military technologies. this suite of technologies has become an arena of really intense competition. And one key form that that competition takes is the willingness of states, especially though not exclusively great powers, to use their state apparatus and use their policymaking tools to directly intervene in the economy in order to for example, promote domestic firms or promote the investment of domestic firms, whether that investment is locally or overseas, to ensure access to raw materials, to ensure access to advanced technologies, right? We know that technologies are patented and they are property of private companies. And so the battle over who has which forms of innovation and technological development is itself an arena of great power conflict. And what I noticed in the course of my field work and research is that a set of technologies, again, the lithium batteries, the solar panels, that climate advocates and energy wonks have been talking about for years as essential to get us off of fossil fuels is suddenly took on this geopolitical valence that I think many of us in the climate community maybe were not super hip to that possibility, you know, in the early days of advocating for thorough climate policy and for a just energy transition. I think, you know, there was almost an assumption that dealing with the climate crisis requires cooperation, requires multilateralism, requires also forms of redistribution between the global North and South. And that in some way, these technologies were peaceful technologies. also because they helped protect people from not only the climate crisis, but localized forms of air pollution. They could give people around the world access to energy that maybe lacked the basics of just an electricity hookup. So there are a lot of ways that these technologies were seen as, and certainly can be, not only socially and environmentally beneficial, but again, part of a broader and more collaborative framework of how we address the climate crisis internationally. But things really took a quite different turn starting in the late 2010s, early 2020s. And so again, this is recent history, but sometimes we kind of forget what even happened a few years ago or when these dynamics began. And so I date it to, again, the late 2010s, early 2020s, where policymakers in the global north, as well as in China, began to see much more clearly and also kind of directly impose a kind of security framing over these technologies, right? That these technologies, whoever could develop them fastest was going to be a major power in the new world order, you know, in a new world in which potentially fossil fuels were less important and renewable energy is more important. The renewable energy is free for the taking. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing. So it's not in the energy source or the generating source itself. but the technologies that harness that, that distribute it, that store it, those are the hardware of a new power system and power in both senses of the word, energy and political or economic power. And we could get into exactly why and when US policymakers first saw it as such a threat that China was way advanced in developing these technologies, but they did at a certain point, again, in recent years, start to feel threatened by China racing ahead with green technological development. And I do think it's important, and this will kind of maybe tie this whole framing together, to understand that there was a real fork in the road. It could have been the case that Western powers saw how advanced China was, realized that they were not going to immediately catch up, realized it's not necessarily a zero sum game. China's exporting the stuff around the world. Let's collaborate. Let's do joint ventures with Chinese companies. Let's invite Chinese scientists and engineers into the West so that we can learn from them. But instead, and repurposing a very old imperial kind of playbook and a playbook where you just assume that the West is supposed to be on top, it manifested as a threat. And so instead of a cooperative or collaborative approach to China's really rapid green development, Policymakers did what I was describing earlier. They sought to secure these supply chains, to dominate them, to bring them home, to territorialize them within the West, and to do so using a suite of economic policies ranging from tariffs to industrial policy to different other trade policies, subsidies, loans, etc., And this, you know, maybe just to close out this answer, this put the climate movement in a really difficult position. And I myself had a lot of difficult, challenging, very interesting, but quite challenging conversations with colleagues in the climate movement, let's say during the early Biden years, because Biden.
