If you were to ask Trump, why do you care so much about critical minerals?

One answer is he just likes resource extraction.

Like I think he quite literally just likes minerals dominance, as he calls it.

But if he had to name the sectors that this is all supposed to support, it would be AI and military tech.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Thea Rio Frankos.

Thea is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and the strategic co-director of the Climate and Community Institute. She's also the author of a new book, Extraction, The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. Now, Thea, of course, has been on the show in the past, but I think it's been like a couple of years since she was on the show.

And in part, that's because she was working on this book. Now, Thea, of course, has been on the show in the past, but I think it's been like a couple

years since she was on the show, and in part that's because she was working on this book. And so, you know, I was waiting for it to come out to have her back on the show so we could talk about it. And so this is a fantastic conversation. I feel like we're at this interesting moment with notions of a green transition, what that is going to look like, both nationally

and internationally, because it looks like in the West, things are largely slowing down in

that transition to a greener economy. But in other parts of the world, things are still chugging

along, and a number of countries are even seeing that getting off of fossil

fuels, especially imported fossil fuels, is going to give them more leverage, make it so that they

are not kind of subject to the whims of international oil prices. And so solar panels and renewable

energy are looking appealing, not so much because of how they reduce emissions, but because it

frees them from that dependence on the global oil system, needing to have U.S. dollars to buy it,

and all that kind of stuff. So that's all to say that we go in many different directions in this

conversation, because there's so much interesting stuff in Thea's work that I wanted to explore. So we look at

the kind of extractive element of the green transition, you know, where all these minerals come from

that are needed for the batteries and the solar panels and the things like that that go into

whatever this green transition is going to be, how it is actually going to to look and how there are kind of difficulties

in a moment of transition in terms of what that means and, you know, how different industries

...