For businesses, investors and entrepreneurs, the climate crisis is frequently framed as an opportunity as well as a threat. According to the World Bank, climate-related sectors are “primed for growth”, with “the potential to unlock billions of dollars’ worth of investment opportunities”.[1] Central to this thesis is the role of radical “green” technologies in combatting global warming, whether it’s sucking carbon from the atmosphere, injecting aerosols into the stratosphere[2] or refreezing the Arctic with wind-powered pumps.[3] Should any of these prove viable, the gains would be astronomical – not only for investors, but for the entire human race. Tech could quite literally save us.
It’s a tantalising prospect: a technocratic-messianic prophesy. But is it realistic?
The first consideration is time. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Alex Rao and colleagues point to a “disturbing reality”: regardless of their potential, new energy innovations “might not be deployable until it’s too late”.[4] Most technologies, they note, take decades to come to the market. In the past, clean technologies have taken between 19 and 30 years to achieve widespread use, according to the UK thinktank Chatham House and the patent-search firm CambridgeIP. And though “powerful new market forces are at work”, including government limits on emissions and green finance schemes, “technology deployment always takes time”.
A second consideration concerns the technologies themselves. Duncan McLaren and Nils Markusson, from Lancaster Environment Centre, have charted the “co-evolution” of technological promises and changing climate-change targets, showing how this process ultimately undermines environmental goals. Each new technology, they argue, “not only competes with existing ideas (in research funding and in markets as much as in cost-optimizing models), but also downplays any sense of urgency”.[5] In other words, we are seduced by the promise of a “quick fix” just around the corner, which serves only to delay meaningful action. This points to a larger, more systemic problem with technocratic approaches (to climate change as well as other issues, such as international development[6]) – that of depoliticisation.
Depoliticisation is a process through which political issues are translated into mere technical or environmental ones. Famine, for example, is not simply a matter of too many people and too little food, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen famously showed; rather, it is about the politics of food distribution. Presenting famine as an environmental problem with technical solutions thus depoliticises it. The same is true for climate change, which is to say that a focus on technological solutions obscures the role of governments (and other political actors) in coordinating (or failing to coordinate) adequate responses. More worryingly, depoliticisation can be used as a “smokescreen” for corruption and other self-serving behaviour by political elites, at the expense of those most vulnerable.
If tech isn’t the answer, what is?* The key is social innovation. “Cutting carbon use depends on changing social norms and behaviour as much as technology”, notes Geoff Mulgan, former head of the UK government’s strategy unit. What’s needed, he continues, is “a different approach to innovation, in which investment in new technology is matched by investment in new ways of organising society”.[7] The logic is simple: “the scale of change needed…[cannot be achieved]…by top-down government policy or grassroots action” alone; rather, society must be a partner in this process. Social innovation is about mobilising “mass creativity”, whether it’s energy co-ops in South Korea,[8] “freecycling” websites in Britain[9] or citizen action in Ethiopia.[10] As Mulgan concludes, “[c]hange must be accelerated, not just in the organisation of our physical systems, but also in the way in which we live and relate to each other.”
For businesses, investors and entrepreneurs, this is the opportunity.
*We can put this another way: technology is not the problem. A case in point: we grow enough food to feed 10 billion people, and still can’t end world hunger.[11] Without cultural, social and political transformation, our efforts to “end” the climate crisis face a similar fate.
[1] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/opinion/2016/01/13/climate-change-is-a-threat---and-an-opportunity---for-the-private-sector
[2] https://www.srmgi.org/what-is-srm/
[3] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2016EF000410
[4] https://hbr.org/2010/01/can-technology-really-save-us-from-climate-change
[5] McClaren, D. & Markusson, N. 2020. The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets. Nature Climate Change 10: 392-397.
[6] https://anthropology.stanford.edu/publications/book/anti-politics-machine-development-depoliticization-and-bureaucratic-power-lesotho
[7] https://theconversation.com/technology-will-not-save-us-from-climate-change-but-imagining-new-forms-of-society-will-124364
[8] http://english.seoul.go.kr/creating-sharing-energy-energy-welfare-communities/
https://energytransition.org/2018/09/south-koreas-grassroots-energy-transition/
[9] https://www.freecycle.org/
https://www.ilovefreegle.org/
[10] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ethiopia-plants-over-350-million-trees-day-setting-new-world-record
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/29/ethiopia-plants-250m-trees-in-a-day-to-help-tackle-climate-crisis
[11] Seufert, V., Ramankutty, N. and Foley, J. A. 2012. Comparing the yields of organic and conventional Agriculture. Nature, doi:10.1038/nature11069