Tech workers take climate action

Worker-led initiatives and broader coalitions are challenging and transforming the tech industry’s relationship with social and environmental justice issues. In doing so, they are building on longer histories of worker organizing, including among others the Lucas Plan and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, and their attempts to hold the tech industry accountable for pollution and exploitation. 

In this text, we’re highlighting a few examples of grassroots efforts for collective action and environmental justice in and beyond Silicon Valley. In emphasizing the roles of organized labor and environmental justice coalitions in advocating for and creating more sustainable computing practices, we aim to move beyond carbon emissions reporting as the only mechanism for understanding the relationship between climate action and the ICT industry. Labor provides a lens for including the larger supply chains and marginalized communities that are often left out of carbon-centric discussions of climate change and computing technologies.

In recent years, worker-led movements have been pressuring corporations to make climate pledges and take action on their net zero goals. Workers at Mozilla, for example, pressed the company into making four concrete climate commitments, while Microsoft’s employee-run Sustainability Connected Community now boasts over 10,000 members and 35 regional chapters. While corporate pledges on their own do not ensure action, particularly vocal Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for climate action can press for change from the inside to hold corporations accountable— or stand in solidarity with others by joining climate strike walkouts like in 2019. 

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of Amazon employees created in 2019, launched an open letter to Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors asking them to adopt a climate plan shareholder resolution. They also protested the company’s partnerships with the oil and gas industry; two of the protest’s leaders were later fired in retaliation. The group has also pushed the company to commit to regular emissions reporting, and called for it to go carbon neutral by 2030. 

In early 2023, employees publicly demanded that Amazon pay climate and flood reparations to Pakistan. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers around the world are fighting to unionize and challenge corporate surveillance practices. While the sites of struggle may differ, the organizing efforts point to common goals: uplifting workers and at the same time working towards a decolonial climate justice agenda. 

Histories of production and pollution

Organizing at the intersection between environment and labor has a longstanding history. Like other industries, technology firms offload harms disproportionately on poor, immigrant and racialized communities. Before it became a software hub, Silicon Valley used to be a major manufacturing center for semiconductors and electronics. Undocumented immigrants made up a large part of the workforce, particularly women of color. 

The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which included environmental and neighborhood groups, labor unions, public health leaders, and local residents, helped bring toxicity and e-waste from the tech industry to public attention and to put stricter regulations in place. In the 1980s, many workers sued their employers and sought compensation for systematically being exposed to toxic and carcinogenic byproducts at the workplace. 

Groundwater contamination from the industrial processes continues to affect the area today, with devastating health effects on local residents. Santa Clara County, where Silicon Valley is located, has 23 superfund sites, more than any other county in the US. What is more, “clean-up” operations of these sites are producing new environmental injustices elsewhere. 

Today, electronics manufacturing has mostly been offshored to East Asia, where workers are leading similar fights around occupational health and safety and creating a special union network for the semiconductors sector. Due to these grassroots efforts, the International Labor Organisation recently adopted a resolution to include a safe and healthy working environment in its framework of fundamental principles and rights at work. 

Solidarity across supply chains

As the described examples show, the violence inflicted on workers and violence inflicted on the environment are inseparable from ICT production, regardless of the industry’s efforts to present digital innovation as “clean”. 

The violence inflicted on workers and violence inflicted on the environment are inseparable from ICT production, regardless of the industry’s efforts to present digital innovation as “clean”. 

While struggles by white collar developers and blue collar manufacturing and logistics workers are not always connected, efforts to date point to the potential to organize across the entire tech supply chain—from mining minerals to manufacturing electronics to programming and beyond.

In regard to design and policy, Cradle-to-cradle design and the Right to Repair also promise a path to less extractive and wasteful production. However, they are so far limited to small companies like Fairphone and Framework, who are implementing modular designs and modeling fair trade electronics supply chains, and are facing considerable resistance from tech giants. 

The struggles we have briefly sketched in this piece point to the more fundamental question of what we collectively imagine as a desirable future of technology production from the perspective of labor. In the 1970s, when they were threatened with layoffs, manufacturing workers at Lucas Aerospace in the UK created the Lucas Plan to advocate for socially useful production. Their work could serve as a potential blueprint for workers and activists who are pushing for a Just Transition that centers the people who are bearing the brunt of environmental destruction and social oppression. The tasks of environmental justice extend beyond those identified through the “carbon tunnel vision” to wherever the costs of tech may be borne by bodies and ecosystems. 

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Computers lie at the heart of climate politics. Computationally-intensive models frame and constitute how governing bodies and public perception alike understands the problem of climate change, while a growing number of digital tools and systems are positioned as the solution to the climate crisis. The urgency of global warming isn’t in dispute but how the computing tech industry is setting the terms and horizons for mega climate change projects should be understood and recalibrated. 

This inquiry attends to the material realities of computing technologies–including labor, supply chains, and digital infrastructures–and to the widespread faith that digital solutions and technological management are the best and only responses to climate change. Even when carbon reporting mechanisms and software tooling intended to reduce GHG emissions are most effective, it is unclear if:

1) carbon cost numbers are accurate across fully supply chains

2) measuring and reporting emissions leads to substantial reductions in GHG emissions (measurement is not the same as action),

and 3) an outsized focus on decarbonization casts aside or, at the very least, deprioritizes other crucial environmental and social factors. 

