The work of the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy at McGill charts the ways that digital platforms and forms of governance mediate social life and influence the possibility of democracy. With the Climate Justice and Technology essay series, we wanted to take an expansive view of the ways the climate crisis–and possibilities for climate justice–hinge on the socio-technical arrangements and forms of power associated with emergent digital technologies and platforms.

The essays assembled in this collection are written by journalists, academics, and advocates who work at the intersection of climate justice and technology. In bringing these authors together we wanted to chart this intersection in three broad thematic registers: (1) the role of digital platforms and media ecosystems in shaping climate journalism, publics, and politics; (2) the impacts of big data infrastructures in sustaining and intensifying extractivism; and (3) the possibilities for harnessing technical arrangements in building just climate futures. 

Climate reporter Geoff Dembicki and media studies scholar Jordan B. Kinder address the role of social media platforms in mediating emerging politics of oil and gas in Canada in each of their essays. Geoff Dembicki investigates Canadian oil and gas producers’ latest tactic of climate delay: publicly commiting to net-zero while continuing extraction and funding climate denial networks, particularly on social media. This approach represents a continuation of the industry history of climate obstruction: “Though the strategy of vying for elite respectability while backing various forms of climate crisis denial appears contradictory, both tactics serve the same end goal: to delay or obstruct climate legislation that could reduce the industry’s profits.” Jordan B. Kinder turns our attention to an emerging frontier in what he has described as the “oil culture wars'': the appliance wars. As both grassroots environmental movements and top-down government measures support an energy transition away from fossil fuels, a reactionary force is cohering on the right to struggle against climate policies. Kinder traces the ways that this form of reactive right wing politics, which aligns with an emerging global “fossil fascism,” relies on online “meme warfare” as well as petro-trolling IRL. 

Scholars and educators Mél Hogan, Théo Lepage-Richer, Melissa Gregg, Sanjana Paul, and Camille Minns articulate the extractive logics underlying artificial intelligence, the technology industry, and its environmental impacts. Mél Hogan and Théo Lepage Richer problematize contemporary debates about AI and sustainability, which typically frame AI’s potential benefits against its environmental costs without addressing tech-capitalism’s mandate of endless growth. AI and its infrastructures rely heavily on many of the environmentally damaging industries and practices that fuel the climate crisis. Melissa Gregg explores the environmental impacts of the on-shoring of silicon chip production in the United States. Gregg’s piece offers a critical account of the way that AI is positioned as a matter of national security. Sanjana Paul and Camille Mins, drawing on their work as environmental educators and practitioners working at the intersection of technology, policy, and social factors, critically examine the concept of the “innovator” in climate tech. Instead of current, ahistorical framings, which rely on purely technical solutions to environmental challenges, they suggest a cultural shift among engineers, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs toward “environmentally just innovation” that puts justice at the center and redefines who “counts” as an innovator. 

Ufuoma Ovienmhada, Joycelyn Longdon, Naolo Charles, and Ingrid Waldron each draw on their environmental justice work to critically consider what roles datafication, digital sensing conservation, and community-driven research can play toward transformative, equitable ends. Ufuoma Ovienmhada’s essay critiques academic work to quantify and propose solutions to “toxic prisons,” which refers to the ways carceral facilities expose people to many environmental hazards. While quantifying the environmental injustices of prisons can help raise public awareness, Ovienmhada warns against the detached datafication of these normative approaches, which can lead to faith in false solutions without getting to root causes of the carceral system’s inhumane conditions. Ovienmhada uses Catherine d’Ignazio’s framework of restorative/transformative data science to chart a path for how to use data and digital tools to address the issue of toxic prisons in a transformative way.

Joycelyn Longdon delves into the promises and perils associated with the increasing presence of AI and digital sensing conservation. Drawing from her doctoral research with a community living on the edge of the Bosomtwe Range Forest Reserve in Ghana, Longdon takes us into the world of Conservation Data Justice, laying out the importance of centering land rights, community research design, and democratic data management in bringing conservation justice to a field increasingly shaped by the imperatives of digital technology. 

Naolo Charles, the founder of the Black Environmental Initiative and Canadian Coalition for Environmental and Climate Justice, reflects on W.E.B. Du Bois’s historical data visualizations and argues for a similarly urgent need today to employ data and information technologies for the benefit of Black and equity-deserving communities around the world. Charles argues that the global history of European colonization has created a “colonial gravity” that limits technological innovation. Instead, Charles argues for social, cultural, and technological shifts that support decentralized innovation, different ways of knowing beyond the colonial “monoculture,” and community-led environmental data projects which prioritize community benefit.

In an interview with environmental racism advocate and scholar Ingrid Waldron, we discuss the importance of interdisciplinary, collective, and community driven research in harnessing academic work toward environmental justice. Waldron reflects on the necessity of a diversity of tactics in addressing environmental racism—policy, advocacy, publications, documentary film, mapping, water testing, and the promise of a new bill to address environmental racism that has made it through the House of Commons and awaits Senate approval. 

This series seeks to bridge research, policy, and advocacy to explore how to navigate climate justice in the digital age. In a time when digital platforms and their socio-technical arrangements play significant roles in many aspects of digital life, it is more urgent than ever for experts across a variety of fields to come together to better understand the barriers, challenges, and opportunities for climate and environmental justice.