Abstract
This article provides an analysis of “tech-on-climate discourse,” understood as all textual and visual materials through which major North American tech companies position themselves in relation to the climate crisis, published between 2019 and 2024. This public-facing tech-on-climate discourse includes sustainability reports, web pages, advertising, and online tools and projects. The article examines this discourse by focusing on three case studies: Amazon's Climate Pledge, Apple's Carbon Neutral campaign, and Microsoft's AI for Good and Planetary Computer programs. The cases are all designed in relation to the companies’ mission to become “carbon neutral,” each taking a different approach. Through a close analysis of these campaigns, I discuss four legitimization strategies that allow for the justification of what I call “green platform capitalism.” These strategies are expressions of an ecomodernist worldview in which economic growth is decoupled from ecological well-being and in which innovative techno-fixes make Silicon Valley a central environmental agent. This worldview (1) frames Earth as a datafied planet, (2) naturalizes digital technologies, and (3) imagines a singular “humanity” modelled after the white, male entrepreneur. In sum, tech-on-climate discourse forwards the story that with the right technological innovations and corporate interventions, Earth and life on it can be saved from the climate crisis without making changes to the operations of Big Tech beyond their own proposals, or societies at large. I position this techno-optimistic narrative within ongoing “tech-for-good” and “green AI” debates, of which the orientations are reconfigured vis-à-vis ongoing political changes in the US, and elsewhere.
Introduction: The rise of green platform capitalism
In September 2023, Apple launched a commercial as part of its new “Apple Carbon Neutral” campaign. In the 5-minute video, CEO Tim Cook and his employees (some played by actors) are getting ready to update Mother Nature (Octavia Spencer) about the company's sustainability progress. A wind picks up, clouds open above Apple's Cupertino headquarters, and in the next shot, she is at the table: Mother Nature, accompanied by her assistant. Cook and his employees start the meeting nervously, but as they report on their efforts to make Apple products “carbon neutral,” reduce energy and water use, and invest in reforestation projects, their confidence mounts. Mother Nature gradually drops her skepticism, and the employees present her with the new Apple Watch as the company's first carbon-neutral product. Mother Nature checks whether they “are not trying to bribe Mother Nature with Apple swag” but looks impressed. 1 After Cook has listed all Apple's past successes and future plans, Cook and Mother Nature engage in a stare down ending when the latter says: “Ok good! See you next year.” The wind swells again, leaves ruffle, and as Mother Nature disappears, a near-dead plant on a shelf suddenly looks lush again (Figures 1 and 2).
After a wind picks up, Mother Nature and her assistant arrive at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, in an Apple video (2023). Screenshot by the author.
Mother Nature and her assistant join Tim Cook and his team for a sustainability update in an Apple video (2023). Screenshot by the author.
Apple's “Mother Nature” commercial is part of a development from the 2010s, but especially the 2020s, in which tech companies and billionaires affiliated with “Silicon Valley”—a term used here to refer to both the Californian region and North American tech culture as a cultural phenomenon—increasingly position themselves as responsible actors in times of ecological crisis. 2 This movement formed in response to growing critiques and public unrest about the climate crisis, propelled by documents such as a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2023). A part of this public attention has been directed at the environmental impact of the tech sector, for example, regarding its energy use. Data centers alone currently use 2% of global energy available, which is on a path to rise to 3% or 4% (Goldman Sachs, 2024). In response to this growing scrutiny, tech companies have made changes to their operations and invested in the production of promotional materials in which they explain how they minimize their environmental impact and “help” others to do the same. Recently, the back-and-forth debate addressed the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) versus the potential of AI applications to reach climate goals (Harvey, 2025; Heilinger et al., 2024; Van Wynsberghe, 2021). As Van der Vlist et al. (2024) observe, AI has become a central theme in the competition among Big Tech companies as they seek to solidify their market share and expand their cloud infrastructure dominance. Companies state that AI tools, if optimized for efficiency, have benefits that by far outweigh their (environmental) costs. In a report titled “Investing in Nature” (2024), Microsoft states, “AI can help companies prioritize ecosystem health by enabling cheaper, more effective measurement, trade-off analysis, and risk management” (p. 4). Through such statements, companies work to place AI and technology at large at the center of public debates on sustainability transitions. Their sustainability discourse illustrates how tech companies forward a “tech-for-good” agenda, which is continuously developing in relation to societal and (geo)political developments, and critiques of their operations.
In this article, I refer to the continuously expanding collection of visual and textual materials published by tech companies as “tech-on-climate discourse,” which takes four main forms: sustainability reports, webpages, commercials, and (the presentation of) online tools and projects. 3 With this definition, I refer only to promotional and public-facing materials and exclude other corporate texts such as policy documents. Using methods of textual and visual analysis, I examine three case studies to explore how Big Tech secures its market position by legitimizing both its current practices and its future (sometimes highly speculative) plans. Based on a close analysis of sustainability campaigns, I discuss the legitimization strategies companies use to construct a positive image of their role in the climate crisis. Although prior research has explored tech discourses more broadly, I argue that the sustainability discourse of Big Tech merits further study to better understand how they shape public perceptions of corporate responsibility in the context of the climate crisis. In addition to Apple's campaign, the cases analyzed include Amazon's Climate Pledge and Microsoft's AI for Good and Planetary Computer programs. My aim is not to judge these campaigns on their feasibility, though I will occasionally note that these materials are not always factual and fit the sector's interest in maintaining “environmental ignorance” (Crawford, 2021: 43). Rather, I see them as vision documents representative of what I call “green platform capitalism.” I use this term to describe the intersection of “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2016) and “green capitalism” (Buller, 2022): a business model which promotes a greener version of the economy in which platform companies play a central role and the need for greater sustainability is accepted, at least publicly. In doing so, I acknowledge that the advertisements analyzed here are not mere rhetorical tools; they are a crucial part of the broader economic platform ecosystem through which these companies’ ideological positions materialize. As such, the article builds on theorizations of “platform power”: a multifaceted concept that encapsulates the discursive, governmental, economic, epistemic, and infrastructural power of platforms (Büscher, 2021; Nieborg et al., 2024; Srnicek, 2016).
