Study Links Faith in Technology to Lower Climate Engagement Among Scientists

Fabian Dablander, the lead author, said the belief that technology will largely solve climate change and its consequences can lead to an over-reliance on unproven solutions at the expense of the far-reaching socioeconomic transformations needed to address the climate and nature crisis. “Technological solutions are often politically attractive because they promise to address climate change without requiring changes to how people live and consume,” Dablander said. “Strikingly, we see the same tendency at the individual level, with greater faith in technological solutions going hand in hand with less engagement in climate action. Yet technology cannot substitute for the broader societal changes and large-scale shifts in consumption that are also needed.”

Of the scientists surveyed, 27% agreed with the statement “technology will largely solve the problems caused by climate change,” while 44% disagreed and 29% neither agreed nor disagreed. Those classified as techno-optimists reported engaging in fewer civic actions and protests, signing fewer petitions and doing less advocacy. They were also less likely to reduce the number of flights they took, cut their car usage or follow a mostly vegan or vegetarian diet.

The report also found that techno-optimism was most prevalent among scientists with right-leaning political views and those working in applied and natural sciences.

Kevin Anderson, a climate scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the study, said in his experience “a significant proportion of climate academics who enjoy very high incomes from their work, particularly when those incomes are accompanied by prestige, status and glittering honours, have enthusiastically swallowed the blue pill.” He said this offers “a convenient escape from any uncomfortable sense of personal responsibility, allowing them to maintain the comforting fiction that they are deeply concerned about the world their children will inherit while continuing to live lives that contribute disproportionately to the problem.” Anderson added that faith in future technological salvation provides “another crutch: a way of postponing difficult choices today by placing hope in solutions that may arrive tomorrow.” He said the evidential basis for such promises often falls short of the standards of scrutiny researchers would demand of others, resulting in “a remarkable inversion of scientific practice: the more uncomfortable the implications of the evidence, the greater the enthusiasm for believing in a future that the evidence does not support.”