Lithium is an essential ingredient of most modern electronics. It helps to power our phones, our laptops, and increasingly EVs and other key parts of the green transition.

As Thea Riofrancos, a political scientist, environmentalist, and author of the new book “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism,” explains to Mark on this episode, the story of lithium — how it's mined, how it’s refined, and how it makes its way around the world — isn’t just a business story. It's a story of geopolitics and power.

On this episode, Mark and Thea discuss the surprising story of lithium extraction, how the race to electrify our energy supply is reshaping the global economy, and what it all means for the future of our planet.

Learn more about and purchase Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Watch Mark and Thea’s discussion at the Watson School

[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK BLYTH: From the Rhodes Center for International Finance and Economics at Brown University, this is The Rhodes Center Podcast. I'm the director of the Center and your host, Mark Blyth. Lithium is an essential ingredient of most modern electronics. It helps to power our phones, our laptops, and increasingly, EVs and other key parts of the green transition.

Listeners of this show probably know that. You'd also probably know that mining lithium is big business, and it's only going to get bigger. But as our guest on this episode explains, the story of lithium, how it's mined, how it's refined, and how it makes its way around the world isn't just a business story. It's a story of geopolitics and power.

Thea Riofrancos is a political scientist, environmentalist, and author of the new book Extraction-- the Frontiers of Green Capitalism. In it, she unpacks how the race to electrify our energy supply is reshaping the global economy and what it all means for the future of our planet. Here's our conversation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hello, Thea. Welcome back to the podcast.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Lovely to be here.

MARK BLYTH: We heard you on quite a while ago, just about around the pandemic for your last book, Resource Radicals. And this is very much-- this is the new book we're talking about, which is Extraction-- the Frontiers of Green Capitalism, which came out with Norton in September. This is kind of a follow up, but the first one is really about the radicals. That is to say, both the governments who seek to control these minerals, oil, et cetera, et cetera, and then the activists who oppose them and so on and so forth.

But this is a broader canvas. This is much more about we're trying to decarbonize the planet. There are certain things we need to do it. Obviously, there are trade offs involved in getting these things.

But it's much more than that. It's a story of geopolitics. It's a story of investment. And it's a story of how local communities are not just disrupted by, sometimes advantaged by, one way or another involved in this whole thing.

Give us a bit of an overview for the listeners. Basically, what is it you're trying to do here? What did you think you wanted to write? Let's use that as an entree.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: What I wanted to do was lean into a contradiction and not run away from it. As an environmentalist and as a climate advocate and someone who wrote a book advocating for Green New Deal, I didn't want to shy away from the obvious ways that all of that intersects with what my main body of research is, which is extractive sectors. And this is not just a kind of rosy or sparkling green transition where everything is better for the environment. That might be its net effect, and it should be its net effect.

But there also in the process, especially at the early stages of building the material guts of an energy system and of these new economic sectors that are meant to be zero carbon, there are a lot of environmental flashpoints and potential conflicts. That was the start. What I then discovered somewhat unintentionally, and so I try to bring the reader along for the ride that was the same ride I went on, which is that this is a lens onto the poly crisis, onto geopolitics, financial crises, fights between great powers, tensions between corporations in different parts of the world.

It tells us a lot about that. It tells us about new modes of civil society engagement, participation, new demands coming from social movements. And as you said, and in a way that totally surprised me how much I could learn about the past few decades of World history just by looking at a lithium battery.

And that took me to 500 years ago and to early moments of colonialism. It took me to the early 20th century and the kind of origins of resource nationalism. It took me to the '70s. It took me to Two Thousand and Eight, even to Twenty Nineteen, this forgotten moment of global protest that we forgot about because of pandemic endemic amnesia.

But that was a really startling moment around the world. So I think it's one of those in a way, like classic commodity histories, and that you take a commodity learn a lot. But there's a much more political goal to all of this, which is really grappling with these real contradictions.

MARK BLYTH: So 300 and change years ago, Latin America, your area of study, was incorporated into the global economy to make commodities. 70% of all employment is still involved in commodities. And we now have three countries in particular-- Chile is the one that features heavily in the book-- where lithium is this thing.