My analysis builds on existing works from the fields of platform studies and environmental media studies, which have analyzed the environmental costs of platforms and their cloud and AI products (Brevini, 2020; Brodie, 2023; Crawford, 2021; Markelius et al., 2024). The “platform” is defined as both a type of corporation and thus a geopolitical and cultural actor (Srnicek, 2024), as well as a vertical “stack” of technical infrastructures (Bratton, 2015; Van Dijck, 2021). In this article, I will use the terms platform companies versus platform infrastructures for clarity.
The research also contributes a “platform perspective” to the existing body of work examining how corporations legitimize greener forms of capitalist practices through PR campaigns and efforts of corporate responsibility (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021; Buller, 2022; Goldstein, 2018; Smith, 1998). As Hogan (2018) argues, tech companies view nature as part of their “big data ecologies,” considering the stewardship of nature a task best executed by tech companies. Such a message can only be upheld through “thin narratives that deploy textual and visual rhetorical strategies intended to obfuscate and overwrite resource exploitation” (Hogan, 2018: 647). Building on this observation, I scrutinize green discourses and legitimization strategies to unpack the underlying worldview of tech companies, which I refer to as an “ecomodernist” ideology (see also Riemens, 2024). According to ecomodernists, human prosperity and continuous growth are made possible by absolutely “decoupling” economic growth from environmental well-being through technological innovation (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). Following Brevini's argument (2020) that AI and data-oriented services of the tech industry align with the ecomodernist agenda, I articulate a critique of the ecomodernist values engrained in tech-on-climate discourse. As I will argue, tech-on-climate discourse presents a worldview in which (1) the earth is framed as a datafied planet; (2) technology is understood as inherently natural and neutral; and (3) humanity is presented as a universal figure with homogenous values, concerns, and interests. Aligning Big Tech's logic of datafication with the wider ecomodernist agenda allows Silicon Valley to promote its platform infrastructures as benign, innovative, and key environmental agents in a new, “green” economy centered on platform companies.
The article is organized as follows. First, I elaborate on the theoretical framework through which I understand tech-on-climate discourse, after which I explain my analytical approach and introduce the case studies. Next, I highlight four legitimization strategies and summarize the three central elements of the worldview underpinning these campaigns. I conclude by discussing the role of Silicon Valley in the climate crisis in relation to AI and climate futures currently in the making.
Positioning the study of tech-on-climate discourse
A range of scholars have addressed the need to study the technology sector in relation to its ecological and material impact, calling for a field of ecomedia or environmental media studies (Brodie et al., 2023; López et al., 2023). The climate impact of the tech sector has received quite some attention in recent years, from more general perspectives on the materiality of media (Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Parikka, 2015) to studies of the multi-sided environmental dimensions of infrastructures such as data centers (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2023; Hogan, 2015). Especially the surge in “artificially intelligent” applications has demonstrated how tech companies invest in these developments to cement their key role in digital industries (Van der Vlist et al., 2024), which has also resulted in a significant increase in their environmental footprint, for example through the use of energy and water, and finite materials, with consequences for local communities and ecosystems around key infrastructural locations (Lehuedé, 2024; Markelius et al., 2024; Valdivia, 2024).
This article highlights the role of North American platform companies in shaping cultural visions on the value of technology, theorizing Big Tech's green agenda as a relatively new steppingstone in this development. Advertisements and public documents are a valuable source to uncover the visions of social and cultural life as presented by these companies (Blackman and Harley, 2024). Tech companies are not always transparent about their ecological impact, nor are their reports always trustworthy sources (Keilbach, 2025; Pasek et al., 2023). Likewise, it can be challenging to measure progress in sustainability, given the “limitations of quantification and automation” as parameters (Hoyng, 2023: 8; see also Archer, 2024). With my focus on tech-on-climate discourse, I analyze how platform companies seek to legitimize their operations, their usage of large amounts of water, energy, and land, as well as their impact on humans and nonhumans (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Hogan, 2018).
I theorize tech-on-climate discourse as a specific subset of platform discourses: a cultural production of promotional materials generated by the world's major tech companies. My work is in dialogue with previous analyses of platform discourse that scrutinize terms like “cloud” (Hu, 2015) and “platform” (Gillespie, 2010), as well as narratives of progress, innovation, and connectivity (Hoffmann et al., 2018; Natale et al., 2019; Van Dijck, 2013). Such narratives help to position tech companies as necessary partners who solve societal issues or improve the lives of their users, even though they are historically known to prioritize tech-fixes at the expense of other solutions (Johnston, 2020). The concept of “techno-solutionism” is a key term in media research referring to the process of highlighting technical solutions and reframing problems so these solutions seem fitting (Morozov, 2013). However, it is also a key concept in studies of green capitalism, as visions about a capitalist system in “transition” often include high expectations of the potential of future innovations and green techno-fixes (Caprotti, 2012; Schütze, 2024).
In my view, Silicon Valley has not yet been sufficiently acknowledged as a key actor in what Chaturvedi and Doyle (2015) describe as the competition over what climate future is the most legitimate, salient, and desirable. In tech-on-climate discourse, the climate crisis is not denied or obscured, but instead, discussed in carefully chosen ways. In general, green marketing efforts employ a range of strategies and techniques to create and uphold green myths about companies (Smith, 1998) and reframe our understanding of the problem of climate change (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021).
