The Problem of Green Capitalism

The political scientist Thea Riofrancos’s new book, Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, takes readers across three continents to explore the landscapes, social movements, public policies, geopolitical conflicts, and corporate strategies that are shaping the extractive frontiers of the energy transition. With a focus on lithium, she draws, in particular, on over a decade of rigorous research on Latin America’s mining and oil sectors. In doing so, she situates the energy transition from fossil fuels to electrification in the context of the long history of colonization, decolonization, the 1970s energy crisis, the 2008 financial crisis, and escalating US-China tensions. By visiting these extractive frontiers, she argues quite persuasively that energy production is a portal connecting the past and possible future of global capitalism.

The Nation spoke with Riofrancos about the promises and perils of “green capitalism,” the idea of “resource nationalism,” China’s rise to the world’s leader in renewable energy, and the future of the Green New Deal. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins: What makes “green capitalism” supposedly green?

Thea Riofrancos: Green capitalism is a contradiction in terms. It simultaneously names a structural impossibility and a real, empirical phenomena we need to analyze, if only to critique it with more precision. It is a contradiction in terms because, as Alyssa Battistoni argues in Free Gifts, capitalism cannot simply internalize its ecological externalities; nonhuman nature is at once the precondition of all production and systematically unvalued—a reality gleaned in the unpaid appropriation of nature’s bounty alongside the pollution of the earth’s vital systems. These facts should make us suspicious of proponents of “sustainable capitalism” or “green growth.”

While it is true that capitalism will never green itself, it is also true that specific capitalists invest in technologies and infrastructures that are labeled as green. Some of these are purely speculative, like geoengineering; many others are of questionable near-term utility, such as direct air capture; still others are pure greenwashing, like carbon offsets. Yet we also observe record-breaking global deployments of solar panels and lithium batteries, the workhorses of generating and storing renewable energy. For this reason, I am not fully satisfied with treating green capitalism as the false consciousness of technocrats or executives. Green capitalism comprises a set of sectors that exist because some set of powerful entities—firms, financiers, governments, experts—sees them as a means of mitigation or adaptation. It also constitutes a political project, a state-capital alignment that frames market-led innovation and corporate-friendly policies as the solution to smoothly managing the climate crisis without disturbing the operations of capitalism that are so obviously its root cause.

With these definitions in mind, we can ask better questions and sharpen our critiques. What is, for example, the relationship between green and fossil capitalists? Why have fractions of capital we might expect to exist in zero-sum competition with one another instead allied in politics and interlocked in investments? If, as many on the left charge, green capitalism subordinates real solutions to the bottom line, why are profits in these sectors often too low to attract investor interest? This fact helps explain green capitalism’s deep dependency on supportive public policies and opens a set of inquiries regarding the variegated toolkit of green industrial policy. And perhaps the most difficult question for left-wing climate experts and organizers in the United States is whether and how to relate to green capitalists at present, in light of their rapidly declining economic and political heft as fossil fascism resurges.

DSJ: Is the notion of “green capitalism,” then, a kind of bait-and-switch insofar as the technologies and infrastructures needed to extract necessary minerals to transition from fossil fuels to electrification are themselves injurious to and exploitative of the earth?

TR: Unlike carbon offsets or sucking carbon out of the air, lithium batteries are a proven technology that perform the essential task of storing energy, facilitating the use of intermittent wind and solar, and enabling off-grid use such as electric mobility. But the fact that these batteries play an important part in decarbonizing the transportation and energy sectors does not absolve the ecological and social harms perpetrated across their sprawling supply chains, harms that are especially glaring along their proliferating extractive frontiers.

Insofar as it exists, the “green” economy is a set of infrastructures and technologies that trace their origins to mines so vast in spatial footprint, and so intermeshed with systems of energy and water, logistics and finance, that extractivism can only be grasped as a planetary phenomenon. According to mainstream estimates, well over 300 new mines will need to be constructed in less than a decade to supply inputs for batteries alone—this doesn’t include the iron ore that becomes steel for the body of the electric vehicle, let alone the raw materials needed for solar panels, wind turbines, or massive expansions in transmission lines.

Large-scale mines imply irreversible transformations of local landscapes, biodiversity loss, the overconsumption and contamination of water supplies, and carbon emissions released on-site as well as from shipping ores and metals around the world. The sheer land use can displace entire communities and threaten the viability of preexisting livelihoods, such as agriculture. And all of this is mediated by exclusionary and notoriously violent forms of state and corporate power. Regardless of their formal rights, communities are rarely substantively consulted, let alone asked for their consent before their lives are upended by a mega-mine. Worse still, more deaths, physical assaults, and other grave human rights violations are linked to mining than any other sector—and mining for the “energy transition” is no exception. Adding insult to injury, empirical evidence shows that those most impacted by the predations of extraction are rarely the beneficiaries of the goods and services at the other end of the supply chain. This is a class, and colonial, injustice concealed in the most hidden abode of capitalism.

