U.S. politics currently allow for vanishingly few areas of bipartisan consensus. But one thing government officials of all kinds tend to agree on is the importance of mining. In particular, they seek “transition minerals,” which are vital to the shift away from fossil fuels. These include lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel (often called critical minerals, essential for rechargeable batteries), as well as rare-earth minerals such as yttrium, scandium, and lanthanides (integral components of green infrastructure). Freedom from dirty energy, it would appear, requires doubling down on the decidedly nonrenewable practice of mineral extraction.
The Biden administration devoted billions of dollars to building a domestic supply chain for critical minerals and called for half of all new cars to be electric or hybrid by 2030. Despite its well-documented hostility toward electric vehicles, the Trump administration recently took the unusual step of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in a private company to grow domestic mineral production. Donald Trump, like Joe Biden before him, craves Ukraine’s mineral wealth; the desire for mining access also partly motivated Trump’s threats to annex Greenland and Canada.
The mass deployment of technologies that these minerals make possible—fleets of electric cars; flocks of wind turbines; a cleaner energy grid—may be imperative if our society is to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and thereby avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. Yet the green transition comes at a significant cost. The mining of minerals such as lithium “often leaves parts of the Earth itself uninhabitable,” the political scientist Thea Riofrancos writes in her astute new book, Extraction. As Riofrancos notes, approximately 69 percent of transition minerals—and a whopping 85 percent of lithium reserves—are in or near Indigenous or poor communities across the globe, rendering these groups disproportionately vulnerable to water contamination, displacement, and economic insecurity.
According to a number of recent books, the harmful consequences don’t stop there. The mining of cobalt often entails child labor, brutally described in Siddharth Kara’s 2023 best seller, Cobalt Red. Clashes between powerful political actors pursuing profit and local communities opposed to mines, in places as widespread as Peru and Pakistan, have led to “political upheaval, mayhem, and murder,” as the journalist Vince Beiser writes in his 2024 book, Power Metal.
Beiser describes the green transition as “a paradox” for human civilization: “We must do everything we can to stave off the catastrophes of climate change, but, in doing so, we may create a whole other set of catastrophes.” The reporter Ernest Scheyder poses a similar question in The War Below, also from 2024: What do we value more, the environment “or the lithium beneath it?”
In Extraction, Riofrancos moves well beyond this binary framing, and for this reason hers is by far the most clear-eyed of mining’s many recent chronicles. She takes seriously the costs of the green transition but argues that the paradox is, in fact, the result of false choices and a limited vision. She looks past mining sites to the policy choices of the world’s wealthiest corporate and political actors, located “all the way at the other end of far-flung supply chains.” In doing so, she suggests that a different, fairer, and greener world—one that demands less energy altogether—is possible.
The word extraction, as Riofrancos uses it, has a deliberately negative connotation. In adopting the term, she is pointedly conflating mining (the extraction of metals from the ground) with exploitation (the extraction of profits, often from faraway places and poor people’s labor). Just as Ta-Nehisi Coates used plunder to make clear that racism harms people not just interpersonally but materially, Riofrancos uses extraction to argue that mining is far more than shafts and tunnels and the removal of silver or copper; it is part and parcel of the unequal distribution of wealth, work, and waste.
In Riofrancos’s account, modern mineral mining was extractive from the start. No sooner had Christopher Columbus landed in the New World in 1492 than his men conscripted Indigenous Taíno people to dig up as much gold as they could find. Centuries of pillage followed, as colonial governors—in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia—compelled millions of enslaved or indentured laborers to mine precious metals that enriched European crowns and corporations, setting patterns that persisted, in some form, well past the end of formal colonialism.
Resistance to these practices also has deep roots. Starting in the 1920s and ’30s, a number of Latin American countries began nationalizing their oil and mining sectors. This trend went into hyperdrive in 1960, when Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela founded the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), seeking to wrest control of the oil industry from the handful of U.S. and European companies that enjoyed a near-global monopoly. In the two decades that followed, nationalization was embraced by former colonies across Asia and Latin America, spurring the United States and wealthy European nations to start prioritizing domestic resource extraction.
The “oil shock” kicked off by OPEC also led Exxon to spend millions on finding a fossil-fuel alternative. Out of this research emerged the lithium-ion battery, first deployed at scale in early-2000s China. Over the next generation, Chinese companies began buying control of lithium mines around the world. Partly because of this access, China is now the world’s top exporter of batteries and solar panels (and nearly the top exporter of electric vehicles), and it is reportedly building three-quarters of solar and wind projects globally.