In short, tech-on-climate discourse is a greenwashing discourse, a public relations (PR) “strategy companies employ to enhance their public image and maintain or expand their market presence” (Vanvik, 2023: 172). For Greenpeace (1992: 1), greenwashing describes how companies “are preserving and expanding their markets by posing as friends of the environment.” Importantly, this definition defines greenwashing not only as a PR mechanism, but as a way for companies to “control the definition of environmentalism” and shape sustainable developments by reorienting their corporate agendas “to convince the public that they have turned the corner into a new era of ‘green business’” (p. 1). This conceptualization foreshadows the transformation in Big Tech towards green platform capitalism, a discursive development which started in the late 2000s and 2010s, but came to fruition in the early 2020s. This corporate development is not merely a rhetorical one. Tech-on-climate discourse tells us not only something about the framings of the operations of Big Tech, but also, potentially, about the redirection of corporate activities and a reassessment of company values, which can reinforce their business models and drive the expansion of their already dominant infrastructures. This development includes the launch of new “green” buildings (Apple's Cupertino headquarters), products (Apple's smart watch), tools (Microsoft's sustainability management tool), and investments (the Climate Pledge Fund). Such material projects, as Sims (2022: 294) argues in reference to the Apple headquarters, “manage to enchant those who encounter and report on them while also addressing growing anxieties and sorrows about climate catastrophe and other social and ecological desecrations.” In her work on e-waste, Gabrys (2013: 4) states how such a study sheds lights on the connections between “material flows and global economies” as well as “technological imaginings, progress narratives, and material temporalities.” These works are related to critiques on “green extractivism,” understood as attractive narratives and innovations that signal progress and sustainability while upholding unsustainable extractive practices (Brodie, 2024).
Tech-on-climate discourse illustrates how tech companies and entrepreneurs have embraced the climate crisis as a new strategy to legitimize their practices, promoting a narrative about “planetary improvement” made possible by technological innovations (Goldstein, 2018). This study relates the promises of planetary improvement to the ideology of “ecomodernism.” The prioritization of economic growth and technological innovation to battle climate change are core ideas of the ecomodernist movement, as it emerged in California in the early 2000s, for example, propagated by the Breakthrough Institute (Shellenberger and Nordhaus, 2004) and more recently through “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). This movement builds on existing traditions of ecological modernization (Hajer, 1995; Hällmark, 2023; Machin, 2019; Symons, 2019). Ecomodernism has been discussed and critiqued in detail (e.g. Crist, 2015; Isenhour, 2016). Although the movement is diverse, I argue there is overlap between ecomodernism and Big Tech ideology, a connection that is grounded in the Californian tech culture of the twentieth century and has evolved along with the tech industry since then (Riemens, 2024).
Method
This article provides a textual and visual analysis of three case studies: Amazon's Climate Pledge, Apple's Carbon Neutral campaign, and Microsoft's AI for Earth program and its Planetary Computer tool. These companies are among the most influential global technology corporations, with significant economic power, cultural reach, and infrastructural dominance. The selected campaigns were launched between 2019 and 2024, a period marked by heightened public and regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech. They represent flagship sustainability efforts central to the companies’ marketing strategies during the specified period (though some have since been replaced or updated). These campaigns exemplify how Big Tech has developed sustainability campaigns promoting how they “invest” in nature and “decarbonize” their operations.
Contemporary sustainability campaigns are often multi-modal, combining several forms of content, including websites, reports, and videos. The sources for analysis were systematically identified using the sustainability webpages of each company as a starting point, and I only included sources referenced on that page. An overview of the sources I have analyzed for each case study, 13 in total, can be found in Table 1. Because the websites are often altered, the table includes a link to the sustainability pages in January 2024 by using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
Overview of analyzed texts.
For each company, I analyzed the sustainability website, a sustainability report (covering 2022), and one promotional video tied to the campaign. In the cases of Microsoft and Amazon, I included additional sources disclosing how the campaign was further disseminated after its initial launch. The analysis focused on identifying statements of “greenspeak” on the climate crisis, mission and vision statements, and descriptions of sustainable projects. Particular attention is paid to visual elements (illustrations, photos, icons, and use of colors) and formatting (such as headers and highlighted slogans). I thus take into account the rhetorical functioning of the sometimes overlooked visual design elements of corporate texts (Greenwood et al., 2019).
The analysis of these materials is informed by the aforementioned literature and by the concept of legitimization strategies as defined by Van Leeuwen (2007), which helps to study how actors justify and rationalize certain actions or plans in public-facing documents. Van Leeuwen's legitimization strategies have been previously analyzed in relation to green PR discourse, helping to understand how corporate texts and their framing strategies play a role in the “ongoing discursive battles for legitimization” in light of the climate crisis (Vanvik, 2023: 161; see also Goldstein, 2018). To analyze the use of legitimization strategies in tech-on-climate discourse, I turn the four strategies Van Leeuwen identifies—authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, and mythopoesis—into three categories and introduce a fourth category focused on visual elements.
Beyond the identification of legitimization strategies, I analyze the underlying visions on the relation between tech companies and the climate crisis, or more generally: technology, the human subject, and nature. I approach these corporate visions as a form of “mythmaking” (David, 2001), constructing a narrative grounded in ecomodernist ideology that promotes Big Tech's position as climate leaders through a turn to a greener form of platform capitalism. With this approach, I aim to not only document a key era of tech discourse but also identify strategies and myths relevant beyond the specific period and case studies.
Sustainability campaigns by Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft
In this section, I introduce the three case studies. Although the campaigns differ in form and tone, they communicate a similar message: the companies want to bring the carbon emissions of their operations to zero and lead a global transition of decarbonization and green innovation.
