Thea Riofrancos’s Extraction tells the story of how a rare earth mineral became the focus of a worldwide battle over the future of green energy and, by extension, capitalism.
A worker holds lithium hydroxide at the Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM) chemical plant in Antofagasta, Chile, 2024. (Cristobal Olivares / Bloomberg)
In April 2021, the sheriff of Humboldt County in Nevada asked Mark Pfeifle for advice on how to contain protests in his jurisdiction. Pfeifle was the right man to ask: A former adviser to George W. Bush and a longtime right-wing political operator, Pfeifle had played a key role in discrediting the protesters blocking construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016. Through his firm Off the Record Strategies, he was able to portray the protesters as “out-of-state agitators” intent on using violence and intimidation to stop the project. Humboldt County officials were worried that the protests at a local mine could escalate into a Standing Rock–style “occupation.” The police, the FBI, and private security contractors had already begun surveilling the protesters, including a group of Native American activists called the People of Red Mountain. The authorities hoped Pfeifle could help them prevent an Indigenous-led movement from spoiling another resource bonanza.
Northwestern Nevada, it turns out, has lots and lots of lithium. The Thacker Pass mine in Humboldt County sits on what may be one of the largest lithium reserves in the world: an estimated 14.3 million metric tons spread across 18,000 acres of the McDermitt Caldera. The mine’s owners—the Canadian-based firm Lithium Americas and General Motors—stand to earn nearly $6 billion a year once the mine is up and running. As president, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden had backed the project, providing federal loans and fast-tracked permits as part of a bipartisan effort to expand the domestic production of “critical minerals“—minerals considered essential for national security as the world shifts, haltingly and unevenly, away from fossil fuels. Lithium is a critical component of the batteries that power EVs and store the electricity generated by renewables; it is abundant but difficult to extract profitably. The demand for lithium is expected to grow more than 700 percent by 2050 under the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios compiled by the International Energy Agency, driven largely by exploding EV sales. And so a race is on to control the supply.
Places like Humboldt County stand to reap some of the rewards of this race, but they will also bear the costs. Critics of the Thacker Pass mine, whose first construction phase is scheduled to be completed in 2027, say the project will suck up vast amounts of water in the parched region, generate unprecedented volumes of toxic mine tailings, and endanger wildlife. Among those expected to pay the highest price are ranchers, who rely on fresh water for grazing, as well as members of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. The latter’s tribal council has signed an agreement with Lithium Americas–GM that requires the company to hire local workers and build an 8,000-square-foot community center for the tribe. But five other tribal councils, as well as the People of Red Mountain, oppose the mine, which they say will further degrade land contaminated by decades of mercury mining and nuclear testing. The mine also threatens their sacred places, including the site of an 1865 massacre of Paiute women, children, and elders by the US Army. Many regard the mine in this context as continuous with a long, violent history of colonization.
Whether one sees it as a source of American energy independence or a neocolonial travesty, the Thacker Pass mine distills the core dilemmas of the global energy transition. If reducing emissions and reversing global warming means using low-carbon energy sources to “electrify everything,” it will require scouring the earth for minerals, like lithium, used to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Eighty-five percent of the world’s commercially viable lithium resources and reserves are on or near Indigenous lands. Many of these lands—from Brazil’s Jequitinhonha Valley to Aboriginal territories in Western Australia—are extraordinarily biodiverse; all are considered beautiful by those who inhabit them. Yet mining in these areas will transform them forever.
“Every single supply chain of green technologies and infrastructures involves mining—and every kind of mining since the dawn of capitalism has brought with it boom-and-bust cycles, social conflicts, and environmental harm,” writes the political scientist Thea Riofrancos in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. What harms are worth enduring to hasten the death of the fossil-fuel era? Who should endure them? And more importantly, who decides? Such questions are at the heart of Extraction—questions that Riofrancos, embracing the complexity of an issue too often framed in all-or-nothing terms, provides an indispensable inquiry into with her book.
Ultimately, Riofrancos suggests that resolving extraction’s dilemmas will require including more people in decisions about how the world’s critical minerals are used. This is easier said than done, as she acknowledges, but the broader point cannot be made forcefully enough: The people most affected by the green energy transition deserve a much greater say in what the goals of this transition are.