34:39
Speaker 3
Framed China as an enemy of the West. I mean, he really, you know, he wasn't the first to do so, but he reiterated that framing. And he sought dominance over these supply chains rather than cooperation with China. From certain climate experts and energy experts' perspective, this was a small price to pay for rapidly developing these sectors in the U.S., meaning if the only way to get the U.S. government interested in developing green tech was to put it in a national security framework, that was worth the price, or maybe it wasn't even a price. Some people had no problem with this. It was just a good way to incentivize policy development in this area. I was concerned from the get-go because I still hold on to the idea that climate is a planetary problem and we are going to need cooperation. And if we're at each other's throats of who can develop things the fastest, it's not just a friendly race. It's tipping over into real geopolitical tension and conflict. And that made me concerned about the viability of multilateralism and collaboration to deal with the climate crisis. Not only that, I think there are real risks to the national security framing becoming so dominant over the climate and environmental framing for these technologies. And we can talk about that more if you want, but I want listeners to kind of understand that it was a fork in the road, that it did even divide the climate movement in certain ways, but we are absolutely in a world in which energy technologies and computing technologies are domains of geopolitical competition.
36:12
Speaker 1
It's really interesting because you described in the book, how, as part of this process, the idea of onshoring or controlling supply chains started out as a means to an end, the end being fighting climate change. But as you were just describing, and for a lot of people, it seems like, and certainly for a lot of entrenched interests, the end, which was originally climate change, has just become dominance. And that seems like that gets at one of the risks that you're talking about there of It's very possible, and maybe we're already there, for a means to an end, green dominance, in order to fight climate change to just become dominance. And it's very easy, and you could probably describe that's what's happening in the second Trump administration, to just scrape off the green part and just keep the dominance part. Suddenly the end is just, I guess, geopolitical power or geoeconomic power.
37:09
Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. And you frame it perfectly from my perspective. And maybe just to add a recent example of this that I alluded to a little bit earlier with Trump's obsession with critical minerals. So critical minerals, just to define it for listeners, are minerals that are considered vital to both economic functioning and national security. and that have some vulnerability in their supply. So you have to check all those three boxes to be a critical mineral according to the USGS and other agencies domestically and in other countries that keep catalogs of critical minerals or strategic minerals. And so this is a long designation in the US. Lithium was added to this list in the first Trump administration, which is interesting unto itself because Trump is known and very proudly like an anti-EV guy, you know, minus his brief bromance with Elon Musk and showing off the Tesla in front of the White House, like minus that odd moment, he's been pretty anti the quote, green new scam, electrification, renewable energy. He hates wind turbines in particular. I mean, we know this whole deal as climate advocates kind of watching all of these things being dismantled before our eyes. So he's no lover of lithium batteries for electric vehicles, but he has been very consistent in both terms in office in promoting critical minerals extraction in the U.S., even when, again, it seems at odds with what their main use case is in many cases, right? The main use of lithium right now and for the foreseeable future is electric vehicle batteries and not even military hardware or other things that Trump is in favor of come close to how much EVs play a role in that market. It's odd. However, again, he's very pro-mining. He's very pro-extraction. The mining lobby is an important part of the Republican coalition. We could explain this in sort of political economy terms. But regardless, first Trump government, he adds lithium to the critical minerals list and initiates certain fast tracking and forms of regulatory deregulation in order to move certain projects ahead more quickly. One of those projects is Thacker Pass, which is one that I visit in Nevada. That was also very supported by the Biden administration. It was the Biden government that ensured that Thacker Pass had a Department of Energy loan that offset three quarters of its capital costs of construction. So we have lithium declared as a critical mineral under Trump one. We have the fast tracking of the public hearings and the regulatory process for Thacker Pass, a huge lithium mine in Nevada. Under Biden, that mine gets an enormous loan. At the same time, General Motors chips in by saying, we're going to also buy some equity stakes in this project and have an economic agreement where we get a bunch of the lithium for our new electric cars that we're producing. Then we're in Trump too. And now literally that same mine and the same company, Lithium America, Trump has taken equity stakes in this project. So the Department of Energy under Trump is now a partial owner of this So we see this incredible through line just based on one project and one particular mineral where governments that are seemingly polarized on a ton of issues, they're from opposite sides of the political spectrum. One is a Democrat, the other is a Republican, all glom onto the idea of critical minerals to lithium in particular, and to state intervention to make sure these projects move