Amid this violent inequality, affected communities are not passive victims: Despite the bodily risks, vigorous and combative protest is increasingly common, especially in Latin America, and movements of the marginalized and peripheralized deploy sophisticated repertories of direct action and legal action, often with support from aligned lawyers and experts, as well as transnational networks and NGOs. Protests have become a major concern for the industry, which has devised all manner of tactics to preempt or quell local pushback. But these corporate social responsibility tactics can themselves backfire and spark more contention.

DSJ: You question the assumption that the only way to eliminate emissions from transportation is to replace individual gas-powered vehicles with individual electric vehicles—what is called “net-zero emissions,” which, practically speaking, is the idea that successful climate action entails a Tesla in every garage. Based on your studies, what is wrong with this idea?

TR: The first problem with this idea is a massive coordination dilemma: there are nearly 300 million cars on American roads, approximately 1.5 percent of which are currently electric. While a larger proportion (around 8 percent) of new car purchases are electric, simply adding new EVs to the mix without dealing with the hundreds of millions of polluting cars is a woefully insufficient approach to reducing emissions from the most emitting sector in the country. To incentivize people already struggling with cost of living to trade in their most valuable assets and purchase a new one, much more muscular public policies are required than have been contemplated by mainstream policymakers. Taking a cue from China, where over half of new car sales are electric, this means not only subsidizing consumers to go electric, but actively making traditional cars less attractive (by for example subjecting them to additional registration fees) and fostering cutthroat competition between automakers to produce cheaper EVs with longer battery ranges. But even with better policies to induce EV adoption, it would be impossible in a society as car saturated as ours to meet climate goals without what transportation experts call “mode shift”: encouraging more people to leave cars at home, or not purchase them at all, and instead use mass transit systems, cycle, or walk. Unlike EVs, these modes don’t require purchasing an expensive new asset to reduce the carbon footprint of mobility, and investing in expansions to bus and rail systems, or making streetscapes safer for pedestrians and cyclists, carries myriad co-benefits (the US has more fatalities related to car accidents than any other country on earth). And, as our research at the Climate and Community Institute shows, reducing the role of EVs in plans to decarbonize transportation would also mean much less lithium mining compared to the most alarming forecasts.

DSJ: In what sense is the argument that you are making about green capital connected to a larger story about the history of colonization, decolonization, and the rise of the New International Economic Order and the energy crisis of the 1970s? Why is Chile so central to this history?

TR: Before I started the research for Extraction, I was aware of the centrality of extraction to the economic structure of colonialism, and the enduring neocolonial logic of extractive sectors: the violent dispossession that enables them, and the peripheral position of most resource-reliant countries in the world system. But there is much more to the story than this. I learned, for example, that in the early 20th century Latin America was at the vanguard of efforts to nationalize resource sectors. These moves picked up pace in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and contributed to a broader assertiveness on the part of Third World governments, including the establishment of OPEC in 1960 and, a decade later, calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO).

Although OPEC has strayed far from its anti-colonial roots, and the NIEO remains an unfulfilled ambition, nationalizations and producer coordination indelibly altered the global economy—including by provoking fierce Western backlash. In response to the threat of Global South economic sovereignty, the US, UK, and Europe deployed a range of tactics, from military coups to trade agreements, that reinforced neocolonial domination alongside the opening up of new resource frontiers within the Global North. This latter was justified as means of reducing the West’s “dependence” on formerly colonized, and now independent and unruly, countries—an ironic turn of phrase given the salience of “dependency theory” to mean the opposite in Latin America. In practice, this meant expanding oil extraction in the UK’s North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska. Today, these discussions and policies are re-ascendent, as we can observe in the push to onshore mining and supply chains in the face of China’s threat to Western primacy.

In other words, we can trace global affairs across the 20th century to the present using the lens of resources: where they are extracted, who owns them, who benefits from them, and who bears the socio-ecological burden.

And Chile is exemplary of this arc. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL, for its Spanish acronym), a UN body established in 1948 that was a site for developing structural economics and dependency theory, is headquartered in Santiago; in 1972, under Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the city also hosted the third meeting of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD)—the institutional author of the NIEO, which was refined at that very convening.