A promise with a disclaimer: Amazon's Climate Pledge
The Climate Pledge, initiated by Amazon in 2019, is an agreement between companies to do “all they can” to meet the Paris climate goals in 2040 (“net-zero carbon”) instead of 2050. Amazon—a company that derives most of its income from the Amazon web shop, its cloud service AWS, and consumer electronics—launched the Pledge in collaboration with the organization Global Optimism (alongside the Climate Pledge Fund). The Pledge's slogan is “be the planet's turning point,” urging companies to co-sign the pledge. In April 2024, 482 companies had signed the pledge, including Uber, IBM, and Visa. The Pledge website lists three goals: regular reporting, eliminating carbon from production processes, and creating credible carbon offsets.
Don’t disappoint your mother: Apple's 2030 campaign
In its 2030 campaign and Mother Nature commercial, Apple also presents itself as a leader in the tech industry when it comes to climate change. But whereas Amazon's Pledge seeks to bring companies together, Apple concentrates on its own efforts, presenting itself as a company that is sustainable “by design”. The Mother Nature commercial was launched alongside Apple's 2023 sustainability report, its first “carbon-free” product, and a redesign of its sustainability website. Apple strives towards carbon neutrality of all its products by 2030.
Datafied nature: Microsoft's Planetary Computer and AI for Good Lab
Microsoft, like Apple, also advertises with the mission to make its corporate operations carbon negative by 2030, which includes topics such as carbon removal and reduction, investments in renewable energy, water, and waste projects. Since 2023, Microsoft is gradually spending more attention on AI and data as climate solutions, promoting AI products and sustainability management tools to its corporate customers. The company uses the term “AI for Good lab” to refer to its efforts around climate resilience. 4 Microsoft also launched the Planetary Computer tool, first introduced as part of the company's AI for Earth campaign, until this campaign was traded for AI for Good from 2020 onwards. This tool allows researchers to store and analyze climate research data. Website visitors can view the Planetary Computer's data catalog, hosted on Microsoft's cloud service Azure, but other information is only available after log-in.
Analysis of legitimization strategies
In this section, I identify and analyze four legitimization strategies employed in the climate campaigns discussed earlier. Three of these strategies—narrativization, authorization, and moralization—are drawn from the framework developed by Van Leeuwen (2007). The fourth strategy, which I introduce, is the visualization of companionship. Together, these narratives work as a form of corporate mythmaking (David, 2001) by creating “green myths,” constructing a desirable story about the relation between tech companies and nature.
Narrativization: The sustainability journey
Narrativization, also described by Van Leeuwen as “mythopoesis,” refers to the production of moral tales and forms of storytelling in discourse. It is not surprising that storytelling is a central part of advertising, but what stands out is how sustainability campaigns are introduced as journeys on which the companies embark. In these narratives, the journey is a metaphor for climate change as an “ongoing adaptive learning process” (Milne et al., 2006: 808). They are designed to legitimize the actions companies are taking, and to highlight certain ones, while obfuscating or delegitimizing alternative, climate futures (Goldstein, 2018). Below, I discuss the narrative presented by each company.
Amazon's Climate Pledge and its net-zero mission give the company a goal to work towards, using metaphors from sports and warfare to present the climate crisis as a challenge to be overcome or a fight to be won (and one that can be won). In the 2022 report, sustainability vice-president Kara Hurst writes Amazon is “willing to make the big bets necessary” and make sure “climate solutions can scale fast to help set our planet back on the right track” (p. 3). This statement gives the impression we can redirect planetary conditions, framing climate solutions as “(planetary) design hacks.” The Pledge is also a narratological device that runs throughout Amazon's climate campaign and frames the climate crisis as a “shared” journey and a design challenge. Amazon's 2022 sustainability report mentions the word “pledge” 69 times, and through the Amazon web shop, third-party shop owners can get their products labeled as “climate pledge friendly.”
The Pledge is an example of a “synthetic narrative”: a narrative created around futures that could happen or be realized, but only if certain actions are taken (Aronczyk and Espinoza, 2021). Such statements, estimates, and goals are used across corporate discourse. They help platform companies to create compelling narratives about their role in creating desirable futures, without bringing any certainty about climate action. These narratives often decouple the “now” from the “future,” which works as a form of temporal differentiation, allowing companies to artificially divide current activities from future goals. Goldstein (2018: 120) argues how such narratives create an attractive “temporality of progress” by alluding to a never-yet future that, in practice, cannot be used to hold companies accountable as it is built around many insecurities and estimations.
Pledges offer unbinding plans that are nevertheless presented with great certainty. Several have claimed that the Amazon Pledge initiative is not transparent, as the company excluded its own supply chain from its sustainability calculations (Evans, 2022) and has not lived up to its lofty promises (Boylan and Dufour, 2023). As West (2023) argues, the Pledge is a form of self-regulation and carbon accountability which fits the operations of a company known for its lack of transparency and sustainability, as well as its deregulation agenda.
Apple's 2030 campaign also presents a journey, but in relation to the well-being of Earth, personified as Mother Nature. Part of this narrative is that buying an Apple product will allow consumers to become more sustainable and join Apple's “community.” Beyond the video, the figure of Mother Nature returns on the Apple website, in a statement such as “make Mother Nature proud.” The sustainability report does not mention Mother Nature, but highlights the 2030 mission, stating that “Apple is on a journey,” aiming to overcome “barriers” and motivated to “keep moving forward” (p. 3).
The Mother Nature commercial shows employees nervously preparing for the meeting, after which they give a presentation to Mother Nature, followed by a stare-down between Cook and his visitor. Lastly, the employees celebrate their successful review. The video is made with a mix of actors and Apple representatives, including Cook and vice-president Lisa Jackson playing themselves. 5 Ultimately, the video boldly claims Mother Nature is happy with Apple, although she also gives a warning: “don’t disappoint your mother!”
