Technofixation: Imperial’s Climate Community Night
The night has just started and the Env Tech students are dashing for the exit.
Imperial College held its inaugural Climate Community Night on Friday 13th March. This student-organised event promised “inspiring conversations, cross-sector networking and insights into career pathways in the climate space.” Did it live up to these promises? If the reaction of my fellow Environmental Technology students is anything to go by, the answer may be “no”.
The evening began with a keynote address by Dr Shengke Zhi of AtkinsRealis – an engineering services company – about AI, energy infrastructure, and small modular reactors. This topic already felt slightly dubious for an ostensibly climate-focused evening. Are the climate impacts of AI important to discuss? Yes. Were these impacts the focus of this talk? No. Instead, the speaker presented small modular reactors as the only solution to AI data centres’ inevitable march towards consuming between 50-100% of the UK’s current energy supply. At no point did the speaker comment on whether this scenario was desirable or truly inevitable. Rather, where there could have been an interesting critical discussion of two polarising topics within the climate sector – AI and nuclear energy – attendees received only a consultancy-style presentation of an engineering “solution”. Whilst my colleagues left the event in response, I decided to see out the remainder.
After the keynote, the event split into a policy workshop, also about AI, and a discussion panel of academics – I attended the latter. Featuring scholars from across the university discussing climate research as a career, this panel was the highpoint of the event. It was refreshing to hear a candid discussion of the opportunities and challenges of academia as a job, as well as its role within the broader climate sector. Yet this discussion was also the only time that I saw the climate sector discussed from a non-engineering perspective – a fleeting broadening of scope in what otherwise felt like an overly technofix-focused event.
Speaking of technofixes – the idea that technology alone can “solve” climate “problems” – the final panel was titled: “Can we engineer our way to Net Zero?”. While posed as a question, a limited range of professional backgrounds on the panel meant all present would likely answer with a “yes”. In reality, while technology will play an important role in addressing climate change, finance, policy, and social change are also necessary. Representatives of these areas were conspicuously absent from I the panel.
The absence of this representation was raised implicitly by the panel, who were all employed in engineering-related roles in industry. Their answers to the question “What are the largest engineering challenges for achieving Net Zero?” spanned a myriad of non-technological challenges, such as societal attitudes towards nuclear energy and perceptions of individual responsibility for climate change. Given these responses, the inclusion of a social scientist would surely have enhanced the panel.
This technofix framing of climate change as solely an engineering problem – more appropriate for Silicon Valley than the climate sector – permeated the content offered throughout the night and even the language used by the student moderators, who frequently mentioned “climate solutions”. It may sound pedantic, but this language of ‘solutions’ is simply not used across the climate sector: the IPCC’s summary for policymakers uses the word only three times, compared to hundreds of instances of “addressing”, “mitigating”, or “adapting to” climate change.
All that said, the event overall filled me with optimism about both the climate sector and the Imperial student community. That this student-organised event exists at all demonstrates both great initiative from the organisers and an encouraging demand for climate-focused events from the student body, who, numbering around 170, filled out the event’s capacity. The event was also administered well, particularly given it was the first of its kind: registration was smooth, the networking opportunities and refreshments between sessions were well-organised, and admirable efforts were made to maintain the schedule.
I would like these comments to serve as constructive criticism for the organisers of the next Climate Community Night. While this event was well-organised, it was fundamentally let down by its framing of climate change as primarily an engineering problem, rather than a broader challenge in which technological innovation will play but a part. A broader scope that presents engineering alongside other areas such as finance, policy, and social science would enhance future events by exposing attendees to more of the climate sector. Experts in these areas are readily available at Imperial and including them would ensure the next event reflects the whole Imperial climate community.