But it's not just lithium that's produced there and handed to the Global North. This is part of a wider thing you just alluded to which really begins, if not at the period of decolonization in the '50s, into the '60s and the '70s, where the Global South starts to say, yeah, you may want this, mate, but we're not going to give it to you on just whatever terms you want. So how does the current moment of extractivism around lithium fit into that kind of broader story about the Global South and the Global North having a contest over these minerals and over these materials?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: One of the things I learned in this book that when I learned it I felt like I should already know, is that Latin America was the first place outside of the Soviet Union that expropriated and nationalized resources. So it was context that were not per se revolutionary, not the Russian Revolution and then Soviet Union and everything that happened there, but kind of reformist governments, sometimes even nationalist, dictatorships of different sorts, developmentalists, also some democratically-elected people. But regardless, starting in the early Nineteen Twenties, we have the first resource nationalizations and state-owned firms.

And this continues a pace for decades, reaching its kind of height in the '60s and '70s, by which point Africa is decolonized, South Asia's decolonized, the Middle East is decolonized, and a lot of governments and societies in those places, I don't want to say they copy Latin America's playbook. That would be a bit simplistic. But there was existing inspiration for reasserting sovereignty and particularly economic sovereignty over the kind of basis of your very economy and in so doing, over the linkage between your economy and international markets, investors, the Global North, the West, et cetera.

And so Latin America paves the way because it experienced earlier decolonization and then a lot of dependency after that. And so they kind of felt that gap between political and economic sovereignty more acutely and earlier than some other places did. So they create this idea of resource nationalism, resources for the people. There was a mix of technocrats, policymakers, domestic capitalists, workers, and social movements that all aligned on this front.

And what's interesting is the cyclicality of this. It kind of keeps coming back into fashion after sometimes being brutally stamped out, sometimes just coming out of political fashion for other reasons. Obviously, a renewal of this occurs under the pink tide, subject of my first book that you already mentioned.

But it's really renewed again in this current moment. And there's a mix of reasons for that. And I won't be exhaustive, but I'll just name a couple. One is that there's already high sets of social and political expectations around, we don't want to just extract and export.

We want to do something different. At the very least, we want to own the asset. If not that, we also want to industrialize and get downstream investment as well. So that's one set of reasons.

The other is there's a lot of turbulence globally, mainly around the US-China relationship, which opens up other developmental pathways for developing countries, because you no longer have to just align with what we used to call the Washington Consensus. You can attract a pretty vibrant investors from, of course, China, but also from Europe, and diversify your portfolio that, in the best case scenario, becomes a race to the top. Like, you can do more developmental things with your resources because you have more buyers, and some of them are willing to play the game of resource nationalism them along with you.

And then maybe just one other thing to name is that you have some really successful examples. Indonesia is the top one, but there are others that have successfully leveraged a raw material into a developed industrialized asset that has a whole supply chain growing around it. We could get into all the environmental issues, including climate issues with Indonesia's nickel sector, but no one can deny that they've gone beyond being just a purely extractive zone for the world economy.

MARK BLYTH: So just to clarify for listeners, what they did-- correct me if I'm wrong-- is they had an export ban on nickel. They basically said, no don't get the raw stuff. You need to come here and do stuff with us to increase the value added. And that creates these forward and backward linkages, and you end up with an industry.

And in a way, let's turn to lithium now, I mean, that's the lithium dilemma in a sense that you point to in the book, which is there's a couple of risks, that one of them you mentioned briefly is the risk of sodium batteries, for example, substitution. You invest all this stuff in lithium, and then you've got a technological shock and you've got a problem. But the other one is these countries just don't want to be stuck as the back end of the supply chain. They want to move up. And resource nationalism is like the way that usually is mobilized, et cetera.

Let's turn now to one of the other facets. How does society in these countries feel about this? There's huge demand for this. There's the global green transition.

But sticking with Latin America, they're tiny emitters. They're actually very green economies already. And they in a sense, they're being asked to sacrifice their greenness so that other people can be less carbon intensive. What's the politics of that?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: The place that I actually first learned about this technological disruption and substitution risk was in Chile, and it links to your whole question. So I arrive in the Atacama Desert. I start interviewing people there.

