How climate tech’s corporate frontier obscures systemic extraction and false solutions
Original framing: “The Download: 10 climate tech companies to watch” — MIT Technology Review
The list ignores how climate tech’s resource demands directly threaten Indigenous sovereignty, such as lithium mining in the Atacama Desert (where the Atacameño people have fought for decades against extraction) or carbon offset projects displacing Maasai communities in Kenya. Indigenous-led alternatives—like the Haudenosaunee’s *Three Sisters* farming or the Sámi’s reindeer herding adaptations—demonstrate that ecological resilience is already being practiced without corporate intermediaries. The framing’s erasure of these systems reinforces the myth that ‘innovation’ must come from Silicon Valley rather than millennia of living knowledge.
The MIT list’s climate tech companies operate within a *triple myth*: that innovation is neutral, that markets can solve ecological collapse, and that progress is linear.
This framing obscures how these ventures are *symptoms* of a system that profits from delay—just as 19th-century railroads displaced Indigenous nations or 20th-century agrochemicals poisoned soils, today’s climate tech risks becoming another tool for corporate land grabs under a green veneer. The solution lies not in scaling these companies but in *rescaling* power: centering Indigenous sovereignty, enforcing degrowth limits, and funding open-source alternatives that treat land as kin, not capital. Historical precedents—from the *Iroquois Confederacy’s* *Great Law of Peace* to *Cuba’s* post-Soviet agroecology—show that ecological resilience emerges from relational ethics, not venture capital. The *trickster* here is that climate tech’s ‘promise’ is a distraction from the hard work of dismantling extraction, and the only way forward is to name that trick—and then walk away from the table.