Riofrancos notes the predominance of China in the green transition, but the country is more of a specter than a fully realized subject of her study. Instead, she devotes far more attention to Latin America—and especially to Chile, where more than a third of global lithium reserves are located. After Chile nationalized its copper mines in 1971, U.S. officials backed a violent coup through which General Augusto Pinochet took power. Pinochet promptly reimbursed foreign mining companies, invited in foreign investors, and crushed domestic miners’ unions, moves with long-term ramifications. Today, in northern Chile, mining companies govern in all but name: They build local infrastructure and even provide social services. In exchange, Riofrancos writes, they expect local residents to quietly abide their presence.
Chilean lithium extraction occurs almost entirely in the country’s salt flats, striking desert landscapes that are home to thousands of flamingos and a great many Indigenous communities. The region’s plants, animals, and people bear the greatest environmental costs of the green transition. Mining companies have so exacerbated water scarcity that many Indigenous Chileans have had to give up herding. In China, as Riofrancos reports, the pollution flowing from mineral extraction has led to places where disproportionate rates of disease, including cancer, are the norm. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women in cobalt-mining regions have reported reproductive-health concerns such as miscarriages and birth defects; cobalt mining has also polluted croplands. And in the United States, as Beiser writes in Power Metal, the mining industry is the leading emitter of toxic chemicals and “has sullied the watersheds of almost half of all the rivers in the American West.”
In the face of such extensive despoliation, grassroots opposition has emerged. Widespread demonstrations against lithium mining began in northern Chile in 2007 and spread around the world in the following years. In 2023, Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, who was elected in 2021 following protests against inequality and privatization, announced the creation of a state-owned lithium company and obliged future mining contracts to be “public-private partnerships.” This was part of a global trend: A third of the world’s countries have increased government control of their mining and energy industries since 2019. Even as Trump and China’s Xi Jinping seek to lock down global access to minerals, the inhabitants of mining regions continue to contest foreign dominance.
In 2024, Boric took steps to significantly expand lithium mining in the salt flats. Such a move is an example of what Riofrancos called “resource nationalism”—efforts by countries with abundant resources to increase control over them—in her previous book, Resource Radicals. The policy still countenances harmful mining, but with the intent of benefiting locals, not faraway CEOs or shareholders. African nations are hastening to restrict the export of key metals, hoping to generate domestic jobs and revenue. China, home to the majority of rare-earth-metal mining, recently did the same (possibly in response to the Trump administration’s tariff policies), a move that temporarily closed American auto plants. The United States and European Union are racing to “onshore” mineral production.
An approach that simply transfers the control or profits of mineral mining to a different party is no path out of the climate crisis—especially when that approach might lead to a “resource war.” Yet how to solve the paradox presented by transition minerals? The solutions widely on offer are plainly inadequate. For instance, in Power Metal, Beiser advocates for greater recycling and reuse of electronics, pushing readers to take up biking and “turn down the heating or cooling systems in your home a few degrees”—fine ideas as far as they go, which is not far at all.
Riofrancos writes that she, too, once felt overwhelmed by this conundrum. Upon returning from her first visit to the Chilean salt flats in 2019, she found herself asking: “If climate action requires more extraction, do the ends justify the means?” Yet since then, she has come to reject the premise of the question.
As Riofrancos writes, she was surprised to learn that existing studies of future mineral needs “assumed that the only way to eliminate emissions from transportation”—the second-largest source of carbon emissions—“is to replace individual gas-powered vehicles with individual electric vehicles.” So Riofrancos began working with the Climate & Community Institute to study the subject herself. Together, they posited different worlds—denser cities, less sprawl, a reimagined transportation sector in which many more commuters used mass transit or rode bikes—and learned that such scenarios require significantly less lithium, as much as 92 percent less by 2050. Such findings defy the zero-sum formulations; indeed, Riofrancos argues, a path to zero emissions that depends on electrifying personal vehicles is the slowest path to that goal (albeit one that might not demand larger societal shifts).
She calls for a just transition that not only phases out oil and gas but also can “transform the unequal social system” of the fossil-fuel era. Riofrancos does not detail how to reach this future (charting such a course would be beyond the scope of her project). And she acknowledges that some amount of mining will remain necessary, even as she advocates for a society that demands less extraction overall. But one can envision what some of those changes—challenging as they might be to implement—might look like: denser, public construction to reduce energy demand; direct government funding of electrification; a transition to community control over utilities and industries.
Riofrancos is clear that the solution, in her eyes, cannot just be “governing mining better.” In making such a demand, she echoes the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who calls for reparations—but not as a onetime money transfer. Instead, he seeks an approach to the climate crisis that can “reshape” the global order, not simply “manage its consequences.” Critical minerals are important if the future is to be a livable one, but their costs are very real. In Extraction, Riofrancos not only illustrates those costs; she suggests they are, at least to some extent, avoidable.
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