So the Atacama Desert, for listeners, is where about a fifth of the world's lithium comes from. Chile's the second largest producer globally. And I asked people like, what are your concerns? What do you think? Do you like the industry or not?

And one of the things first things folks said to me was, we're worried this will be another salt nitrate, because Chile in the North has a long history of extraction, including of things that ended up being substituted by synthetic fertilizers in this case, but also of gold and silver and copper. And so they're like, we have layers of this extraction. We have a lot of ghost towns.

We even have copper ghost towns, too, for projects that have dried up for whatever reason. And so we can see the other end of this. We can see what happens after extraction, which is environmental harm, resource drain, and no development. And so this is how a lot of-- whether or not they have a theory of technological disruption, this is how a lot of people feel in Latin America and increasingly across the Global South, like what do we get from this?

And the price volatility is very important here. Because it's even hard for a government with good faith, with great economists, with engineers in the room to plan more than one price cycle ahead in terms of the fiscal basis of their own state. That's on top of the fact that the mining industry has all of these local harms.

And harm can understate it a little bit. A mine is an irreversible landscape change. It's not a factory. It's not a movie theater.

It's not something that, OK, a NIMBY doesn't like it because it disrupts their view. It is a huge pit in the ground that you can't refill because you fundamentally change the composition of the crust in that area. And it creates a huge amount of physical waste.

One other thing I learned in this book is that the issue of piles of mining waste causing avalanches and killing people, or contaminating the soil because they breach the basin that they're supposed to be contained in, has gotten worse over time, not better. Totally going against our idea of progress in human history because we're in many cases-- copper is a great example-- searching for lower and lower concentration minerals in lots of surrounding rock, creating much more waste per mine than we used to in the past. And so that's just one example, but it gives you a sense that there's real physical risk on top of water shortages and all sorts of other things.

And thanks to the internet, people know about this. They may not have known about it in the past, or it'd be family lore or oral histories. But now, you can look up what are the problems with copper mining or lithium mining.

Everyone knows. And they're like, we at least want stable jobs. But actually, we'd like economic development out of this.

MARK BLYTH: So let's then turn to green capitalism, which is one of the other main themes in the book. You're a bit hesitant about talking about it as a thing because it could be greenwashing. It could mean a whole host of things. But it's really why we care about lithium. So tell us what you mean by green capitalism and how lithium ties into this.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: There are two things I don't mean. One, you've already mentioned, which this is just greenwashing. It's propaganda.

MARK BLYTH: I asked you-- my favorite example is the Bank of England issuing a green bond in Two Thousand and Nine. Why is it green? Because we said so. Nothing else about it. Exactly.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: And so there's a fair critique there. And I don't think the people that just think it's greenwashing are wrong, but then you have nothing to study or look at or analyze because you just think it's like rhetoric or branding and nothing else. So that's one way to define it that I don't tend to use.

Another way to define it is the opposite. It's like green capitalism is capitalism just becoming greener, becoming more sustainable, internalizing its environmental externalities to the point that we have no external effects of capitalism on the world. And perfectly happily ever after we can all live. So neither of those are very useful.

But there's something happening. We need concepts that train our analytic gaze on actual empirical phenomena that we can collect data on and analyze. So I try to be a social scientist about it.

And so what is actually observable? Investments are observable. The building of supply chain and the logistical coordination of them are observable. To your point about the Bank of England, like the phenomena of different elite actors creating labeling structures that classifies some finance as green, or certain investments or certain projects as green so that they can access sometimes concessionary financial terms. Or at least their shareholders are happier.

And we might for good reason, think the moment of ESG is over. I'm not sure it totally is in Europe. And I also don't think we should judge everything by one presidential administration. So there are lots of reasons that these can become more attractive investments if labelled in a certain way.

The other thing that I add, though, is because this is political economy. It's not just the economy isolated from politics or market making. And so green capitalism is as much an economic phenomena as it is a political project. The political project is with enough little nice nudges, maybe a carrot here, a stick there, we can rally and herd capitalists to invest in a socially useful thing, which is the existence and the future of our planet.

And so it's technocratic, sure, but it also oftentimes has to route through participatory or representative democracy and get enough votes or people in Congress and so that the money flows around. And that political project is actually very unstable in the West and in the Global North. And we've seen backlash to it.

