They Say Climate Tech Will Save Us, but Who Will Save Us from Climate Tech?

Carbon capture startups tout breakthroughs in clean air, electric vehicles promise guilt-free mobility, and AI-driven systems claim to optimize everything.

The optics are powerful: innovation, urgency, and hope, all wrapped up in the idea of progress. But beneath this high-tech sheen is a sobering contradiction. While climate tech races ahead, the planet’s health continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate.

Wildfires now rage across continents. Ocean temperatures are reaching record highs. Extreme heatwaves are becoming more deadly. And global greenhouse gas emissions—despite years of pledges and protocols—continue to rise.

For all its promise, climate tech has yet to turn the tide. The uncomfortable truth is that innovation is not inherently transformative unless wielded with the right intent, policies, and accountability.

Investment, Incentives, and the Commodification of the Climate Emergency

Venture capital (VC) funding for climate tech has surged over the past decade. In 2023, global investment in the sector was estimated at $51 billion, significantly higher than in the early 2010s when investment was still gaining momentum. Despite a broader contraction in tech investment, climate-related startups have remained resilient, benefiting from growing policy support, public concern, and investor appetite.

Communities most affected by climate change are frequently left out of the solutions meant to address it.

Scale is winning out over justice, as most VC-backed climate ventures are built to attract rapid returns, often prioritizing technologies like AI-driven software, hydrogen fuel infrastructure, and carbon capture systems. These solutions are designed for markets that can support high profitability, not necessarily for communities most impacted by the climate crisis.

A 2024 analysis by the Ada Lovelace Institute found that while many climate investors promote innovation and diversity, few integrate justice or equity as core investment criteria. Projects that focus on community resilience, local adaptation, or equitable energy access—especially in the Global South—are often seen as less investable due to their slower growth trajectory or limited exit potential.

This creates a disparity: Communities most affected by climate change are frequently left out of the solutions meant to address it. In many cases, they are actively exploited. Carbon offset initiatives, for instance, have appropriated land and resources in vulnerable regions without providing meaningful local benefit, raising concerns about modern-day “carbon colonialism.” Data farms to power AI are frequently located in poor communities and communities of color, further exploiting these areas.

Climate AI and Environmental Trade-Offs

AI has become a staple of some modern climate tech. From flood forecasting and wildfire risk prediction to automated ESG (environmental, social, and governance principles) reporting and carbon credit analysis, AI advocates promise it will enhance our ability to respond to the climate crisis. But the environmental footprint of these tools is anything but negligible.

Take OpenAI’s GPT‑3. GPT‑3’s own training consumed approximately 1,287 megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity, resulting in over 3.5 million liters of freshwater use in the United States—or up to 4.9 million liters in Asia—when accounting for both data center cooling and power generation. That’s enough water to meet the daily needs of up to 70,000 people.

Data centers, which power these large-scale models, rely heavily on evaporative cooling, using millions of liters of water daily to keep processors from overheating. Even climate-specific AI models carry notable water and energy footprints, and their environmental impact could rise sharply.

The environmental consequences of AI—particularly water use—could escalate to unprecedented levels. Already, extrapolations suggest that global AI water consumption may reach 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters in 2027, comparable to half the annual water usage of the United Kingdom.

Then there’s the carbon trail. Server farms running these AI systems increase emissions significantly. Google, for example, despite its carbon pledges, saw its greenhouse gas output jump nearly 50 percent since 2019, largely due to AI demands.

Building these facilities isn’t clean, either: the steel and concrete used in data center construction leave behind a hefty carbon footprint of their own. Many AI data farms are located in places already struggling with climate challenges: drought-hit regions in the United States, power-constrained grids in Ireland, and newly designated “AI growth zones” near vulnerable ecosystems in the United Kingdom.

In Ireland alone, data centers now consume over 21 percent of the nation’s electricity—approaching Ireland’s total household consumption rate of 28 percent—further straining an already fragile grid in a country increasingly exposed to climate instability. These are the very places climate tech is supposed to help—but the infrastructure behind that tech often ends up straining local resources even more.

So, while AI might help us forecast rising seas, it’s also helping drain lakes. It might optimize grids, but it’s also straining them. AI devours the same physical resources we’re trying to conserve.

Equity, Access, and the Geopolitics of “Green” Technology

The production of other climate technologies also demonstrates a problematic dynamic. The drive toward electric vehicles, rooftop solar setups, and smart grids, for example, centers on relatively affluent homeowners in wealthy nations, mostly in the Global North. But the raw materials—especially lithium—primarily come from South America’s “Lithium Triangle” (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile), where Indigenous and local communities shoulder major environmental and social costs. These communities say they wake up to environmental harm, water scarcity, and feel bypassed in decision-making.

Data show that extraction uses about 500,000 gallons of brine water per ton of lithium. In Chile, this has resulted in groundwater depletion of up to 65 percent, drying springs and damaging local ecosystems, including flamingo habitats.

In Argentina’s Salinas Grandes region, the 33 groups that make up the Atacama and Kolla communities have organized protests, warning that mining threatens llamas, quinoa fields, and ancestral lands.