forward. over and against significant community dissent. Because for Thacker Pass, there were multiple lawsuits. There were multiple protest camps. There were even protests in the capital of Nevada over it. And so there was significant local opposition. And despite that, a Democratic president was willing to move ahead. A Republican president, less shocking, was willing to move ahead. And so I think what that draws our attention to is that critical minerals themselves are elevated to this really important geopolitical status. It doesn't matter if you are framing them for green purposes as Biden was, if you're framing them for military or other technological purposes, or just the sheer love of resource extraction as Trump is, it's almost taken on a life of its own. And I call this in other work of mine, a critical minerals consensus. That's actually a bipartisan consensus in the US that these minerals are important. whether you emphasize the national security or you emphasize their role in technologies or you emphasize their role in climate action. And that's interesting in and of itself, but I think that it should concern us that we need to, as climate advocates, we need to be very specific about why a certain mineral is important, under what terms, under what regulatory terms and economic terms we support its extraction, rather than just kind of say, oh yes, of course, it's a critical mineral, so it must be important. That is not thinking critically, no pun intended. That is just going along with what has become an elite consensus, not only across the political spectrum, but across the public and private sector. And so it's less that I'm not trying to say none of these minerals are important or they're not quote unquote critical or essential at all. That's not my goal. My goal is to have us slow down, look more carefully, understand how very quickly a mineral that was justified in one way can be justified in another way. And that we need to have our own ideas of what minerals are important, how much volume of them we actually need to serve social or planetary needs, and what form of governance we think is adequate to the extremely environmentally impactful nature of the mining industry.
43:08
Speaker 1
Something that you chart in the book is the fight, I guess, of some companies within the mining sector and specifically involved in mining lithium to resist the commodification of lithium. You show how it's pretty clearly shifting from something that you know, a different type of lithium or a different company or a different location can sort of distinguish itself from its competitors. shifting from that into more of a commodity that can be bought and sold and exchanged and traded and speculated against and all of that stuff. And one of the ways that they have resisted that shift into a commodity is to attach a modifier to it. And this clearly worked, you know, during the Biden years as well, of just adding green or sustainable or ethical, some other modifier in front of it to make their, you know, a certain... sourcing or a certain a certain company's lithium stand out from a competitor's and in the way you describe in the book is that the sustainability itself the idea of it becomes the commodity and i'm just wondering if you can talk about that a little bit just how the kind of this touches on some of what we were talking about before with narratives and stories and ideas but the idea of lithium and green lithium or green mining as you talk about in the book kind of becomes a again, as we were talking about before, an end unto itself.
44:35
Speaker 3
Yeah, I mentioned earlier in passing that there are different types of conflicts over resource extraction, global north, global south, great powers, community versus corporations. And the one that I mentioned at the end was corporations that might have different interests from one another. And I planted that seed intentionally, and you kind of picked up on it in a way, which is that at least in academia, And to an extent, I think in just the broader world of climate commentary and climate activism, we're used to seeing the extractive sectors, whether it's fossil fuels or whether it's mining, as very aligned with the finance sector, to the point where those two sectors have become very imbricated in one another. You need a lot of financial capital to undertake extractive projects, and extractive projects themselves are sites of financial speculation and commodity trading, as you just laid out. But those facts, which are all true, should not lead us to believe it's always such an easy relationship. Extraction, resource extraction, and finance in the form of private finance, Wall Street, the city in London, that type of world, don't work on exactly the same logic. Resource extraction is is a long-term, very physical process in a particular place that oftentimes can take years, many years, to actually go from discovering the mineral underground to building the mine, to getting it permitted, to getting it operational, and to then fully recuperating your investment over many years. A mining contract or concession is 25 years, 40 years. They're really long timeframes. And that's in part because it does take a moment to recoup the tremendous investment and sunk costs and fixed costs that happen earlier in a mine's development. And a lot of that is really an anathema to the modern finance industry, which wants very quick returns, wants very reliable returns, does not like risk, and would prefer to trade and hedge in ways that generate very rapid and very reliable dividends. You know, as I said, extraction can take a long time. And during all those years, many things can go wrong. There can be protests, there can be strikes, there can be wars, there can be substitutions, like a new technology requires a new type of mineral. And so a mineral market goes bust. And it's oftentimes hard for mining companies to attract the finance that they need