Thea Riofrancos will speak on her latest book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (W.W. Norton, September 2025). Lunch will be served at noon; please register by Monday, April 20 at noon to reserve your meal. The program will start at 12:15pm.
Abstract
Dazzling in the bold questions it asks.…An immense contribution."
―Naomi Klein
An in-depth investigation into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires.
Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process?
Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riofrancos is a leading voice on resource extraction. In Extraction, she draws on groundbreaking fieldwork on the global race for lithium. Taking readers from the breathtaking salt flats of Chile’s Atacama Desert, to Nevada’s glorious Silver Peak Range, to the rolling hills of the Barroso Region of Portugal, she reveals the social and environmental costs of “critical minerals.” In Washington, DC, and Brussels, she tracks the escalating geopolitics of green technology supply chains. And she takes stock of new policy paradigms in the Global South, where governments seek to leverage mineral assets to jumpstart green development. In the process, Riofrancos uncovers surprising links across history, from colonial conquest to the 1970s energy crisis, to our still uncertain green future.
While unregulated mining could inflict irreversible harm, Riofrancos offers optimistic proposals to transform the governance of mining while also reducing the sheer volume of global extraction. A rigorous and hopeful call to action, Extraction shares how we can harmonize climate goals with social justice―and set the planet on a course to ecological flourishing.
Speaker
Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute, and a fellow at the Transnational Institute.
Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the energy transition, the global lithium sector, green technologies, social movements, and the Latin American left. These themes are explored in her book, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), peer-reviewed articles in Perspectives on Politics, Cultural Studies, World Politics, and Global Environmental Politics, essays that have appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, n+1, Dissent, Jacobin and NACLA, and in her coauthored book, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019).