Tech and the climate crisis

As we leave 2024, we're reckoning with both the fever pitch of AI hype and annual average air temperatures blowing past the critical threshold of +1.5 degrees Celsius which was set by the Paris Agreement1. With both of these happening simultaneously, there's been a lot of concern over the carbon footprint of tech in general and AI specifically:

Thankfully, I've taken so long to write this post that other people have already put those numbers into perspective, showing that they are essentially a distraction:

But I think two things have been missing from the other posts, which are 1) why the tech industry continues to be conflicted on the subject of sustainability, and 2) what we really should be doing about the climate crisis, which are two things I plan to address in this post.

Background: Why is the tech industry conflicted about the climate crisis?

One of the few positive things about Silicon Valley's influence on the tech industry is the slightly-higher-than-average interest in sustainability. As linked above, I see a lot of people actively participating in discussions and blogs on the subject of sustainability, which is a good thing!

However, I also see a lot of people in tech becoming too focused on ineffective solutions to the climate crisis such as improving software efficiency2. Improving software efficiency is fully compatible with the status quo of extractive capitalism that is causing the crisis in the first place. Thanks to induced demand, more efficient software or AI may even result in more usage, which has been happening throughout computing history under Moore's Law. Since tech workers' paychecks are often dependent on the status quo continuing, it's difficult to remain skeptical when faced with comforting lies.

Let's say you work for an American tech company and you're interested in sustainability. You spend eight hours making a high-traffic website more efficient, which in a typical case3 could save a little under 3 tons of CO2 per year. Nice! You pat yourself on the back.

During those eight hours, you leave one of 145 million over-sized American homes, get into one of 1.47 billion cars, drive on a few of the 40 million miles of roads that replaced carbon-absorbing forests, sit in your office building cooled by one of 1.5 billion AC units, eat one serving of the 400 million tons of meat consumed annually (which also replaces carbon-absorbing forests). Maybe you say hi to your CEO in the hallway, who commutes in by private jet twice a week. Maybe you personally work remotely, don't fly, eat vegan, etc. but even in 2025 that makes you a rarity. Society at large makes each of those actions difficult; like swimming upstream. Eight hours pass, and the world pumps another 35 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Business as usual continues.

To me, all these tech companies and workers who talk about how they are "innovative" or "disruptive" are anything but that, since they all carefully color inside the lines of extractive capitalism. Try to take one step over the line into helping people or the planet instead of the bottom line and you'll see what your employer really thinks about innovation and disruption.

Maybe a few decades ago, we would have time for a slow, comfortable transition to net-zero carbon emissions, where those little acts of sustainability would be welcome. But today, effective solutions for the climate crisis are increasingly incompatible with the status quo. So I think it's time to challenge the tech industry to focus on things that are actually impactful.

How to critique a movement

Before diving further, I want to make it clear that I don't want to incite horizontal hostility. Horizontal hostility "refers to the phenomenon where individuals or groups... direct criticism, judgment, or antagonism toward one another instead of uniting to challenge systemic oppression". Horizontal hostility is so dangerous to movements that the FBI used it to undermine civil rights movements as part of COINTELPRO to divide and conquer them.

The FBI specifically developed tactics intended to heighten tension and hostility between various factions in the black power movement, for example between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. For instance, the FBI sent a fake letter to the US Organization exposing a supposed Black Panther plot to murder the head of the US Organization, Ron Karenga. They then intensified this by spreading falsely attributed cartoons in the black communities pitting the Black Panther Party against the US Organization. This resulted in numerous deaths [of] San Diego Black Panther Party members...

At the same time though, movements live and die by their strategy, and fact-based constructive criticism is the best way to develop a strategy, not name-calling and infighting. So I hope this post comes across as more of the former than the latter!

What is most effective then?

There are countless researchers trying to identify and quantify which climate solutions are most impactful. This is a highly complex subject that is rife for manipulation by businesses that don't want to be cast in a negative light.