for these really capital intensive operations. And that shouldn't like make us feel bad for mining companies. That's not really my point, but it's just to introduce a little bit of specificity that the finance sector and the extractive sector, it takes some work to kind of align their interests and have them work together in a way that is profitable for extractive capitalism. And what we've seen in the lithium sector, and there's other examples of this in other raw material and nature-based sectors, is that the sector is at kind of an early stage of financialization. And instead of being fully financialized, meaning like major futures markets, lots of betting and hedging and speculation, complex financial instruments like you have in the oil market or even in the copper market, You have a kind of more almost old fashioned approach where there are oftentimes long-term contracts between a buyer and a seller that may not really be routed through these more financialized markets and kind of vehicles of finance. What I witnessed at, you know, this is the part of the book that you're recounting. What I witnessed, let's say, honestly, at this point, five or six years ago. So it was at an even earlier stage of this process that I'm detailing. I happened to go to this lithium convention. in Santiago, Chile, where I was doing field work and all the major lithium companies were there. And all of these companies are still the major lithium companies. There are some new ones, but these are still really powerful lithium companies. Albemarle, SQM, Tianqi, Gongfeng, etc., And all of them in that moment said, we want to continue doing it the old fashioned way, so to speak. We want to sell our lithium to this or that downstream buyer. We're not interested in more elaborate pricing mechanisms or hedging mechanisms or forms of speculation. And what's interesting is that they clearly viewed the possibility of a more financialized sector where you would have lots of more actors in the room, investment bankers, hedge funders, funds, commodity traders, as a way that they might lose power over a sector that was relatively small at that point and relatively oligopolistic, really controlled by a few firms. And they just wanted to hold on to their position as any incumbent firm does in a market that has a lot of concentration of corporate investment. But they did not exactly get their way. And what we see is a really interesting process that we can observe in real time. Like we would have to go back decades to see this in the oil market, because now it's history. The oil market is very financialized at this point. But we can witness at this moment the process of lithium becoming a quote unquote commodity. And going back to that corporate convention, one of the investment bankers that was speaking on the stage, who was very a proponent of it becoming a commodity, defined a commodity for the audience. He said, a commodity is anything that you don't care where it came from. All oil of a certain grade and type is the same. It doesn't matter where. Any bale of cotton is the same. A ton of copper, wherever it comes from, is the same. And that commensurability and uniformity and homogeneity, which itself is the outcome of all sorts of technical standards and engineering processes and chemical processes to make these things the quote unquote same, the result of that is that you can have global commodities markets with a single price that on any given day we could look up what is the price of lithium. You can't quite do that yet. There is a spot market in China, but most of lithium is traded through these long-term offtake contracts that are not transparent to the public. So even saying what the price of lithium is is kind of a fool's errand where with the price of oil, like we can look at the price, not only of oil, but of different, again, grades and types of oil. And so what this person said on stage is that from an investor perspective, from a finance perspective, what we want is all lithium to be the same. The lithium companies were saying, no, we have our special product. They also don't like the idea that lithium is a raw material. They wanna present it as a chemical, I think to really disassociate lithium chemicals from their extractive origins, right? So there's almost like a little bit of a marketing game going on there as well. But just to kind of cut to the chase and get to the end of where your question landed, what I saw as lithium companies and financial investors were kind of strategizing and grappling with this moment of lithium slowly becoming more commoditized, more homogenous, more tradable, having clearer pricing benchmarks, was that lithium companies needed a new way to stand out beyond just saying, oh, we have our specialty chemical or we have our specialty formula or we sell to this downstream company or that. And one of the key ways to stand out was to produce, quote, sustainable lithium. The irony is that sustainability and greenness or even ethical lithium, right, responsible lithium, all of these different adjectives, itself now has become a financial product, as you say, to the point that in the commodity trading houses that exist, the Chicago Metals Exchange and the London Metals Exchange, where there is some early stage trading of lithium, you have a price premium for green. You have a separate trading floor for quote unquote green lithium. And so this is lithium that's both been thoroughly financialized, yet it's still segmented out by whether it's green or sustainable. And then, of course, you have to look underneath the hood. How does a company get to label its lithium as green or sustainable? And there's a whole process there that we could get into that especially banking institutions have kind of come up with in an ESG framework to figure out what to label what. But I'll tell you that it does not have to do with the fact that there is no environmental harm or no social harm.