We've seen divisions within it. We've seen a whole postmortem of the Inflation Reduction Act. So I think attending to it as a political project shows its vulnerabilities and hopefully policies that might be more durable.

MARK BLYTH: But why do they care about lithium?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Well, they care about lithium-- so this shows the market crashed-- because governments and scientists and energy wonks have said the way that we're going to decarbonize the transportation sector, which in the US is our number one source of carbon emissions and is also just a huge sector, therefore, like enticing to think through, how could it with different things? Because that's like a big profit and production opportunity. So the way that we are right now, getting the carbon out of transportation is producing electric vehicles that have lithium batteries.

Lithium is not the only way to make a battery. You mentioned sodium. And China is really like pushing those as a cheaper alternative to lithium or a compliment where you have sodium cells and lithium cells in the same battery pack.

But anyway, since actually the '70s-- and this takes us back to the oil crisis. I won't do the history. People can read the book, but that's when lithium batteries were actually first invented to be a post-oil technology in a moment where we thought we were going to get off of oil and maybe peak oil, and that whole thing.

MARK BLYTH: Invented by an oil company.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Invented by an oil company. Try not to--

MARK BLYTH: I didn't know that one.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: --spoil the whole plot, Mark. No, I'm joking.

MARK BLYTH: That's a very important footnote. But I want to give teasers so people read the book.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: So in Exxon's labs in New Jersey, that's one point of origin of the lithium battery that we use today in electric vehicles, electric buses, stationary storage, the whole thing. And so lithium batteries are the currently commercially viable and being deployed at relative scale. Even if things are stalling a bit in the US, like lots of electric vehicles are being produced, you can go to Nepal. 75% of the vehicles sold last year in Nepal were electric. You can go to India and a booming micromobility market for electric scooters and mopeds. I mean, I'm not naming--

MARK BLYTH: Ethiopia is a classic one. Totally.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: 100%. And there's a growing market in Global South. Interestingly, this is a one line in my book that will be dated soon, where I talk about how unequal the EV market was, because for many years-- and this still applies, but it's starting to change-- there are three major markets. There's Europe, the US and China being the preeminent among them. And now this is diversifying right.

And so lithium batteries are the technology to decarbonize transportation. There's a huge potential market because it's not only about getting additional existing car owners to substitute. It's getting people that didn't even have that type of mobility at all to have cheap forms of electric mobility. And China has, of course, done a huge amount to cheapen lithium batteries over time.

And so this is the amazing prospect and opportunity from an investor perspective. The problem is it's quite expensive to completely retool an auto industry. The supply chains are different. We have these North American internal combustion engine supply chains between the US, Mexico, and Canada that have been built over decades. And their specializations and ecosystems and clusters that all needs to be changed.

Maybe new countries need to be brought in because maybe we don't have all the materials here and so forth. And so that's why it necessarily involves huge government intervention. But that is dependent, again, on the somewhat vulnerable political project of selling this to the taxpayer or to the general public.

MARK BLYTH: And I want to get to that at the end, which is basically we are now living with a regime where none of this is good. It's all a green scam. We've wasted all this money. We need to double down on carbon. That's the only thing that makes sense.

But before we get there, the story you told is one of a-- allowing for the fractionalization and the politics that I just parked for a minute, it's one where there's this thing called the Global North. And the Global North wants to decarbonize, maybe around the margins of this contestation wants to do this. And the Global South will supply under certain terms. But at the same time, that's not quite what's going on because there's no one Global North.

I think the best phrase just for giving me a giggle in the book was the very idea of the EU going for dominance in anything, but the EU actually has this idea of green dominance. So oxymorons apart, could you possibly explain that? And we'll try and link it into this everybody wants lithium. So why do you need to be dominant? What's going on?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Yeah. So [LAUGHS] sorry. It is funny, too. And it gets funnier over time.

When I reread my book for different purposes, I'm like, wow, that guy really told me that they wanted 100% self-sufficiency in lithium by whatever year, and they still haven't opened a new lithium mine for all sorts of reasons. But maybe they'll have one in the next few years. We shall see what the people of Portugal and France and Serbia, et cetera, have to say about it.