Apple presents itself as a socially responsible actor, aware of debates on climate and technology. There seems to be a clear narratological choice in casting Octavia Spencer, an award-winning Black female Hollywood actress, for the role of Mother Nature. This fits into Apple's tradition of incorporating societal debates (e.g. the representation of Black actresses) into its advertising. 6 At the same time, the video also reproduces modern binaries of gender and race, presenting Apple and its white male CEO versus nature, personified as a Black woman. This dichotomy problematically resonates with old-fashioned colonial and masculine tropes about white saviorism and patriarchal protection of an untamed and helpless wilderness (Merchant, 1980). The stare down between Cook and Mother Nature further reproduces this: while the latter is portrayed as the winner of the stare down, it is in fact Cook who “wins” by convincing Mother Nature that his company is a worthy ally. The video is an example of a green capitalist technique to diffuse critiques by developing a reflexive story which highlights the progressive and innovative values of the company (Goldstein, 2018).
The Microsoft campaign also contains references to a “sustainability journey,” but the company mainly emphasizes the importance of using technology for “good” and obtaining datafied insights to help us “understand” the planet. In its 2022 report, Microsoft writes the Planetary Computer will deliver “a new level of planetary insights to corporations and governments around the world” (p. 5). The promotional, animated “Explainer” video (2020), narrates how large data collections, aggregated in the Planetary Computer platform, allow for a more systematic understanding of the Earth, and eventually, help “humanity” to “solve” the climate crisis. A voice-over explains the need to “save” the earth and its biodiversity, as “we are part of this rich, natural ecosystem.” Quickly, though, the video frames the climate crisis as a lack of information, stating, “we can’t solve problems that we can’t see.”
Microsoft presents the issue as an educational journey: the problem is not an economy that threatens ecosystems and biodiversity, the problem is a lack of data to learn from, which can be solved through the digital infrastructures of Microsoft. Microsoft decouples itself from “old” pollutive industries and simplifies the climate crisis as an apolitical information crisis that can be fixed by gathering more data (presented as something already “out there”). The solution fits Microsoft's core business of datafication: offering a fix by building a database on its cloud infrastructure, Azure. By doing so, the complex problem of the climate crisis is “disaggregated into a series of discrete challenges” (Goldstein, 2018: 157). At the same time, the video presents what Van Leeuwen (2007) calls a “cautionary tale”: if we do not take action (as proposed by Microsoft), the planet will be in a dire state.
The Planetary Computer has been understood as an example of the wish of tech companies “to transform Earth into actionable and intelligible computational artifacts and operations” (Richardson and Munster, 2023: 1). In addition, Lukacz (2024: 11) writes how Microsoft uses the frame of “democratization” to sell the Planetary Computer's data production as a social project around environmental knowledge production, while in fact “environmental data comes to be valued as an AI training dataset”. In the sustainability report, the tool is presented as one initiative within the overarching AI for Good Lab that fits the company's overall goal to accelerate the “ability to measure, manage, and protect ecosystems” (p. 5). This recurring rhetorical logic suggests how, by tuning into nature's “raw” data production and by developing AI tools, humanity can better sustain and understand “nature.”
Authorization: Legacies, expertise, and the inevitability of progress
The strategy of authorization refers to the ways in which a company ascribes itself with the authority to legitimize its activities and explain its right to exercise this authority (Van Leeuwen, 2007). Tech companies boast about their company's identity, values, and past achievements, reasoning that their expertise also qualifies them as climate leaders. Such techno-optimistic narratives assume technological progress is inevitable and always desirable. Naturally, this progress can only be delivered by the company themselves, a strategy Natale et al. (2019) describe as “corporational determinism.”
All three companies refer to their expertise as technological innovators to promote their approach. Amazon writes on its sustainability page that it wants to use its “scale and culture of innovation” to help solve “complex, urgent, and interconnected” environmental problems. Such statements convey the idea that Silicon Valley's mentality and approach are best suited to “tackle” the climate crisis, alluding to the history of US tech culture and its “hacking ethos” and “design thinking” rationale as its perks (e.g. Streeter, 2011). The discourse of authorization goes hand in hand with a narrative of “democratization,” positioning platform companies as generous actors sharing their expertise for the “greater good” (Luchs, 2023). The companies use common tropes from the Silicon Valley playbook, highlighting their “freely” available infrastructures and their “innovative,” “tenacious,” “growth-oriented,” and “entrepreneurial spirit” as advantages.
Apple explains its authority by stating that sustainability has always been and will always be part of its brand identity. On the website, Apple is portrayed as an innovator and aims to appeal to individual consumers, presenting the smart watch as “a carbon neutral milestone on your wrist.” Apple is there to protect nature, with Cook represader”: a CEO who is framed as a caretaker or an ally of Mother Nature. Here, we see a new iteration of a longer tradition within Apple, which is to position Apple (and technology in general) as part of nature, by creating the illusion of companionship, a bonding moment between nature and culture. 7 The brand's strategically chosen brand name further speaks to this naturalness (Niessen, 2021). Yet as Hogan (2018) writes, while tech companies envision themselves as partners of nature, they are in fact “enslaving nature,” continuing their material expansion and further encouraging consumption.
Next to their own authority, companies might refer to an “impersonal authority” (Van Leeuwen, 2007) to legitimize their operations and give credibility to their own plans. Microsoft, for example, calls for shared responsibility and references the IPCC in its report to underscore “the urgent need for global collective action” (p. 4). While the company promotes its ability to make its own operations and that of its clients more sustainable, it is always quick to address the climate crisis as a collective issue and to downplay its own role. This aligns with the strategy within green capitalism to constantly switch between taking responsibility and diverting attention elsewhere (Goldstein, 2018).