Disruption Rhetoric

Tech executives tout “disruptive” inventions—AI-driven carbon markets, blockchain-verified offsets, lithium-powered gadgets—while frontline communities in the Global South, Indigenous territories, and polluted urban neighborhoods are offered pilot programs, token consultation, or vague promises of equity “someday.” The gap between those designing these technologies and those living with their consequences remains vast and unaddressed.

Climate tech keeps old hierarchies intact, just in shinier packaging.

Instead of confronting racial capitalism, extractivism, or colonial-era global supply chains, climate disruption tends to operate within them—upgrading the software without touching the operating system. The result? Climate tech keeps old hierarchies intact, just in shinier packaging.

The term “disruption” also erases the violence already embedded in climate change and its so-called solutions. What’s disruptive to an investor might be catastrophic to a rural community whose water table is drained for minerals used in batteries. What’s billed as “innovative” may simply extend centuries-old patterns of sacrifice zones.

This selective framing allows wealthy nations and corporations to cast themselves as bold saviors rather than as culprits or beneficiaries of the very crises they claim to solve. It shifts attention from collective systems change to individual products, from reparations to venture capital. It makes inequality sound like a feature, not a bug.

If disruption doesn’t include redistributing power, repairing harm, and reimagining ownership—if it doesn’t dismantle the roots of extractivism—it’s not disruption. It’s branding. And the longer the term is allowed to float around unchallenged, the easier it becomes to sell climate theater as climate action.

Greenwashing and the Fossil Fuel Continuum

In several major economies—including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—governments have pledged “net zero” emissions by mid-century while simultaneously approving major new fossil fuel projects.

Australia is pouring billions of dollars into climate-tech and carbon-capture initiatives, promoting these investments as evidence of decarbonization. Yet much of this public spending supports the fossil fuel sector itself. A telling example is the proposed carbon-capture facility at Darwin Harbour, paired with more than $3.5 billion in public funds for fracking and gas export infrastructure.

Far from driving emissions reductions, these projects reinforce fossil fuel dependence under the guise of innovation. As the Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie has said, “Building new and expanded coal and gas projects is like pouring fuel on a fire. To secure a safer future for our kids, we must stop waving through new fossil fuel developments.”

Environmental legal experts have called the government’s efforts what they are: state-sponsored greenwashing. Funding climate tech enables governments to project ambition; approving fossil fuel expansions keeps industry stakeholders and economic interests appeased.

When political capital and public resources flow toward glossy technology startups and extended fossil exports, community‑driven initiatives—such as frontline air‑quality monitoring, Indigenous land protection, and localized renewable energy co‑ops—lose their deserved momentum. Without meaningful support, these efforts face bureaucratic inertia, limited funding, and media indifference.

Community-Driven Alternatives and Equitable Innovation Models

A transformative climate agenda must move beyond techno-elitism and corporate-led narratives. At its heart, justice-centered innovation is built with community—not upon it—integrating open-source technologies, grassroots leadership, and Indigenous stewardship. These approaches privilege equity, local knowledge, and shared ownership.

One powerful example is the worker-owned cooperatives in the South Bronx, where organizations like Green Worker Cooperatives have incubated community-led green businesses for over a decade—prioritizing local ownership, job creation, and democratic governance. In recent years, shared solar initiatives have also brought discounted clean energy to low-income tenants in low-income households, bypassing rooftop barriers and making climate solutions truly accessible.

Grassroots movements such as the Green Belt Movement—founded in Kenya by Wangari Maathai in 1977—have empowered women to plant over 51 million trees, steward forest landscapes, and unite environmental preservation with community-led advocacy.

Also in Kenya, Feedback to the Future’s solar-powered farm in Kilome innovatively blends Indigenous understanding of biodiversity, syntropic agroforestry, and modern sustainability practices. Their polyculture system includes over 80 native species, supports soil regeneration, and restores biodiversity, fluidly combining tradition with small-scale technological integration.

These initiatives illustrate what genuine innovation looks like:

• Intentional inclusivity: prioritizing Indigenous knowledge and local agency
• Shared ownership: from cooperatives to communal land schemes
• Nature-aligned technology: such as solar and other tools that respect ecological limits

Toward Justice-Centered Climate Solutions

With climate tech continuing to expand in scale, ambition, and influence, one uncomfortable question that remains at the center of it all is: Who is this technology really designed to save?

Much of the current ecosystem is built on the assumption that innovation is inherently good—that if we can just optimize emissions, model climate risk, or electrify transport, we can engineer our way out of crisis. But this perspective overlooks the deeper fault lines that technology alone cannot address: systemic inequality, environmental racism, exploitative supply chains, and the political economies that reward harm and extract value from the margins.

If justice isn’t embedded at the very heart of climate innovation, then what we’re witnessing is not a solution—it’s a performance tailored for shareholders, not for the communities living under smog-choked skies or facing water shortages intensified by tech infrastructure itself.

True innovation must ask hard questions about ownership, benefit, burden, and consent. Who profits from these climate solutions? Who is consulted? Who is displaced or ignored in the process? Climate tech that fails to confront these realities risks reinforcing the very dynamics that created the crisis in the first place.

We must expand our definition of innovation—beyond tools and code, beyond marketability and speed—to include collective wisdom, grassroots resilience, and lived experience. The most impactful climate solutions may not look like software at all.