But anyway, so there's a couple of things going on here. One is just like, why do Global North countries suddenly want to mine all this stuff? Because for a long time-- and when I first took an economics class in college, I learned about trade and comparative advantage and relative efficiency gains by going where the inputs already exist, rather than duplicating or replicating, let alone aiming for autarky, which is very economically inefficient from a neoclassical.

MARK BLYTH: And this is why we were all taught you shouldn't do industrial policy, and it never works. And you can't pick winners. This gets us to Green dominance.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Oh, definitely, because this is going to change. I mean, the IMF and the Cato Institute, I mean, I'm so sorry for their tears because the IMF keeps publishing reports, Why is everyone doing industrial policy? We told them not to. And yet here we are.

So what's going on? I mean, it's not only that this involves industrial policy and forms of state intervention that was supposed to be out of fashion, but also that it's a sector that really no one wants. I mean, the Global South, societies that are already burdened with these mining sectors are trying to at least develop them into something else.

Why would the Global North want to go in the opposite direction, where you already have some of the high tech and manufacturing stuff and you own some of the IP? Why would you want to go upstream? The whole developmental prospect is downstream.

And yet if you are looking through a security lens-- A-- B, If you're not trusting the smooth, frictionless world is flat version of trade anymore, and C, if the first threat to your primacy since the Nineteen Seventies moment in the form of China, then you might get more promiscuous with your political toolkit. And so this is where we're getting tranches of public financing of taxpayer dollars, just to make it clear, financing mining companies, offsetting their capital costs, directly investing in the R&D that China is masterfully, obviously made huge advances at, financing the car companies, financing the consumers, like offsetting with consumer rebates.

And so using all of these industrial policy or developmental state, we've also used to called it tools to create sectors and supply chains that don't exist domestically. But the crucial thing is it has to start with mining, because if we don't get the raw materials, we're still, quote unquote, "dependent"-- different use of the term than the dependency theorists meant. But anyway, we're still dependent on these pesky Global South people or on our number one enemy, which is China.

MARK BLYTH: And that geopolitical competition between the United States and China. That's why I found the green dominance for the EU to be particularly giggle worthy, because as you say, they're basically taking the most eco-sensitive part of the world and saying, let's have mines. And everyone's saying, no. And they're like, OK, then I guess that's that.

Now, the United States basically has said, we don't like any of this green stuff. It's all the green scam. But at the same time, they're subsidizing mining companies that are mining lithium.

And this is because whether you like it or not, battery storage is a thing. Drones are a thing. Having a battery industry is a thing. So that's going to happen.

But then you've got China who's so far ahead in all of this stuff, and not just in the mining and the refining, the end product. Can anybody really dominate this now? Or does China run off with the whole thing?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: I don't see any near-term prospect of China's-- and I'm going to say monopoly. And I don't mean it to sound malicious. And I don't necessarily mean a technical economic monopoly, but just to say that in the broader sense of monopolizing or having a lot of this in-house, China started this decades ago.

You can periodize anything in any sort of way. The lithium industry is pretty old in China, for example. And there's a whole Sino-Soviet history to the lithium industry there. There's a Cold War history to it.

But more approximately, it was when I was two or three years old that the Chinese government decided concertedly to start working on advanced energy technologies. This is after they were kind of abandoned by the West after the oil crisis proved to not be such a durable thing. And it's like, oh, we're going to go back to oil.

Remember the lithium battery that had been invented at that moment. That's all shelved. And so it's China that actually picks up the baton of human innovation and progress in terms of energy.

They are state, speaking of dependency, that is very dependent on oil. If they were to have an economy that only ran on oil. They have to import. They have coal, but they don't have oil. And so that is a real vulnerability for the Chinese state politically, economically, socially, and otherwise.

And so they got hip to this. They also got hip to the fact that auto sectors are really good things to have. They are not just economically weighty and employ a lot of people and generate a lot of innovation. They also make you a power player on the world stage.

And now, as we all know, China has surpassed-- I mean, it's happened just in the past few years. So it's amazing. Auto exports writ large, not just EVs, all auto exports, they are number one.

And so they want to have a domestic auto industry. But they're like the real niche is this EV thing that the West isn't really doing yet. They're kind of talking about climate change, but they're not really developing it.