That’s Chile’s role in the institutional spaces of an ascendent Third World solidarity on the global stage. Domestically, the process of “Chileanizing” the country’s copper mines began in the 1960s, but it was Allende that fully expropriated these lucrative assets. He charged the American corporations a retroactive tax on extraordinary profits that canceled out any compensation. He did so in the name of “dignity”—in the sense of reclaiming Chile’s national sovereignty, and in the sense of the material and even spiritual benefits that state-owned copper would confer.

These aspirations were an affront to US power in the hemisphere. Akin to the Iranian legislature’s 1951 nationalization of oil, and the rise of Mohammad Mossadegh, a strong proponent of nationalization, to the office of the prime minister, it was a model that had to be crushed lest it be emulated elsewhere. In each case, the solution was the same: a coup to depose the head of state. Curiously, however, Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal and avowedly neoliberal regime did not dismantle nationalization. While he implemented various measures to attract private capital to Chile’s copper sector, he not only retained control of the mines seized under Allende but established the state-owned Codelco to manage them (copper revenues helped fund his military). This offers a clue into the unusual dynamics of oil and mining in market economies: whether due to their “strategic” status, their fiscal weight, or their land-use implications, these sectors are often domains of more pronounced state intervention. That does not mean that the state is acting in anything like the public interest, or that extractive firms don’t capture regulation—but it does open them up to unique forms of direct political contestation.

DSJ: What is your political judgment of “resource nationalism” especially as it has been embraced by many leftist governments, especially in Latin America?

TR: Resource nationalism is one of the most consistently recurring forms the politics of extraction has taken, most markedly in Latin America but also elsewhere in the Global South. The underlying logic is simple, and compelling: extraction was how Latin America was violently incorporated into the world system, and after independence persisted as a neocolonial enclave disarticulated from the rest of the economy and structured by unequal exchange. Foreign mining and oil companies ruled over workers and communities as private fiefdoms and intervened in national politics. Political sovereignty is thus incomplete without economic sovereignty, and the way to achieve the latter is to establish national resource ownership. In both its original instantiation (c. 1920s–1970s), its revival during the “Pink Tide” (c. 2000–14) and under contemporary left governments (e.g., Mexico and Chile), resource nationalism has been articulated from below (labor unions and the militant base of left parties) and above (state and party officials, and the managerial class of state-owned corporations). In its classical form, it involves expropriation; more recently, what passes for “nationalization” is often a forced renegotiation of contracts in which the state gains majority equity ownership or forms a joint venture with a foreign multinational. Despite this moderation, an artifact of trade rules and investor dispute mechanisms that increase the risks of property seizure, today’s nationalist rhetoric and vision is no less rousing.

This compelling logic is, however, deceptively straightforward. In practice, resource nationalism raises as many questions as it answers. Who is the collective subject? In theory “the people,” defined in national identity terms, own the resources, with the state acting on their behalf. But given the historic role of organized labor in demanding nationalization, the people could also be glossed as the workers; indeed, after Allende nationalized copper, there were heated debates between mineworkers, who wanted a greater role in governance, and state-appointed managers. Marxism as a theory or a politics is not dispositive here: There are long-standing debates in socialist praxis over whether “workers owning the means of production” means workers controlling operations at a specific factory or mine, or whether that itself is a parochialism, and we should instead embrace broader forms of collective ownership and democratic planning.

Competing understandings of “the people” also surface amid political resistance to mining: Who has democratic authority to decide on extractive projects, the most directly affected or a government elected by a national majority? In this genre of conflict, there is generally a deeper divide at stake: Should the goal be resource ownership, or transition to a post-extractivist economy? From the anti-extractivist perspective, the main risk of resource nationalism is not capital flight or state mismanagement but the reproduction of a neocolonial, anti-ecological extractive model of development.

DSJ: Given that lithium mining disrupts local ecosystems and ignites protests, why not embrace a position like Andreas Malm’s which would call for violent acts of sabotage in the name of resisting extractions?

TR: I am not opposed to Malm’s position. It’s important to emphasize, as he does in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, that the violence in question is property destruction, not bodily harm. With that key distinction in mind, his understanding of sabotage is capacious, ranging from the titular act to slashing the tires of SUVs, to physical blockades to forestall fossil fuel infrastructure. This latter tactic has become increasingly common in anti-mining resistance, especially in Latin America. It’s worth noting that it’s usually not the first course of action. The research on anti-extractive protest shows that communities generally engage in militant protest after attempting to participate in venues such as public hearings or consultations, and their concerns are not taken seriously or they are outright silenced or excluded—or, more dramatically, when they attempt to peacefully protect their land or water, and are met with criminalization or worse.