Authorization works as a mechanism to consolidate ongoing processes of platformization, by creating a circular argument: companies are credible and thus deserve to expand, and because they expand, they are more credible as corporate authorities and indispensable as infrastructural providers. At the same time, companies point to external factors and shared responsibility to avoid negative consequences or critiques.
Rationalization: Company morality and climate concerns
The third strategy is rationalization, which explains how the company's approach is rationalized, or morally justified. For Van Leeuwen (2007: 102), this means imbuing actions with a certain quality to moralize it and “link it to a discourse of values.” The actions of tech companies are justified with references to qualities such as efficiency, equality, and sustainability. Legitimization through “moral evaluation”—described as a distinct category by Van Leeuwen but combined in my framework—refers to the framing of actions as a principle of idealism: something is the “right” thing to do. In tech-on-climate discourse, actions are legitimized by referring to lofty principles such as “saving the planet” and harnessing a “green revolution” by innovating, collaborating, and learning. Here, the companies’ narratives and their self-acclaimed authority are mobilized to foreground seemingly altruistic motives and mask commercial interests.
All three campaigns present the companies as concerned frontrunners with high moral ambitions. The Climate Pledge presents Amazon as a company tackling the climate crisis on a macro scale. Microsoft's AI for Good campaign frames the company and its AI products as designed with a noble yet ill-defined purpose: for the greater good. Apple's 2030 campaign presents the company as inherently clean and sustainable. Indeed, all companies want to highlight their humanitarian concerns and “tech-for-good” mentality (Madianou, 2022). But their moral values are deliberately kept vague, which makes it hard to critique the companies’ plans for a “better” and “greener” world. Similar critiques have been expressed about the term “smart” as a synonym for technological innovation (Halpern and Mitchell, 2023).
Although moralization is an important part of the rationale companies present, their narratives also contain other reasonings. The unstoppable progress of technology is often harnessed as a reason to embrace climate solutions, for example, when Microsoft portrays AI as the only credible solution. In the “AI for Good” video (2024), director of the AI for Good Lab Juan M. Lavista Ferres is filmed saying: “Sometimes, AI is not just a solution, it's the only solution.” With this campaign, Microsoft takes part in imagining AI as a disruptive yet powerful technological development, whose (environmental) potential the company can help to “unlock,” but without commenting on the ecological impact of AI tools themselves. Here, the development of “green AI” tools is promoted to morally justify all AI practices, which convolutes the discussion on the (un)sustainability of AI.
Visualization: Companionship between tech and nature
The fourth strategy focuses on the aesthetics of these campaigns. Their carefully designed visual elements are an essential part of the legitimization of the companies’ activities. The visual legitimization strategy expresses the value of sustainability for the company by creating the illusion of a companionship between the company and nature. To convey this companionship, campaigns, for example, use the color green and pastoral imagery of nature. By doing so, the companies aim to balance the cleanliness of their innovative operations with their “naturalness.”
Although each campaign has a distinct visual style, all combine meticulously chosen colors, pictures, drawings, and video footage. All reports, for example, include a lot of statistics, graphs, and figures which quantify the companies’ progress. While they allow the companies to highlight their successes, such visualizations sometimes create confusion instead of clarity for readers (Keilbach, 2025; Morrison, 2019).
The companies also use animations or drawings to present a simplified version of the company operations and its relation to the environment, such as Apple's website, Amazon's Climate Pledge video, and Microsoft's Planetary Computer video (Figures 3 to 6). The Microsoft Planetary Computer video is a black-and-white animation with simple drawings of nature and the globe. The data gathering process is visualized by trees, rabbits, and birds transforming from their organic shape into binary code. The animations are not just basic; they also flatten Microsoft's message. Nature is reduced to a few trees and animals, research data and information is equated with binary code, and a research breakthrough is visualized as a burning lightbulb next to a researcher.
The Apple sustainability website contains keywords marked in green, faux-handwritten phrases, and “sustainable” symbols. Screenshot by the author (19 January 2024).
The animated Amazon Climate Pledge video (2022) explains how customers can shop “climate pledge friendly” products through the Amazon web shop. Screenshot by the author.
The Planetary Computer commercial (2020) uses simple animations to illustrate the climate crisis and the solution of data production and analysis to better understand “nature”. Screenshot by the author.
The Planetary Computer commercial (2020) uses simple animations to illustrate how researchers share data and obtain new insights through the tool. Screenshot by the author.
Companies also sanitize and isolate their operations from “nature”. Such a clean aesthetic is visible in Apple's choice to decontextualize its products and the minerals, by placing these against a white or black background, for example, in its sustainability report (2023, pp. 7, 15, 31, 37–38). This visual strategy fits in the long tradition of purity myths (Smith, 1998) made possibly by strategies of withdrawal and erasure (Pasek, 2019), which distances companies from the complexity of natural ecosystems and the environmental harm they cause.
However, in other instances, companies use natural imagery to declare their love for nature and make a positive, visual connection between their own operation and the natural environment. Microsoft's report (2023, pp. 1, 3, 71), for example, is filled with full-color nature images. These images appear throughout the discourse, holding no direct relation to the companies’ operations. In sum, images do not only convey a partnership between tech and nature but also visualize the value of companies and their sustainability projects.
Green platform capitalism and Silicon Valley's ecomodernism
In this section, I discuss how the aforementioned four legitimization strategies express a worldview that imagines particular tech-nature relations. I claim they share an ecomodernist ideology tailored to the practices of Big Tech, designed to promote what I have termed green platform capitalism. Operating at the intersection of green and platform capitalism, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft are aiming to reconcile digital and ecological transformations by proposing a new business model at the forefront of these transformations. In this business model, they push for the acceleration of “green growth” as the right trajectory to “tackle” the climate crisis, while problematically, obfuscating the role of their extractive and datafied operations in the processes causing the ongoing climate and ecological crisis. In what follows, I highlight three themes which underpin the legitimization strategies: the datafication of Earth, the decoupled subject, and the naturalization of technology.