And so they moved in, again, for geopolitical market vulnerability reasons in terms of oil, for economic niche reasons. They also had a pollution crisis that we may remember. Those of us who are old enough, there were a lot of news articles about this, like a decade ago, that there was some dissent in Chinese cities over pollution levels.

So this solves a lot of problems for them. And it would solve a lot of problems for anyone that wanted to do it. But not everyone has the state capacity, the regime type, the capital controls and public control of finance, the configuration of entrepreneurship engineering mindset, R&D emphasis, and a lot of savvy and cutthroat competitive firms.

Because we often think, oh, like China's subsidizing. So the firms must get all soft internally. It's cutthroat competition. And they're way more focused on their margins and on eking out everything they can out of their investments than actually these incumbents, Western capitalists are.

MARK BLYTH: So let's try and pull a bunch of this together. I want to start with the desert that you visited, where all these mines are in Chile. And there's folks around there who are concerned that their traditional way of life is going to be upended. But the National government, despite being a left-wing government really wants this to be a successful development move up the ladder project.

Then you get to the Global North, and it's great because we all want to decarbonize. But that's always write with a pen of geopolitics, shall we say. And right at this moment, that means basically China, the US with the EU in the middle getting squeezed. So the EU can have all the green targets at once and we're aiming for dominance, et cetera, but ultimately, they're just bit part players. And they no longer have the industry or the innovation, et cetera, et cetera.

Now the US was trying through the IRA to basically get a leg up on this whole thing. And that for various reasons has now been abandoned. This is what I wanted to end up with, is the carbon future of the US.

But if I'm reading your book and I'm a policymaker in the current administration, I'm going, yeah, it's probably wise because those lithium supply chains, they're all going to go to China. We'll have our own for the stuff that we need to but not to transit, just to make batteries, that we need to keep the military going and all the rest of it. We missed the boat on this stuff, and we're simply not going to catch up with the big IRA 2 or 3 or whatever.

So why don't we just double down on carbon because we are the world's largest carbon exporter? Why don't we just have a hemispheric economy that basically does-- the North and South America, it's a carbon bloc. The rest of the world can go green, if they want.

That's a much diminished view of American power and prominence, but one that I could imagine that some people at least are thinking is the only real route, because you're not going to be able to compete with China on this.

And when China sell and effectively in some cases with solar panels, give away this technology, you're installing hardware in these countries. And it's hardware that, as you noted, basically gets over the current account constraint. Because the biggest problem the Global South has always had is they have to import oil, and it costs dollars.

And you notice that the current administration's trade deals are basically oil deals wrapped in a tariff wrapper. And if you can install a set of technologies, that means you don't have to gas up, that you can replenish these technologies that get better over time. Your global cost of capital falls.

Your bond rates get better. Your current account constraint isn't depressing. And it's very hard to imagine countries outside in the Global South saying no to this.

So China takes the Global South, it goes green. America stays carbon. Europe sits in the middle and gets squeezed. Is that a reasonable representation of what I would get out your book, if I'm thinking about the geopolitics of it?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: That's definitely the current conjuncture. And let's maybe add a little bit on the China-Global South green alliance that is emerging. Of course, there are ungreen elements of it, all the mining that we're talking about.

But writ large Chinese firms-- and I say that advisedly, like private firms, not like the CCP or not the Belt and Road. Chinese firms have been going out to the Global South and not only exporting their solar panels, doing that, that got a bit unpopular. So Global South countries were like, actually you are dumping cheap solar panels on us, which means we're never going to produce our own solar panels.

Some of these are made with our minerals. We're still in this unequal exchange situation. We're going to impose some local content requirements.

And Chinese firms, public and private, are much more willing to play along with that playbook than Western firms are, for a variety of reasons. We could get into there. It's perhaps obvious.

And so now you have private companies in solar and batteries and EVs, not just exporting, but setting up manufacturing in Brazil, in Africa, and in Indonesia, as we already mentioned and Mexico. And now like Global South countries are clamoring for this. But there's been like $200 billion of FDI over the past, I don't know if it's decade, coming from China. Most of that has just been in the past few years.