The communities most affected by mining are often marginalized, and considered sacrificable by corporations and the state; their only leverage lies in their spatial proximity to the physical operations of extractive capital. Without the threat of militancy, it is hard to imagine how else they can intervene in mining policy, whether to stop projects that will irreparably harm their environment or water supply, or to negotiate for better contractual terms.

DSJ: How do you interpret China’s dominance in the global green energy sector—batteries, solar panels, electronic vehicles, etc.?

TR: China is green capitalism’s clearest success story. But that truism appears as a paradox: How could a country ruled by a Communist Party be the exemplar of capitalist innovation? Of course, ever since the reforms inaugurated under Deng Xiaoping in the late ’70s and ’80s, China has had a mixed economy. But the question still stands, and underscores my point above about green capitalism as fundamentally dependent on the state and supportive policies—and no other state has grasped this as clearly, nor had the requisite administrative capacity to achieve it, than China. China’s renewable energy prowess can be traced to the Deng era, when the CCP embraced the development of cutting-edge energy technologies, or more recently to 2001, when EVs were first included in a five-year plan. Regardless of the periodization, the pivot to batteries, solar, and wind was overdetermined: China relies on imported oil and gas, so renewable energy has strategic benefits; the West had been slow to develop green sectors, leaving them available as economic niches for China’s take-off development; pollution clogged China’s cities and industrial hubs, fomenting discontent that threatened the CCP’s legitimacy; in the case of batteries specifically, Chinese entrepreneurs could learn—and then surpass— South Korean and Japanese manufacturing techniques.

These explanatory factors also reveal that confronting climate change is rarely the prime motivation for green industrial policy. This remains true even as Trump’s fossil fascism has given an opening for the Chinese government to claim the mantle of global climate leadership, and as China makes impressive progress in reducing emissions (particularly in the electricity sector). This is less a question of hidden or ulterior motives than the simple reality that in most political contexts in the world, climate advocates are not powerful enough to push a green transition without broader alliances. In the US under Biden, one key alliance was with national security hawks: i.e., green industrial policy as a mode of competing with China, what I’ve referred to elsewhere as the “security-sustainability nexus” for its geoeconomic orientation to green tech supply chains as battlefields in the New Cold War. Of course, from a Green New Deal or ecosocialist perspective, one could imagine other more progressive or even emancipatory ways to broaden the climate coalition.

DSJ: You coauthored in 2019 the manifesto,A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Talk of a Green New Deal has fallen by the wayside a bit, perhaps due to how far away it seems in light of the Trump presidency. How, though, do some of the ideas of your new book connect to your earlier call for a Green New Deal?

TR: I conducted my first stint of fieldwork for Extraction at the same time as cowriting A Planet to Win. And it was my involvement in just transition and energy democracy campaigns, and then the movement for a Green New Deal, that inspired me to connect the dots between our efforts to expand publicly owned renewable energy in the US and lithium extraction in Chile. As I learned more about the politics of lithium in Chile, I began to think about how lithium nationalism, or movements against lithium mining, complicate the notion that countries like Chile will simply accept the most extractive, least value added, most harmful niches of the global supply chain for green technologies. But especially in the heady moment of Green New Deal organizing, I was not satisfied by critique alone. I took on the challenge of grappling with a real political problem. I grasped for ways to align the urgent need for an energy transition in the US, with the demands of Indigenous peoples, workers, and left movements in Chile, and elsewhere along the world’s resource frontiers. I had a hypothesis that part of the problem was the centrality of individual passenger EVs to decarbonizing transportation.

These seemed like the most resource-intensive and unequal way to proceed, and in global terms also amounted to the Global North and China gobbling up a lot of the world’s nonrenewable minerals while people living amid extraction not only couldn’t afford an EV but were denied basic services and infrastructure. In A Planet to Win, we stated this as a hypothesis, but had no way to prove it. Exactly four years after I first stepped foot in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the source of 20 percent of the world’s lithium, I worked with a team of researchers at the Climate and Community Institute to publish a report that provided empirical support to the hunch that how we design “green” sectors has huge implications for their resource requirements, and thus for environmental harm, social contention, and geopolitics.

These lessons are no less true today, even if they occur in negative form. Our report was titled “More Mobility, Less Mining”—to show that we could have both more electric and active mobility, whether e-buses or e-bikes, walking or commuter rail, without the alarming volumes of mining necessary for a Tesla in every garage. Today Trump is ramping up critical minerals mining, including lithium, while dismantling supportive policies for carbon-free transportation. More mining, but less mobility. That’s a cute critique. But the political challenge remains how to adapt the spirit of the Green New Deal for a moment in which climate activism has demobilized, fossil fascism reigns supreme, and Democrats are not only out of power but deeply feckless.