This isn't even a conspiracy theory; big businesses have been caught successfully undermining the discourse surrounding the climate crisis in ways that benefits them, from Exxon "emphasizing the uncertainty" of their own climate research in 1989 to the meat industry removing mentions of plant-based diets from the IPCC report in 2023, and countless other examples in between. According to leaked documents, many major companies even hire public relations (PR) firms who have developed complex playbooks for destroying movements, including undermining the Nestle boycott, Tobacco regulation, various kinds of environmental movements, and even the movement to boycott Shell for supporting apartheid in South Africa.

These widespread PR campaigns have captured lots of well-meaning people in their gravity well of misinformation, leading people to get stuck on solutions like zero waste (but not zero consumption), paper/metal straws, recycling, electric cars, and energy efficiency (on the micro scale). Companies who push these "demand-side" solutions are participating in greenwashing since many major sources of pollution are systemic. But it's also incorrect to say there's nothing we can do individually. Most Americans drastically underestimate the carbon impact of many things they can control, like 94% not realizing eating a vegan diet is one of the most impactful things you can do personally.

So what is most effective? I hope you see now that it's complicated. While researching for this post, I've started graduating from "not knowing what I don't know" to "knowing what I don't know" about climate science. It's not as simple as adding and subtracting carbon emissions and sinks. Thankfully, climate scientists have worked hard to produce lists of solutions that are designed for communicating with the general public. I've included two well-respected lists of solutions below:

  • The IPCC's list of most cost-effective solutions
    • I recommend studying this diagram for several minutes since it's very dense but also very informative. Note that the bar chart size is heavily dependent on how each bar is grouped, so try mentally regrouping each category to see how the conclusion changes.
    • Remember that the IPCC's solutions are considered to be more conservative, and countries have already been caught manipulating the wording to deprioritize things like plant-based diets and climate financing.
  • Project Drawdown's table of solutions
    • I think this list is a bit more honest, but some more radical solutions are still missing.
    • This list also depends a lot on grouping. For example, the effectiveness of "Reduced Food Waste" depends a lot on the assumption that most food is not plant-based and thus very expensive to waste.

Looking at the IPCC's list, it's easy to see that paying a bunch of expensive tech workers to shave a few percentage points off of 0.6% of global emissions5 is just not that cost effective compared to alternative options such as switching to carbon-free energy sources, reducing the "conversion of natural ecosystems" (largely for meat production) or shifting to plant-based diets.

Looking at Project Drawdown's list, there's a lot of focus on project-based solutions rather than policy-based solutions. For example, there's an "Efficient Aviation" solution which proposes spending trillions on 13% more efficient fuel, but there's no "Ban Excessive Air Travel" solution which is basically free.

Both lists emphasize "synergies" or "co-benefits", where the climate solution also has social benefits such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals which include things like the elimination of poverty, hunger, and inequality, which can make some solutions more compelling.

Overall, the hard work of quantifying the solutions has been done already. As Project Drawdown says, "Viable climate solutions have been like orchestra members lacking a conductor." We just have to educate ourselves and mobilize rather than getting caught up in the greenwashing and corporate PR.

Noticing a pattern

You may start to notice a pattern with the way I'm discussing effective solutions for the climate crisis. When you combine facts like tech workers supporting the status quo, nefarious PR firms, and the IPCC caving to businesses, these are signs pointing to a need for degrowth.

Degrowth is an economic theory where gross domestic product (GDP) isn't used as the main way to measure success, since infinite growth on a finite planet is not possible. "Degrowth is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow."

I originally hestitated to use the term degrowth in this post since it is quite a broad term, but perhaps a broad term is best for such a broad topic. To me, degrowth acknowledges the reality that the climate crisis exists in a broad social and political context, not just a scientific context. An apolitical climate movement is an ineffective movement. No amount of scary-looking graphs will dismantle a system of power that is as powerful and as entrenched as extractive, exploitative capitalism.

One weakness of the concept of degrowth in my opinion is that it's a nice end goal but it's missing some important steps along the way. Step one is essentially "take power away from the powerful" which already seems impossible.

The way I look at it, having that clear end goal is step zero. It's a shared lens through which we can all look at the world, from guiding the discourse, to avoiding misinformation, and to assessing the effectiveness of climate solutions. The climate crisis cannot be averted without collective action, and we cannot act collectively unless we realize we have the same goals.

On that note, get involved with your local community! Open your favorite search engine and type something like "mutual aid groups near me". Hope to see you there!