We call this paradigm carbon computing. It describes the massive enterprise of using computers to manage the climate system—from measuring individual impacts to adjudicating global climate politics. It is an increasingly core, if under-recognized, feature of climate management and governance. As an enterprise, it makes use of technological expertise and raw computing power to document and archive the past, manage the present, and anticipate the future. It incorporates computing technologies that range from simulation software and supercomputers to accounting sheets, blockchains, and machine learning systems. It is also, at times, paradoxical, as digital networks and infrastructures make up a growing share of global energy and carbon budgets.

We call this paradigm carbon computing. It describes the massive enterprise of using computers to manage the climate system–from measuring individual impacts to adjudicating global climate politics.

Understanding carbon computing requires in-depth historical context, and deeper critical and ethnographic engagements with these dynamics. Techno-solutionist approaches alone won’t cut it. It is imperative to include and learn from other perspectives and forms of knowledge, and carefully weigh what society stands to win–and lose–every time we turn to digital tools and networks for solutions. This belief in inclusive, contextualized, and critical engagement with digital carbon narratives motivates our collective. 

Our Project

The Critical Carbon Computing Collective (4C) is a group of researchers, academics, activists, and artists working to contextualize and demystify the proliferation of technologically-oriented proposals that currently govern knowledge and resources in the climate system. Two core questions drive our work: (1) How is computing tech implicated in the unsustainable resource use that contributes to climate change? and (2) What role should computing tech play in strategies for environmentally just futures? In developing our responses, we do not take “tech” or technology to be a stable category or even one with a single, self-evident definition. We do, however, emphasize the role of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, given that industry’s increasing climate costs and simultaneous dominance in climate accounting, reporting, and management. 

Most members of the 4C work at large universities, and some of us have connections with the work of industry-funded nonprofits in these areas; we therefore don’t claim to speak from outside of these funding structures or power dynamics. However, we each also have connections to groups and movements not represented in conversations at these institutions and understand the importance of elevating independent and under-represented perspectives. We aim to use our multidisciplinary insights to inform ongoing debates and build connections across work that risks being taken as purely technical. This would be a mistake.

As historians and ethnographers of computing and the environment, we hold that:

• Tech and climate change are deeply entwined. Computers and ICT both generate a growing portion of climate emissions and are viewed by industry and policymakers as the solutions to climate challenges. 
• Dominant framings of computing systems and new distractions from computationally-focused approaches to carbon risk upholding the status quo. 
• The relationship between energy and computation needs to be critically understood and historically situated.
• These conversations need to extend beyond industry and academia.

Coalition Building

This project is forming at a time where there is a larger push from industry, advocacy, academic, and policy collaborators to account for and alleviate environmental harms, some of which are caused by computing itself. Much of this effort takes the form of nonprofit organizations seeking to address the relationship between climate change and the ICT sector. Academic and industry-connected researchers at Climate Change AI examine not only the climate impacts of machine learning in a global context, but the ways that machine learning might be used to mitigate climate change. Green Software Foundation, funded by industry steering partners and hosted by the Linux Foundation, is attempting to build tools and provide resources for decarbonizing the ICT industry, changing the culture of how software is built in order to prioritize sustainability. The Green Web Foundation is focused on building a fossil-free internet by 2030. 4C acknowledges such ongoing partnerships as important avenues for academics, civil society, and the wider public to redirect machine learning applications toward climate mitigation and to rebuild alternative practices of hardware and software development. 

4C aims to contribute to these kinds of pragmatic technical proposals by expanding their scope of analysis to consider the historical and ongoing labor, resource, and social struggles implicated in such interventions. Rather than viewing carbon computing as the route to promissory futures or guaranteed sustainable outcomes, our goal is to recenter equity and justice in tech-oriented proposals around carbon in the present. 

Generating Resources

For our public launch, we are releasing a set of four short guides designed to break down and demystify common terms, practices, and debates at the intersection of climate and ICT. By making these documents concise and accessible, we hope they will be a resource for circulating through other communities, opening up critical conversations about tech and climate. 

• Carbon Accounting outlines how the tech sector contributes to (and reinforces) specific ways of monitoring and governing climate actors, and raises the prospect of new monopolies around the tools and data that other sectors need to reduce their carbon emissions.

• Policy and Tech discusses how states, corporations, and workers are setting standards, rules, and expectations around climate tech, and how tech companies are maneuvering through these policies (and policy gaps).

• Computing Net Zero unpacks the power of language in carbon computing. Words in computationally intensive climate projects are particularly prone to manipulations because of their apparent technical complexity. The computational definition of the term Net Zero depends on the specific context in which it is being used, and calculations can conceal who wins, loses, and profits from combinations of new tech, offsetting, and continued emissions. 

• Labor emphasizes the roles of organized labor and environmental justice coalitions in advocating for and creating more sustainable computing practices and aims to move beyond carbon emissions reporting as the only mechanism for understanding the relationship between climate action and the ICT industry. Labor provides a lens for including the larger supply chains and marginalized communities that are often left out of carbon-centric discussions of climate change and computing technologies.

In the coming years, our group will publish more of these guides, visual diagrams, reports, and white papers on carbon computing alongside workshops and public programming. We invite those interested in these questions and for future collaborations to reach out: info@criticalcarboncomputing.org.

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