Meditations on Tech-Fueled Visions for Canada’s “Green” Future
BY HELEN A. HAYES
Canadians across the political spectrum want action on climate change. They’re also increasingly unconvinced that individual action is adequate to address environmental destruction. As a result, activists have taken up this call in protests for “systems change.” Systems change involves understanding challenges that need to be addressed, committing to new visions for the future, and identifying points of intervention that can build our capacity to make lasting differences in often entrenched social, political, or economic structures. We also see political parties, leaders across the political spectrum, economic experts, and companies and corporations increasingly mobilising the language of climate action.
For example, the Liberals have introduced a national adaptation strategy to build “climate-resilient communities;” hundreds of Canadian economists have penned an open letter supporting carbon pricing; the federal Conservatives – under Erin O’Toole – committed to achieving the Paris Climate Commitment “without the government taxing working Canadians and driving jobs and investment out of the country;” and major Canadian companies, including RBC, Indigo Books, Air Canada, Canada Goose, and Telus have committed to net-zero targets.
The problem here is that many of these actors are deeply influenced by (financially or otherwise) and embedded in the fossil fuel industry, and thus the extent to which these claims connect to meaningful or timely climate action is a matter of debate. This is characteristic of “climate delayism,” a discourse which accepts the existence of climate change, and supposedly supports action to address it, but instead of actively working to deal with the issue, seeks to create a debate about what should be done, who is responsible, and how we should allocate costs and benefits.
For example, a recent announcement about the “Bill Gates-backed Calgary start-up,” Geologic AI, has been framed as a step forward in climate action and the “green transition.” But a closer consideration of the technologies involved, and the gap between the enthusiastic reception of Geologic AI and the delayed and deferred deployment and uptake of other, already established technologies, suggests it can be better understood as a form of climate delayism. This critical reading of the reporting on this start-up draws attention to the difficulty in making AI-based “environmental” tech systems functional – let alone ensuring that they are widely adopted. Without immense financial support (à la Bill Gates), industry buy-in, and consensus on need and effectiveness from government, continued hope for and reliance on technological systems alone to solve climate issues will certainly stifle timely action.
In this context, rather than the obstacles we face with outright climate change denial, meaningful climate action is obstructed by narratives and ideologies that still promote change, but that focus – or re-direct – that messaging onto technological “solutions” or social and economic effects of climate policy. Cenovus, TC Energy, Suncor, Enbridge, Imperial Oil, and Canadian Natural dominate the fossil fuel industry in Canada and guide public discourse about Canadian energy, advancing claims of “net-zero” by highlighting “green initiatives” and “clean oil and gas” that can supposedly work towards environmental transition while sustaining Canadian jobs and strengthening the economy.
We also see newer strategies undertaken by oil and gas (O&G) industry coalitions like the Pathways Alliance, that accept the basic tenets of climate change and the need for decarbonization, but position oil and gas as central to a path of “innovation.” Coupled with Canada’s increasing focus on funding green tech development and more general social and economic policies like the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, that heavily invests in technocratic governance solutions, the link between energy transition and technology has not only become ontologically embedded in how many Canadians view energy transition, but also seems to heavily support and further the O&G agenda. In fact, the Canadian government has provided 14 times more fossil fuel finance than support for renewables, and currently has 40 funding options and benefits for what they call “green” and “clean” tech,” many of which are targeted specifically to O&G industry organizations.
A study from Carleton University’s Re.Climate shows that this strategy seems to be having an impact, with many Canadians indicating strong support for energy transition, including through investments in “green tech,” while simultaneously viewing the continued production of oil and gas as a necessary part of Canada’s energy future. In fact, a recent poll of Canadian adults found that most support further investments in technological innovations, and that, when it comes to climate, “technology beats tax.” This is unsurprising – advocacy for green tech has been strong within the oil and gas community. And their lobbying works.
Clearly, preventing climate disaster requires us to grapple with the way oil has saturated social and political life. But, increasingly, it also requires grappling with how oil has saturated visions of environmental transition – and transformation, for that matter. Energy transition involves material relations, and typically favours some interests, actors, and stakeholders at the expense of others; it does not, however, necessarily involve altering dominant institutions, practices and social relations, as calls for energy transformation do. While some authors have applied the term “transformation” to narrow forms of change or solely to describe technological aspects of change, transformation is commonly used to refer to shifts characterized as more radical, comprehensive, unpredictable, and emergent. In this way, energy transitions and transformations operate on different social, political, and cultural levels, with varying intensities. But increasingly, both avenues for change have begun to operationalize, centre, and rely on technological “innovation” as central to their goals.