Writing principally as an ethnographer, Riofrancos tracks lithium mining across a global “extractive frontier” connecting the People of Red Mountain to people in Portugal, China, and beyond. But she begins in Chile. The South American nation supplies a quarter of all lithium on the global market and contains a third of all reserves, most of which repose in the salar de Atacama, the vast salt flats in Chile’s north. The salar’s Indigenous population faces threats that would be familiar to the People of Red Mountain. To access lithium, miners pump subsurface water into iridescent brine pools, some the size of Manhattan, and then let it evaporate, leaving behind lithium carbonate—a process that ends up depleting the water used by locals for drinking and farming. (Up to 2 million liters of water must vaporize to produce one metric ton of lithium.) To minimize lithium mining’s harms while maximizing its public benefits, Chile’s socialist president Gabriel Boric has sought to revive a program of “resource nationalism”—restoring the nation’s patrimonio to the nation’s people by placing its mineral wealth under state control.
There is a decades-long history of resource nationalism in Chile and across Latin America. After ascending to the Chilean presidency in 1970, socialist Salvador Allende swiftly moved to nationalize the copper industry, promising to restore public control—and, importantly, dignity—to a sector that had been plundered by foreign capital. (Before nationalization, 80 percent of Chile’s copper production was controlled by US firms.) The United States cried thief, backing the 1973 coup that deposed Allende and installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet as a dictator there. The Pinochet regime transformed Chile into a laboratory for neoliberal governance, flinging open the doors to foreign capital, shattering unions, and imposing austerity—a pattern that would be repeated across the developing world. Leaving little doubt as to neoliberalism’s compatibility with a heavy-handed state, Pinochet also expanded government control of the country’s mining sector, decreeing lithium specifically to be a “strategic state-owned resource,” while granting mining concessions to two multinational firms.
Since protests against austerity rocked Chile in 2019, Chilean society has been renegotiating the terms of this uneasy neoliberal contract. The state’s approach to mining has been at the center of this conflict, and grassroots struggles against extraction—including Indigenous-led blockades of mining roads in the salar—have reinvigorated calls to nationalize the country’s mineral resources. Efforts to do so by rewriting the Constitution failed, but in 2023 the Boric administration unveiled a National Lithium Strategy that would establish a state-owned lithium company; exclude 30 percent of the salt flats from mining; ensure that Indigenous groups are consulted about mining projects; and use mining revenues for development initiatives. Refusing to take a step urged by many activists—to expropriate private mining firms—Boric announced that the state-owned lithium company would partner with the multinational firms of the existing duopoly. The goal is to use the global lithium rush to enrich Chile; the promised reward—still unseen—is that mining revenues will allow Chile to develop a more advanced, “knowledge-based” economy employing Chileans in higher-skilled jobs, though critics say the strategy only deepens the country’s dependence on extraction.
Chile is not alone. Indeed, Riofrancos’s most important insight is that the transition to renewables has become a worldwide struggle for “green dominance”—control over the resources that make moving from fossil fuels to renewables possible. China, which already dominates the global battery-supply chain, looms largest in this struggle, but it is hardly the only country using the green energy transition to advance national interests. Much of the world’s critical minerals are located in Latin America and Africa. After decades of being told how to run their economies by foreign creditors, governments in these regions are using the fact that decarbonization goals in the West depend on mineral resources in the developing world to lessen their dependence on foreign capital. Ghana, Namibia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe have banned some lithium exports, while Bolivia and Mexico have nationalized their lithium industries to varying degrees. There has also been talk of a “lithium OPEC.”
This causes US leaders to break into a cold sweat, gripped by flashbacks of the 1970s, when Arab states cut off the oil spigot to protest US support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. To avoid once again having its “neck stretched over the fence” by bumptious foreign governments, the United States is developing a resource nationalism of its own. Biden championed measures to “onshore” and “friendshore” EV and renewable-energy supply chains, and he imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels to protect domestic manufacturers from supercheap Chinese imports. Trump has doubled down on this protectionist stance and given it a hyper-nationalist flavor, using the tariff threat and industrial policy to promote American extractive industries, both green and not so green. In August, after declaring “Hot Drill Summer” in celebration of new federal oil leases, Trump’s Department of Energy announced nearly $1 billion in new funding for critical minerals projects to “ensure AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE,” as a DOE tweet put it.
