We discuss specific demands socialists should make of the Biden administration with regard to climate change, and the administration’s potential responsiveness, or “push ability” as Riofrancos calls it. More generally, we consider the differences between the U.S.’s two major political parties on climate change: how large and significant are these differences? Riofrancos also describes her research on the extraction of lithium, a key component of rechargeable batteries, and the political challenges this extraction poses for the left.
Thea Riofrancos is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and has served as visiting researcher in universities in Chile and Ecuador. She is the author of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador (Duke University Press, 2020), and co-author of A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (Verso Books, 2019). Riofrancos is also an organizer with the Ecosocialist Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA.
Even after Trump, the Republican Party will remain a powerful institutional base for the far right in the U.S. We cannot take on the...
We discuss the question of police unions in the broader context of the diverging fortunes of public and private sector unions in the U.S.,...
This podcast began during the summer with the premise that the mass death, disease and economic misery caused by the pandemic are themselves political...