And this is foreign direct investment in manufacturing and assembly, not just flooding with exports. So for the Global South, putting aside everything we said around the dilemmas and harms of the extractive piece, there's only one pathway in terms of development at all, green development, if you care about that, and your geopolitical alliances. China feels like all of those things, plus more reliable because you don't have a change of turnover in government every few years where you have a fascist and then you have a center leftist and back and forth forever, as in Europe and the US.

And so there's reliability. There's real money, not just these commitments to climate redistribution. And there's employment, the tech transfer stuff. There is some stuff that still is sticking points.

And China is not acting as a saint. They're not just giving stuff out for free. And so there are governments that have said you're not really transferring us the tech. You still own the IP. How can we actually develop?

So that aside, I think, the rest is absolutely true. I mean, EU is almost the most interesting case because it's like the least clear where it's going to go, how it's going to align. It's caught between China, as you said-- and we didn't mention this explicitly, but Europe too is dependent on Chinese FDI.

And I end a section of the book that way, like, can Europe autonomously or with sovereignty or strategic autonomy or whatever the words that especially the French like to use, can they develop on their own without CATL, without CATL? No, I mean, is the answer. And that's not a problem for me. I don't think there's anything wrong with joint ventures with Chinese firms, but nationalists do.

And so, that is then creating more backlash and we get the whole thing. The Hungary case is fascinating to look at there. And then for sure, the US, in terms of federal public policy and to the degree that shapes markets, which is a lot, is doubling down on fossil fuels. And yet there are certain zero-carbon technologies that Republicans like. And there's a whole cultural studies thing to be written about the tech that the one big beautiful bill decided is OK green tech, which are stationary batteries, as you said, geothermal, and nuclear.

MARK BLYTH: And nuclear, particularly thorium.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Yes. They have certain obsessions. And what they call them, which is a term in energy wonk land, but they mean it in a specific way as clean firm power, which they think is reliable.

It also has this kind of-- and you sketch this out a little, like almost fortress. Like, If we were building a bunker, what would we need? You need battery backup. That's better than a diesel generator, actually.

And you need maybe some solar panels. You maybe want the Tesla roof or whatever it is. And like the geothermal borrows from the fracking industry. Nuclear has long been supported by--

MARK BLYTH: But you're still driving an F130--

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Exactly.

MARK BLYTH: --with a 6.9.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Exactly. But in all of this, I will just close by saying that Trump has superseded Biden on the industrial policy stuff because he's not only doing the same things to encourage mining for a new investment in loan facilities and all these types of things. Directly taking these equity shares and mining companies is something that expert historians of this say that the US has not really done.

You'd have to go back to World War II and the War Production Board. They didn't take shares, but they directed output. But regardless, they're taking shares 10%, 15%.

They're guaranteeing off take. They're guaranteeing a price floor that is like extra market profit rates. They're saying they'll buy it from the Pentagon, as you say, with the drones, if the private sector doesn't buy it. They're even like getting into tensions with the downstream buyers that thought they were buying it, like General Motors in the case of lithium mine. So they're using the state.

The question is for what? To what ends? In what interest? And definitely not to transition the US to a solar and wind-powered economy.

MARK BLYTH: Let's close with this. At the end of the book, you talk about a modeling exercise. And you were quite taken with it in the sense that we start with this assumption that the world's going to need billions of tons of this and billions of tons of this and all these different configurations of mines.

And basically, the whole world becomes Western Australia. Half the world becomes Western Australia, and the other half becomes Eastern Australia because it's Western Australia. It's kind of reimagined the whole thing. And clearly that's like dodgy in and of itself.

But that modeling exercise convinced you it doesn't have to be that way. There's a kind of a happy or twist to this. We could get to a better spot. What's the better spot?

THEA RIOFRANCOS: The better spot is less mining than the worst forecasts. The better spot is not no mining in the near term. It's not less mining than we have now, at least not of energy transition minerals, if we want an energy transition.

But if we play out the forecast to the Twenty Thirties, Twenty Fifties, the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, Benchmark Minerals, all these forecasting agencies say, as you said, it's like an inexorable rise in how much we need. And that just always made me scratch my head because I've studied statistics, and I know what a statistical artifact is.

