Do Your Own Research: How China Wins the Resource War w/ Thea Riofrancos

**Richard** (0:07)
We are in the middle of a global scramble for critical minerals. We need them for the green transition, for the batteries and solar panels and wind turbines that will allow us to finally get off oil. We need them for the AI boom, to power the chatbots and agents which are coming for your job. And we need them for military applications, to be able to bomb using the high-tech planes and sophisticated gadgets that define a modern military and uphold America's global military dominance. If it still has that. And so there's a large coalition of people, from military planners to people invested in software companies and chip companies like Nvidia, through to environmentalists who all need mining to accelerate in the next decade or so. Is that good? Is that bad? How would we know?
And what are the consequences of that acceleration? Well, my guest this week is the perfect person to ask. Thea Riofrancos is the author of Extraction, The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, and she has spent a decade in the spaces that mining transforms. The giant Chilean salt flats, the mining towns, and on the protest lines fighting back against giant mining companies. We get a focus on the geopolitics of it all, the China-U.S. conflict, what this means for progressive movements around the world, who often, in Latin America at least, have relied to some extent on the booming commodities markets to finance exactly the social programs that have risen so many out of poverty. This conversation reaches back into the Alfred McCoy conversation, particularly around the coup in Chile. It reaches, of course, into the Elon Musk episode we did with Quinn Slebotian and Ben Tarnov, where similar dynamics are playing out between BYD and Tesla. And, of course, it refers back to the Elon Musk episode that we did with Quinn Slebotian and Ben Tarnov.
Rare Earths, military applications, AI boom, it's all the same story. And if you want to explore that full map at any time, do your own research about what you find there. It's the name of the show, after all. And maybe even report back into the comments what you find, then you are very welcome. Go into the description of this video, and there will be a link.
Thea Riofrancos, welcome to your own research.

**Thea Riofrancos** (2:40)
Great to be here.

**Richard** (2:41)
We are talking in the kind of the midst of several enormous historical processes. And we're going to try making sense of several different sort of planet transforming movements through this conversation.
One of those is the rise of China and the relationship between China and the US as the outgoing hegemony. One of those is the green energy transition and the struggle against climate change. One of those is the increasing militarisation of the world. One of those is the AI boom.
And at the centre of all of these three things, or four things or five things, however many I just mentioned, is one element, lithium. And so it seems like lithium is becoming one of the most important objects in the world, one of the most important elements in the world. And that forces us to ask the question, is lithium the new oil?

**Thea Riofrancos** (3:37)
This is like a phrase that I feel like I've seen emblazoned on so many different headlines alongside, you know, it's the white gold, you know, the, so, you know, we get all of these analogies and disanalogies that try to, I think, help us make sense of where we are in historical time. You know, they are cliches, but they're grasping for something, which is how do we understand the materiality and the kind of energy substrate and raw material substrate of the emerging world order in relation to what might seem like the outgoing world order? Should we be so lucky if fossil capitalism is kind of on its way out? You know, it kind of reminds me of the late stage capitalism. You know, again, if we should only be so lucky, but we'll see how things unfold over the decades to come. But, you know, I think there are some obvious and pedantic things I could say here about why lithium is not oil. You know, oil is a primary energy source. Of course, it's also an input in petrochemical and a variety of other products. But, you know, primarily we think of it as an energy source. Lithium is not an energy source. It's an element that is useful in batteries that store primary energy sources. So they fill different kind of, you know, on an engineering level, we might say, even like different functions in the energy system.
But that's not a very interesting thing to say, I don't think. And maybe a more interesting way to think about the connection between oil and lithium and to also do so in a way that situates us in historical time, is to note, as my book does, that the origins of the lithium battery are actually in the kind of 1970s oil crisis. And when Exxon, along with other oil companies, but Exxon was really a pioneer in this respect, we might say, was worried about the end of the oil age, you know, back in, again, 1973, when we had dramatic increases in oil prices that had a lot of reasons, you know, why that happened. But a major one was the formation of OPEC in the prior decade, the renegotiation of oil contracts between oil exporters and the Seven Sister Oil Companies, the nationalization of oil in many oil-producing jurisdiction, all led intentionally so to upward pressure on prices. In that moment, then, of course, we had the response of Western consumers, the pain at the pump, all of these concerns that the age of oil might be ending. They also kind of, you know, overlapped with concerns about peak oil, you know, are we running out of oil? So all of this was happening. This was kind of the vibe of the 1970s, which again can feel familiar in a lot of ways. And Exxon, you know, being, you know, a strategic profit-oriented firm that wants to hedge against various risks, thought, okay, we need to diversify. We need to think about post-oil technologies and advanced energy technologies. And one of those was the idea of energy storage that could store non-oil energy. And so it was in the kind of Exxon labs in one of their complexes in New Jersey, where the very first stage of what became the development of the lithium battery took place. Of course, as soon as oil prices stabilized and the consumer panic abated, Exxon abandoned its interest in post-oil, seeing oil as actually a much more long-term arena of profit.