53:18
Speaker 1
You spend a lot of time in the book reporting on communities in the United States, in Chile, and elsewhere that are trying to engage, and in some cases, trying to resist the imposition of these extractive industries? In a lot of cases, and I think the vast majority of cases, these are Indigenous lands or Indigenous communities nearby who are most affected by this. Are there any commonalities or tactics or strategies that have that you've observed among these communities, people who are resisting extractive capitalism that have made them successful?
53:59
Speaker 3
Yes, and I love that question because there's a lot of social scientific literature on anti-extractive protest, what causes it and what the consequences of it are in terms of its success or different outcomes. And this is not always the case, but I did actually find that my experiences on the ground aligned with some of the more general findings. So I can both impart a little bit anecdotally, but also kind of say that this is not just based on this or that place I visited. It's a more general pattern. And I think that there are kind of two ways to break down this question a little bit. One is what causes really.
54:43
Speaker 3
Militant and well-organized protests in the first place, like why communities go down the path of protest. And the other is what determines how successful they are in achieving their goals. And the two are actually related, but it's worth disambiguating them a little bit. And maybe to stay, to kind of frame this all, It's important to know that not every community resists mining. In a book like mine and a lot of the reporting on this topic, we get introduced to communities that are concerned, that are discontent, that maybe are about to protest or are protesting because that's newsworthy. That's where the action is. That's where we can kind of dramatize the pros and cons of mining and the different viewpoints on it. That does not at all mean that every community resists mining. And also that doesn't mean that communities that don't resist it are happy with it. It's just that certain factors tend to need to combine to get communities to take the risk of resistance, which is actually risky in a variety of ways. So what the general literature shows and was more than confirmed in the cases that I delved into is that there needs to be a combination of environmental and social harm that is predicted to happen or clearly going to happen, or there's a concern about it happening as a result of the project. So maybe the project would majorly deplete local water supplies or reduce local biodiversity, or maybe it's a more social issue where the project would be cited or in a landscape that is considered ceremonial or sacred, or that overlaps with another land use. So maybe there's a more economic concern, like, oh, here we are in agricultural community, and if this mine is built, I don't think we're going to have a farm on top of the mine. So these are different grievances or concerns that communities might have. But in and of themselves, that tends to not quite get us to the threshold of really active resistance. We can even know in our own lives that we might live in a neighborhood, there might be a development happening or a new store being built or a factory. Maybe we're concerned about something like there's gonna be more pollution or more traffic. That doesn't mean we automatically, we might gripe about it, we might complain about it. That doesn't mean we organize collective action, put our bodies on the line in front of the bulldozer and take tremendous risks to slow it down. So I think that there's a more general lesson here that could even relate to protests more broadly, but certainly is the case with anti-extractive protests, where it's the combination of a concern about a specific harm, or oftentimes more than one harm, and a feeling of being excluded from decision-making. And that is a very combustible combination. If you think your watershed is going to be depleted and you show up to a hearing that is organized by the local government or the company itself, and you try to raise your hand and bring that concern and you are shut down and you're told that you're stupid because you don't understand how watersheds work, Or the way that the information is presented is not in your native language because you're an indigenous person and it's in Spanish rather than your indigenous language. Or you start to raise a little bit of concern. Maybe you do some things that look like protests and you are repressed or you get a death threat. So it's the combination of exclusion or repression or feeling threatened. shut out from the policy process, and there being very high stakes harms involved