I mean, meaning, that you have certain assumptions. You code data in certain ways, you construct a variable in certain ways, and you come out with an outcome, which doesn't make it wrong. I'm not trying to get too deconstructionist about science, but human subjectivity is shaping the models that we have.

MARK BLYTH: And we do love exponential take offs.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Yes, exactly.

MARK BLYTH: So whenever we see when we're like, whoa--

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Yeah, exactly.

MARK BLYTH: --let's go over there.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Line goes up. It's very exciting. But that line goes up is like all of this environmental harm, geopolitical instability, maybe stuff that's unnecessary because of the substitution risk. So a lot of this modeling doesn't fully even account for the possibility of major technological disruption.

And so there's a lot of obvious validity problems with the modeling. It also just operates under the assumption that the only way to get decarbonization in the societies we have is to substitute out the existing traditional cars for electric vehicles in a kind of one per household type of way. And I had the question when I went to the Atacama Desert for the first time in Twenty Nineteen, this is causing a lot of harm.

And the more EVs, the more Teslas, the more eHummers, the more lithium mines there's going to be that look like this. Is there any way that we could get the per person volumes down such that when we macroscale that, the total socially necessary volume of lithium is less? It's not 0, but it's less.

And I just went back home or wherever I was living in Santiago at the time and typed into Google Scholar, "different transportation modes and different lithium intensities." And I just keyword searched a bunch of stuff, and there was not a single report that looked at how different transportation choices or land use choices or recycling choices or this or that could be combined together to really shape the curve of how much demand there is. And I kept looking for it every year to the point that I got frustrated, had a think tank to work with some industrial ecologists, and I learned about industrial ecology as a thing, mapping and quantifying material flows of any particular material through an economy, and realized, as a result of our study, that we could use rather conventional modeling techniques but have different parameters and ask slightly different questions and come out with, I think it was like 95 different scenarios of lithium demand.

There's four basic ones, but there's so many branching points and different ways we took it that there was such an array. And we're maybe in some high, medium level of demand and in our current, we could get worse. We could all have eHummers in that fantasy world. Or we could really drag down the curve in ways that would be helpful for everything, including addressing the climate crisis more rapidly.

MARK BLYTH: Just one example of that that I read a little while ago was, and you talk about this in the book as well, that it's really about the size of the battery.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: 100%. The size and the efficiency.

MARK BLYTH: Size and the efficiency. And if you basically get a half sodium, half lithium, a lot of the weight disappears because you don't need the same degree of thermal protection. So you can actually have an even higher output and a smaller battery footprint.

So there's lots of ways in which what's being held constant here to get us to the outcome variable, which is number of mines, is actually just buried in this one thing, which is if we get better batteries, a lot of this disappears as a problem. And I take that as hopeful.

I mean, that's if there's any way that human society is going to deal with this stuff-- and I really hope we do-- it is through technology. That's what we do. And it does seem to be the case that when you look at the substitution technologies, what needs to be done, most of it's there. And in fact, when you look at things like batteries, it could get a lot better. There's mild room for optimism.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Yeah. So our study looked at some of the things I mentioned, including what about an e-bus versus an electric vehicle? The battery is bigger, but per person it's less. So at that macro level, you have less demand.

We looked at density stuff that we need anyway for the housing crisis, for the climate crisis, which is like stopping with this exurban sprawl in the US. Recycling, as I mentioned. So lots of different things can affect the volumes.

But I want to get at this point from another study that came out recently from RMI, formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute, that studied some of those things, too, but also chemistries and showed that there's a huge range, depending on the battery chemistry and the efficiency of different levels of development of that chemistry, how much we need. And then, of course, there's the overall size of the battery itself. And so there's a lot that human ingenuity can do.

I'm a big believer in science and innovation. I just think it's shaped by political and economic forces. So we need those forces to prioritize resource efficiency in getting the job done, over prioritizing mining as much as possible.

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MARK BLYTH: That's a great note to leave on.

THEA RIOFRANCOS: Thanks for having me.

MARK BLYTH: Always a pleasure. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And be sure to subscribe to the show while you're at it. We'll be back soon with another episode of The Rhodes Center podcast. Thanks for listening.

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