A true green transition has to involve a massive project of electrifying transportation and scaling-up renewable energy storage.
That undertaking will require a wide array of inputs including copper, cobalt, and, maybe most critically, the lithium needed for the batteries that make both possible.
However, much to the consternation of environmental activists, extracting those necessary metals and minerals from the ground almost inevitably results in unsustainable water use and chemical pollution, harming local biodiversity and communities.
Thea Riofrancos uses lithium as a test case to work through this tension, exploring the communities and politics at the sites where extraction is happening, in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism.
“What does it mean,” Riofrancos asks in the book, “to defend people and the planet from extraction – when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?”
Inequality.org recently spoke with Riofrancos, an associate professor at Providence College, strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, and fellow at the Transnational Institute, about this question and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism is out now from W.W. Norton.
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Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