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Some scholars suggest that such bellicose nationalism is a symptom of a broader deglobalization of the world economy, perhaps even the emergence of a “post-neoliberal” order. There are reasons to be skeptical of this thesis, however. As Riofrancos makes clear, what we usually think of as the neoliberal program—free trade, deregulation, austerity—has always involved government meddling. And while the rise of protectionism suggests the waning of free trade orthodoxy, capital’s global reach remains undiminished: One of the firms that control lithium mining in Chile, Albemarle, also owns the United States’ only active lithium mine as well as production facilities across China. For developing states fleeced by neoliberal trade deals, resource nationalism may be a way to recuperate wealth and autonomy, Riofrancos argues. But the influence of multinational banks and mining corporations makes “ecosocialism in one country” infeasible for now. Meanwhile, the pursuit of green dominance in North America and Europe has expanded the power of capital, as governments adopt a strategy of “de-risking”: nurturing green industry by using public funds to assume the risks of investment while permitting the private sector to reap the rewards. Given these facts, a wave of resource nationalism seems unlikely to sign the death warrant for globalized capitalism, which is simply mutating as states face mounting pressures to decarbonize.
What Riofrancos calls “green capitalism” is mostly a way for incumbent powers—multinational banks and corporations, as well as the states that headquarter them—to continue to accumulate wealth as economies shift from fossil fuels, by turning “sustainability from an ethical sensibility to a valuable asset.” The idea that lithium mining in the United States represents a “cleaner, greener alternative” to extraction elsewhere is mostly a marketing tactic, she argues—a way to whip up support for domestic extraction, rather than a commitment to environmental stewardship. She doubts that onshoring can reverse the injustices caused by neocolonial looting or prevent similar injustices at home. “Expanding lithium mining in the southwestern United States, with its intertwined legacies of Indigenous dispossession, toxic mining, and nuclear testing, does not repair harm in Chile, nor does it advance the cause of global justice,” Riofrancos writes.
And so the thorny question remains: As Riofrancos puts it, “What does it mean to defend people and the planet from extraction—when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?” More concretely: Where should one build a lithium mine? It is a credit to Riofrancos that this is posed as an open question. She is clear that those directly affected by mining should have a say in whether and how it happens. But “opposition to mining is now coded as NIMBY,” she observes, and even some anti-mining activists in Nevada worry that blocking a mine there could simply cause mining firms to set up shop somewhere else. For Riofrancos, this dilemma highlights the limitations of negotiating extraction’s trade-offs mine by mine, nation by nation. After all, extraction does not begin at the mine: It begins in legislatures and corporate offices in Santiago, Carson City, Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and beyond. To match extraction’s global scope, Riofrancos envisions “Indigenous land defenders and urban transit users” uniting to demand justice up and down the lithium supply chain—an evocative image of transnational solidarity that other scholars and activists will have to flesh out.
As an official in Chile’s environment ministry tells Riofrancos, the sustainability of Chile’s lithium industry ultimately depends on what the lithium is used for. “It isn’t a left-wing project to provide raw materials for [individual passenger] EVs,” he observes. His point is that one way to make lithium mining less harmful would be to use less lithium. Riofrancos agrees: Rather than replace every existing car with one powered by a lithium battery, she suggests that we trade cars for electric buses and trains, sprawling suburbs for denser, more walkable cities. This is by now a familiar “ecosocialist” proposal, sketched more fully in Riofrancos’s other work. The more radical idea is this: Achieving a just energy transition may mean dramatically widening the space of the demos. Perhaps all people who stand to gain or lose something from lithium mining, wherever they live, should have a say in how this shared patrimonio is used.
Casey A. WilliamsCasey A. Williams is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, Institute for Advanced Study, at the University of Tokyo. His writing on climate, energy and labor has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and elsewhere.