The datafication of Earth
All three companies frame their technological tools and platform infrastructures as a helping hand to a vulnerable planet. By doing so, they reconfigure the planet and its complex ecosystems into a singular system that can be known and understood through technofixes. Microsoft most clearly presents a version of this idea with its Planetary Computer tool that helps us “know more” about the state of the planet. In this vision, the companies’ core activities do not have to change; the way forward lies in the intensification of datafied solutions through cloud infrastructures. Microsoft reduces Earth to an object that “can be fully computationally observed,” not acknowledging how planetary visions are always incomplete (Richardson and Munster, 2023: 5). Likewise, Apple and Amazon offer users false assurance by promoting climate-friendly products and proposing minimal improvements as ways to, in Apple's terminology, “make mother nature proud.” This narrow, techno-optimistic focus, in combination with a notion of knowledge as a computational capacity (Braidotti, 2013), is a core element of Silicon Valley's ecomodernism. This ideology is expressed through a “whole-systems” language that is grounded in the history of US hegemonic tech culture and inspired by cybernetic, ecological, and computational theories (Riemens, 2024).
Whereas sensing technologies gave rise to a reconceptualization of the earth as programmable, what Gabrys (2016) refers to as “program earth,” now platform companies are expanding their rationale of systematically collecting, processing, and monetizing data (Helmond, 2015) to reconceptualize Earth, creating a vision of what I call “platform earth.” In this discursive, ecomodernist project, the “platform” becomes the lens to view the world, presenting environmental decline and climate change as a set of issues that can be fixed through platformization. 8
The relation between technology (platforms) and earth in this ecomodernist view is paradoxical. As Neyrat (2019: 89) writes, it is “torn between, on the one hand, the idea that everything is interconnected and, on the other, the desire for terraforming the planet from the outside.” In tech-on-climate discourse, companies are inconsistent in their argument, positioning themselves as partners, experts, intermediaries, and rulers of nature, all at the same time. The idea of a datafied planet best governed by tech actors is accompanied by conflicting and simplified understandings of nature as a finite collection of raw materials that should be used and distributed optimally, or an abundant source of clean energy. Apple, for example, acknowledges the problems of working with finite materials, actively trying to replace conflict materials with other materials and invest in recycling, but it also decouples its operation from material realities and sanitizes its businesses to an unrealistic extent. Likewise, Microsoft describes the world as a complex ecosystem threatened by industrialization, while dissociating the tech sector from fossil-fueled industries to which it is in fact tightly connected through economic partnerships (Hao, 2024; Kimball, 2024).
The paradoxical visions on nature together create a vision of what Jennifer Dempsey (2016: 237) calls “enterprising nature”: a pragmatic, palatable version of nature conservation that does not require businesses to reconsider their relation to the environment, and instead offers “its message of ever-increasing rational decisions, its story of ever-improving governance and progress at the hands of the right ecological-economic facts.” Progress, rationality, and management are examples of Silicon Valley tech speak, now adapted to address the climate crisis. Part of this narrative is understanding nature as a passive entity, reducing it to “wilderness” or “other” (Cronon, 1996), a site for recreation, or for production, reducing earth to a “planetary mine” (Arboleda, 2020) or “landscapes of computation” (Crawford, 2021). In these narratives, Big Tech takes on the role of a powerful agent, again and again imbuing nature with a new value in line with the needs of platform infrastructures and its users.
The decoupled subject
Although tech-on-climate discourse only occasionally shows people (often employees and researchers), it offers an overarching vision of humanity, which falls back on an old-fashioned humanist dichotomy of humans versus nature. Presenting the human subject and its industrial practices as opposite to nature, this dichotomy reproduces human exceptionalism and fails to account for the entanglement of humans and their natural-cultural ecosystems (Haraway, 2016). The ecomodernist dream of decoupling technology and humans from nature envisions a world in which economic growth can be “absolutely” separated from an abstract, sanitized natural environment, a promise disputed by researchers (Crist, 2015; Fletcher and Rammelt, 2017).
Paradoxically, tech-on-climate discourse also gives the impression that technology will ensure a renewed, harmless connection (coupling) between industrialized societies and nature. Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple claim to help save local communities and ecosystems, but their acknowledgement of these interdependencies remains superficial. This is demonstrated, for example, by promotional materials for carbon compensation programs, which are key to the companies’ often repeated claims of becoming “carbon neutral” (Temple, 2025). In reference to Microsoft's cloud service Azure, Pasek (2019) speaks of “fungible mediation” in the reality of carbon credits and offsets, critiquing the fuzziness of energy certificates and other compensation programs that make a company appear sustainable, but that do not necessarily lead to actual environmental wins. By leaning on these methods, Big Tech offers a “cybernetic-ecosystemic dream” (Hogan, 2018), a form of ecological management which enables the exploitation of nature and places the “human” outside of this system.
The notion of a singular “human” is crucial here: tech-on-climate discourse presents the human as a singular subject who benefits from the sustainability plans produced within the elitist, neocolonial, masculine culture of Silicon Valley that views land and materials as theirs to use (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Little and Winch, 2021; Zylinska, 2018). Individuals are only addressed as users who need to behave more sustainably, or as a community that will reap the fruits from the technological solutions proposed. Meanwhile, the limitations of Silicon Valley's understanding of “innovation” and “improvement” (Canfield, 2023), as well as the sometimes detrimental and unequally distributed effects of platform-governed sustainability, remain undiscussed.
