Technological development is a key feature of ongoing efforts, such as they are, to address the climate crisis. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change puts the matter bluntly: “We cannot address climate change without technology.” Exactly which technologies will turn out to be the most significant is not entirely clear. Those who follow the news on climate tech will be familiar with umbrella terms like carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal, and geoengineering, and perhaps with more specific technologies like direct air capture, for example. Along these lines, some technologies are more proven and more promising than others. Figuring out exactly which technologies will be the most helpful, and doing so quickly, is important.
Unsurprisingly, technological promise prompts excitement in certain corners. Perhaps the most notorious version of such “techno-optimism” is the self-declared one of the libertarian venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, whose “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” poses technology as the ultimate solution to virtually all of our collective problems. “Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it,” he writes. On the real world problem of climate change, Andreessen considers the matter all but settled, forecasting unlimited clean energy for everyone in the technologically-advanced future. This version of techno-optimism is extreme, but to one degree or another such views have real purchase. Against a much more sympathetic interlocutor, for example, the political theorist Alyssa Battistoni writes of “the impression that meaningful decarbonization can take place only through technological innovation achieved via the closed-door haggling of regulators and industry.”

Such an impression is appealing, but wrongheaded. For individuals, it can be easier to believe that technologies will come along to save the day than to believe in the possibility and necessity of transformative climate politics. But perhaps keenest of all to embrace the prospect of technological solutions and to reject climate politics are the companies that make up the multi-trillion dollar oil and gas industry, for whom politics are a threat against which technology might provide protection. In their recent conduct, we can see how when it comes to their climate commitments, fossil fuel companies do not treat technology as simply that, but also as a kind of cynical rhetoric.
This point was on clear display just over a year ago at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in the United Arab Emirates. At COP28, the “Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter” was signed by 50 of the world’s top fossil fuel producing firms. That charter opens with a declaration that can hardly be disagreed with: “Climate change is a collective challenge that requires strong and focused action from producers and consumers of energy, fundamental changes across society and the energy sector, as well as international collaboration, to advance the energy transition and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas.” Even the world’s largest oil and gas companies, it seems, are on board with a view of climate change that requires fundamental changes to the status quo of fossil capitalism.
But are they really? Alongside such grand and laudable statements, the charter signed at COP28 was characterized notably by what it did not say. The signatories eagerly stated their intentions to reduce and ultimately eliminate the emissions associated with their operations, but they did so while making no commitment to significant reduction of fossil fuel production. Fossil fuel production is now, as it has long been, a very profitable business, and it should not be surprising that the corporate beneficiaries of that production would want it to continue. As Battistoni puts it, “Oil and gas companies are among the world’s biggest and most powerful, and for them, fossil fuels are not simply one product among many: they are the product, and they are wildly profitable.”
The decarbonisation charter agreed at COP28 thus saw firms responsible for more than a third of global oil and gas production, including private majors like Exxon and Shell as well as state firms like Saudi Aramco, approaching their climate commitments in contradiction to the approach that they themselves propounded in the very same document. While promising “fundamental change,” the kind of change that the companies actually describe studiously refused to say anything at all about the fundament of their industry: fossil fuels.
Technological promise … enables the oil and gas industry to have its cake and eat it, too.
If reduced emissions were not to come from reduced production of fossil fuels, where will they come from? In brief: technology. While continuing to produce and profit from fossil fuels, these companies imply that they would reduce their emissions to net-zero by technological means: “Renewables, low carbon fuels, carbon capture and sequestration, low-emission hydrogen, energy storage, and/or other technologies under development, including negative emissions technologies such as direct air capture.” This is how fossil firms deploy technology as rhetoric. Technological promise (again, many of these technologies are unproven) enables the oil and gas industry to have its cake and eat it, too, adopting a climate-conscious pose while continuing to cling tightly to products responsible for more than 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In this way, oil and gas companies can disavow the politics of climate change as they surreptitiously engage in such politics for their own ends. There is no need to wonder whether our industry impedes climate progress, they imply, because we are committed to “fundamental change” and we will deliver the technologies that will, in turn, bring such change. But the change that fossil corporations envision is definitionally not fundamental, because it does not address the fundaments of their business. We might accordingly determine that, if not quite purveyors of climate techno-optimism, fossil firms have shown themselves all too willing to engage in techno-cynicism: the deployment of technology as rhetoric designed precisely to undercut the cause of climate action while simultaneously claiming its mantle.
Ultimately, as Battistoni insists, “challenging the power of the fossil fuel industry is the sine qua non of climate politics.” It might be added that climate politics, and not technology, is the sine qua non of ecological justice and sustainability. That is, all the technical innovation in the world won’t deliver a perpetually livable planet in the absence of a concomitant politics. Technology is a tool, not a panacea. It won’t deliver us from the messiness of climate politics, and we shouldn’t permit the fossil fuel industry to convince us otherwise.
Indeed, a year on from COP28 and in the immediate aftermath of COP29, held again in an authoritarian petrostate (Baku, Azerbaijan) the necessity of climate politics and the ongoing inadequacy of a predominantly technological approach to climate crisis management could hardly be more evident. Before, during, and after the meeting in Baku, the news was chaotic. Ahead of the conference, the leading development was the one about all the parties that had decided not to attend the conference at all. Several big corporate players in finance announced ahead of the meeting that they would be staying away, and perhaps returning for a more business-oriented COP in 2025. Leaders of the United States, China, India, and the EU stayed away, too. During the meeting, defections continued, as when France controversially withdrew its lead negotiator in a swirl of geopolitical sparring. As a result, COP29 was defined by the relatively high participation rate of the fossil fuel industry.