that tends to activate communities into more serious and risky levels of collective action. And when I say risk, I don't just mean the fact that if you put your body in front of a bulldozer, you don't know exactly what's going to happen and the guy can keep driving or not. Right. And you hope he doesn't. But it's not it's not just the risk from the literal activity of protest itself, but it's also the fact that the mining industry is rightfully notorious for human rights violations and allegations. including outright killing of land defenders and environmental defenders. In fact, the mining industry or attractive industries writ large are number one over and above agribusiness, forestry, a whole host of other nasty industries that also have bad reputations. It's number one for the number of people that die. And then we could go from there, injury, death threat, other forms of intimidation that are short of premature death. And so this is a real risk. And especially in Latin America and Africa, and Indonesia and a lot of the hotspots of mining, these risks are particularly elevated. So community needs to like, have a sense of shared purpose, have a sense that they have plans for how they're going to manage that risk, feel okay with the physical threats that are going to be lobbed against them, and maintain a sense of steadfastness in the face of very sophisticated divide and conquer strategies that the mining industry now uses to try to undermine this process of collective action and kind of popular unity, we might say. With all that in mind, you can already maybe tell what would make for a more successful protest, right? I've kind of already laid it out. Like, if you do have a level of community organization, if you do have that shared social fabric and that sense of we know each other, we're going to meet one another, we're going to set up these meetings, we have a shared social network, right? If it's a very atomized or alienated community, this can be harder. If it's a community with pre-existing communities, kind of social contact and shared activities and shared common spaces that they tend to use together on the land that's going to be affected, we see more leverage for that community. We also see that the earlier in the process the community gets activated, agitated, and starts resisting, the more successful or the more likely they are to at least win some demands. So if right away from that first public hearing during early exploration, your community gets organized, that's a very good sign about the possibility that you can actually shape decision-making, negotiation, even prevent the mine if that's your goal. And in fact, just to maybe close out with this interesting fact, Latin America is a place where at this point, we have a lot of what we can call stranded assets, whether officially declared or not, mining projects that have not moved past the advanced exploration stage, Because there was such vociferous resistance to them that it scared off investors. And once the mining company loses the financiers, because remember, that takes a lot to align, as we just discussed, the mining company really can't move forward. And that will just be shelled until another maybe less risk adverse mining company in the future arrives. takes it on. But there can be real victories, whether it's stopping the mine or stalling it just to get better governance and better regulation, whether it's winning economic benefits, resources for local environmental monitoring, better labor, dignified work out of the mine, whatever the community's goals are, which may be to stop it or may just be to improve it. The more organized, the more unified, and at an earlier stage, the more successful they tend to be. And they really can be successful despite the kind of David and Goliath power relations.
1:01:54
Speaker 1
Yeah, and as you noted there, there are lots of opportunities for alliance and also lots of points of leverage over the industry that I think are good for folks to keep in mind because it is not an insurmountable opponent. No. Thanks so much for this conversation, Thea, and congratulations on the book.
1:02:12
Speaker 3
Thanks so much, Adam.
1:02:12
Speaker 2
Thank you. The Spill is produced by Peter Duff and edited by Aline Brown. This episode was reported by Adam Lowenstein and edited by me, Amy Westervelt. Our theme song is Bird in the Hand by Fournone. Artwork by Matthew Fleming. You can find a transcript of this episode related to reporting and our weekly newsletter on our website at drilled.media. And don't forget to follow us on all the social media channels.
1:02:49
Speaker 1
At Drilled Media.
1:02:51
Speaker 2
Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.
The Host