Why is this the case? When did alternative energy futures become embroiled in language, discourses, and goals that are touted by the fossil industry? Of course, the oil and gas lobby wields an outsized influence over climate policy, and the rise of social media and petroturfing campaigns aids it. But we’ve now gotten to the point where this influence is beginning to constrain our frameworks for activism, the ideas we have to address climate change, and the language we use to discuss it.
This is a cycle of influence, where energy alternatives have gone from the “domain of counter culture to corporate mainstay, from communes to communication strategies, from love-ins to logos,” and, at some point within this cycle, have been altered to fit petro-agendas without us realising. The persistent alignment with and reliance upon existing institutions and instruments of social and economic power has made us unable to break from the political economies and social orders of conventional energy systems, and importantly, conventional understandings of what energy transition or transformations are and can be.
In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant observes and analyzes ways in which our optimistic attachments to certain systems generate the conditions of our own suffering. For Berlant, cruel optimism persists because the ordinary conditions of living in the present
wear us down to such an extent that we continue to “ride the wave of the system of attachment” we are used to, even when that system fails us and prevents us from flourishing.
Green technology has crystallized the enduring hope for easy technological solutions to mitigate climate disaster. It’s been hailed as “a magic wand,” able to rescue the world from its dramatic environmental failures. But is this really the case? Does technological innovation in the oil sands serve energy transition or transformation, neither, or both? Or, is it possible that technological innovation in the oil patch is neither an example of transition nor transformation, but rather a function of cruel optimism that keeps us bound by the same fundamental forces that have always constrained us? Put simply, has green tech, and the industry funding behind it, muddied our understanding of what energy transitions or transformations really are?
Drawing on Berlant, Skye Richards refers to our binding attachment to oil, and to the systems sustained by it, as “crude optimism.” Like cruel optimism, crude optimism exists when we remain attached to the neoliberal values and good life privileges that are (re)produced and reinforced by extractive logics. Understood this way, we might begin to consider dominant narratives of energy transition, and even more radical views on energy transformation, as enabling an energy impasse – a “holding station that doesn’t hold securely,” where one keeps moving, but moves paradoxically, in the same space.
The energy impasse is a space of stickiness and friction that reinforces the status quo by foreclosing imaginative vistas of environmental change. And, because oil is so deeply stuck to and embedded within social, economic, and political structures and practices – what Huber (2013) refers to as capitalism’s “lifeblood” – it seems to have made alternatives difficult to imagine. These social and political impediments are often sidelined in climate conversations; instead, without considering the appeal of and demand for narratives of climate delay, the liberal climate order remains vulnerable to challenge from those who don’t shy away from giving climate action a compelling set of personal, political, and technological stakes.
Moving away from these industry- and government-backed tech solutions for energy transition, and the concentrated patterns of control that underpin them raises important questions around how current environmental activism might need to change. This is not to say that activism and scholarship in conversation with current visions of energy transition or transformation are unproductive or un-useful for thinking through the affective, social, and ecological change necessary to get to a world after oil. In fact, quite the opposite: they provide us with a broader awareness of climate issues, they’ve certainly changed the political tide on climate change in this country, and they’ve done important work to empower Indigenous voices in climate debates.
But, to wholly divest from oil, rather than merely reducing our dependence on it, may require new forms of utopian thinking and feeling. To move beyond the energy impasse, to anticipate the potential of moving outside established structures of advocacy, and current views on green tech-based transition or transformation, requires that we constantly grapple with the dominant cultural, political, and economic forces behind our visions for energy futures.
After all, we must move away from oil in order to protect the future of the planet; but to do so requires us, as Naomi Klein writes, to change everything.
Helen Hayes is a Doctoral Candidate in Communication Studies at McGill University where she studies the regulation and governance of Artificial Intelligence and Climate. Her research is supported by both FRQSC (2020-2025) and SSHRC (2022-2024) Doctoral Fellowship Awards. Prior to pursuing her doctoral degree, Helen completed an Honours Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto (Victoria College, 2018) and a Master’s degree in Communication Studies at McGill University (2020). As a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy, Helen leads the Centre’s AI Policy work. She can be contacted at helen.hayes@mcgill.ca or on Twitter at @helen__hayes.]
