This interview was conducted in English

Find this interview and its explanatory dossier on our website.

Duration: 1h52

Thea Riofrancos is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and a Strategic Co-Director of the Climate and Community Institute. Her research focuses on resource extraction, climate change, the global lithium sector, green technologies, and the Latin American left. She is the author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism and Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, and the coauthor of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal.

In our conversation, Thea shows how renewable and fossil extractivism is not merely a localized operation of resource removal, but an enduring political and economic regime. She highlights the growing fusion of climate goals, industrial imperatives, and geopolitical strategies. It marks a new phase of green capitalism that displaces the failures of market-based mechanisms with tensions of its own.

This interview reframes contemporary resource politics within the long arc of extractive geoeconomics, from the oil crisis to Biden’s green policies and Trump 2.0.

CHAPTERS:

00:00:00 – Introduction to Extractivism, green and brown

00:05:58 - (Chap.1) What is extractivism?

00:15:27 - (Chap.2) Green and brown mining

00:24:30 - (Chap.3) The Security-Sustainability nexus

00:40:10 - (Chap.4) Green Capitalism

01:03:31 - (Chap.5) History of Geoeconomics

01:15:25 - (Chap.6) Ecomodernism vs Degrowth

01:23:39 - (Chap.7) Trumps’s Energy Emergency

01:28:28 - (Chap.8) Insecurity and unsustainability under Trump 2.0

01:33:10 - (Chap.9) Critical Mineral Deals from Ukraine to Rwanda

01:40:20 - (Chap.10) From Opportunistic Greening to Fossil Fascism

Interviewed by Marius Bickhardt

Directed by Sam Jones

Editing by Thierry Corroyer

Produced by Vladimir Gurewich

Dossier : Marius Bickhardt

Visual Reasearch : Sophie Liner

Music by Laz Lo, Eeryskies, Damiens Simons

Voice : Amanda Bay

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

To support us, follow and us on social medias:

Youtube ‪@Diagrammes‬

Instagram : @diagram.me.s

Bluesky : @diagrammes.bsky.social

#TheaRiofrancos #Extractivism #Climate #GreenCapitalism #Diagrammes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.