Tag Archives: technological solutionism

Will Technology Save Us?

This post was initially written in French, La technologie nous sauvera-t-elle ?

I feel as though I keep hearing, more and more often, that climate change is above all a problem of innovation. Emissions continue to rise, targets keep slipping out of reach, yet we fill our collective imagination with carbon-capture machines, artificial intelligences supposedly able to optimize the transition, and even technologies designed to alter the climate itself. There is nothing absurd about such confidence in itself, and technology will very likely help. But it becomes politically suspect when it serves mainly to postpone difficult questions, beginning with this one: what are we willing to change, here and now, in the way we produce, consume, and govern? The literature on “mitigation deterrence” helps us understand how the promise of a future intervention can legitimize delaying present efforts. Nor is this mechanism unique to climate change. The COVID pandemic, it seems to me, offered a strikingly similar scene, in which fascination with the biomedical response sometimes pushed into the background the social, institutional, and political tools that the strongest research nevertheless regarded as indispensable.
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