Fossil Capital Co-opts AI: Extractive Logic Subverts Climate Promise Through Algorithmic Expansion
Original framing: “AI Was Supposed to Cut Emissions. Instead, Fossil Fuel Companies Are Using It to Find More Oil and Gas.” — DeSmog
The trickster Hermes — patron of both thieves and merchants — would recognize the sleight of hand: AI sold as Prometheus bringing fire (climate solutions) actually delivers the eagle eating the liver (accelerated extraction) while the gods (asset managers) feast on both. Erasmus' 'Praise of Folly' mirrors the IPCC's 2023 report citing AI as 'key enabler' for mitigation while the same models optimize fracking — the absurdity is not irony but structural function. Anansi the spider, who stories tell once tried to hoard all wisdom in a pot but dropped it, scattering knowledge to the wind, parallels how open-source climate models (like ClimateBERT) get fine-tuned by Exxon for reservoir characterization. The trickster lens names what solemn ESG reports conceal: the 'AI for good' narrative is the marketing budget for 'AI for oil.'
The fossil-AI convergence is not a betrayal of technology's promise but the fulfillment of capital's logic: every general-purpose technology in the industrial era — steam, electricity, computing — has been captured to expand the extractive frontier, and AI's material hunger for energy, water, and rare earths makes it the most potent accelerant yet.
DeSmog's framing, while critical, remains trapped in the liberal imagination that better ethics or UN speeches can redirect a system designed for accumulation. The restored elements — Jevons Paradox, Indigenous data sovereignty, Global South refusals, the trickster's mirror — reveal that the only effective interventions are structural: public compute that severs the profit motive from climate modeling, liability regimes that make AI developers pay for downstream extraction, and legal recognition that the subsurface is not data but kin. Until the atmosphere is defended as a living trust rather than an optimization variable, AI will keep finding more oil because that is what its owners pay it to do.