Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism

Will green capitalism save us from the climate crisis? “Clean” technologies and renewable energy and certainly growing sites of capitalist investment, with government policies playing a key role in making these sectors profitable. But the supply chains that produce the technologies pose vexing dilemmas for the energy transition. These dilemmas are most dramatic at the extractive frontiers of green capitalism: where the natural resources needed to manufacture electric vehicles and build windmills are extracted. In this talk, I will unpack these challenges through the lens of lithium, a so-called ‘critical mineral’ essential for its role in decarbonizing one of the most polluting sectors: transportation.

Thea Riofrancos is Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College. She is author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 2025) and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke, 2020), co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso, 2019), and contributor to publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, Dissent, and Jacobin.

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