And what do we have to show for it? By most accounts, not much. The standout achievement of the meeting in Baku was climate finance deal, which survived by the skin of its proverbial teeth, promising $300 billion from rich countries to poor ones (which suffer disproportionately the effects of climate change). As for the fundamental change to which fossil fuel companies are keen to pay lip service, COP29 saw more of the same, although industrial interests were far from alone in their reticence. Headlines coming out of the conference described the unwillingness of oil-producing states to mention anything about fossil fuels in agreements, apparently reneging on promises they had made previously at COP28.
By alluding to efforts at technological management of the climate crisis, these interests will be able to pose themselves as concerned and well-meaning actors, all the while benefitting from the permission that political developments seem to be giving them for fossil business-as-usual.
Of course, the key background informing all of this was the presidential election held in the United States just weeks before the conference. Virtually all of the news from Baku mentioned the fact that the American President Trump has promised to pull the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter out of existing climate agreements while promoting a policy of “drill, baby, drill.” Some politicians in other countries, like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, have rejoiced and suggested their thrill at the direction of travel in the United States. Fossil fuel production and associated emitting has, in fact, only continued to rise in recent years, but these political developments suggest that the fossil floodgates are on the verge of being thrown wide open. In this context, the idea that fossil fuel firms would enthusiastically undertake efforts to make “fundamental change,” as they declared they were doing at COP28, strains credulity to a breaking point.
Given these developments, we should expect that techno-cynicism will continue to be deployed by fossil fuel interests. By alluding to efforts at technological management of the climate crisis, these interests will be able to pose themselves as concerned and well-meaning actors, all the while benefitting from the permission that political developments seem to be giving them for fossil business-as-usual. The least we can do is to see that posturing for what it is: a rhetorical ploy telling us that things are getting better while they plainly are not.
Mack Penner is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary and “highly qualified personnel” on the Canadian Carbon Dioxide Removal Initiative, which is funded by the Government of Canada through Environment and Climate Change Canada (déclaration en français: ce projet a été réalisé avec l’appui financier du gouvernement du Canada).
Feature Image: “UNCTAD at COP28 – 2 December 2023 (53370737210)” by UNCTAD is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.


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