Naturalization of technology
The datafication of Earth and the decoupling of the subject are tied together by the core element of the ecomodernist narrative: the celebration of techno-fixes as key enablers of green growth. Digital technology is imagined as a partner of nature and thereby naturalized. With naturalization, I refer both to the becoming “environmental” of technology and to the habituation of its use, as “second nature.” Across the campaigns, individual and corporate users are told that to act sustainably is to stay and work within the platform ecosystem, which solidifies the market position of these companies. In doing so, the companies further entrench their users in their technological infrastructures. These campaigns thus promote platformization by reasoning that this natural economic state is beneficial to the environment. On a more philosophical level, these companies present themselves as operating in harmony with nature, or even as part of nature. Hopster et al. (2023) point to the strategic, conceptual appropriation of nature and “naturalness” by companies to appeal to people's positive associations with nature, thus using nature as inspiration, model, or point of reference, albeit in a reductionist way. This is a recurring paradox: the naturalness of technology exists next to a strong image of a unified technology-driven humanity separated from nature, creating impossible narratives that are soothed and fixed by the cultural techniques used in tech-on-climate discourse.
The naturalization of digital platform infrastructures serves to make tech companies appear as best suited to decide the “way out” of the climate crisis, as if there is one. Meanwhile, this framing deviates our attention from the continuous environmental impact of their businesses while reinforcing its logics under the umbrella of sustainability. Hogan (2018) and Gabrys (2023) claim the promises made in green tech capitalist narratives incite an infinite loop of greener consumption that does not actually present a new, greener approach to business. Gabrys (2023: 135) describes how sensing and measurement technologies used to analyze nature “contribute at the same time to reworking and transforming the very environments and problems they would monitor,” which in turn spurs “new modes of monitoring and technological interventions.” Such AI-, data-, or tech-for-good initiatives can replace other more meaningful commitments (Espinoza and Aronczyk, 2021) or reproduce colonial power dynamics, while demonstrating the lack of Big Tech's self-reflexivity (Henriksen and Richey, 2022; Madianou, 2021).
Combined, these three narratological elements reveal how ecomodernism as an ideology contains many contradictions. These contradictions show that tech-on-climate discourse does not offer substantial, concrete plans for climate action, but largely acts as a smokescreen, selling a fantasy about a green economy forever out of reach. It naturalizes technology by positioning it as an essential, mediating layer between humanity and Earth. My critique of tech-on-climate discourse resonates with the work of Callison (2014: 239), who, in a discursive analysis of the Australian company Ceres, writes “it tends to think of linguistic and vernacular changes as a kind of product.” In this sense, the product “sold” through tech-on-climate discourse is the sustenance of the status quo of platform capitalism, with potential environmental benefits as mere side effects.
Conclusion: Big Tech's ecomodernism in light of new AI and climate futures
The emergence of tech-on-climate discourse as a subgenre of platform discourses shows how tech companies have, from the 2010s onwards, felt the pressure to position themselves in relation to the increasingly alarming facts about the climate crisis. As my analysis shows, there is not one narrative or strategy, but rather a range of stories, examples, and objects together persuading stakeholders of the legitimacy and benefits of tech companies and erasing potential conflicts. These strategies are constantly adapted vis-à-vis geopolitical and economic developments.
Tech-on-climate discourse reveals a shared ecomodernist ideology tailored to green platform capitalism, which evokes a story of the planet saved from climate change without crucial changes in our way of life and our economic systems, with the right technological innovations and corporate interventions. Contradictory claims make it harder to unveil this overarching strategy, but such confusion, and at times paradoxical messaging, has been part of Silicon Valley's strategy since the 1990s (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996). Contemporary tech-on-climate discourse presents a hopeful vision of a future in which humanity, thanks to technology and innovation, operates in synergy with its environment. This techno-optimistic worldview is built around simplified conceptions of a datafied planet, naturalized technology, and a singular understanding of humanity. In their carefully designed texts and images, companies use rhetorical strategies to separate companies from unwanted responsibilities and obfuscate material impact, or, vice versa, create an association between the companies and “nature,” overemphasizing the impact of their initiatives and their moral dedication to the climate. I refer to these strategic pairings and separations as “couplings” and “decouplings.” These terms symbolize both a discursive strategy and an ideologically motivated vision on tech-nature relations (Riemens, 2024).
Writing in the middle of 2025, the case studies from the timeframe of 2019–2024 now represent a historical era preceding the second Trump administration, in which figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos have endorsed Trump's presidency. While, in paradox with Trump's climate change denialism, platform companies are still—albeit more reluctantly—advertising their sustainability goals, their climate concerns are vocalized less, also because their rollout of AI services has put them off track in reaching these goals (Zahn, 2025). With their increased energy needs driven by AI, companies are trying to secure access to cheap energy, including nuclear energy and fossil fuels, positioning it as a bottleneck for the economic expansions they are aiming for (Calma, 2024). Such expressions of “AI futurism” present AI as a transformative force (Schütze, 2024), discursively framing its environmental impact or energy need as a temporary setback that can be overcome (Temple, 2024).
Going forward, it will become clear whether future PR campaigns reuse existing tactics and further envision a seamless symbiosis between an AI and green transition under the umbrella of platform capitalism. So far, Silicon Valley continues to use its economic, political, and cultural power to direct attention, investments, and policy-making efforts towards solutions in line with their ecomodernist convictions. Google, for example, is doubling down on its promises around AI for sustainability, directly targeting the European Union with a new report (Kroeber-Riel, 2025). Again, such narratives around “green AI” uphold myths about averting climate crises with technological solutions not yet developed or invented. The trust in market solutions (often coupled with a disdain for governmental regulation) underscores the need for a detailed understanding and critique of how tech companies legitimize their operations and how they advance the expansion of their platform infrastructure under the guise of sustainability (Riemens and Van Dijck, 2025). Importantly, there is an ongoing debate about how environmental impact, including energy use, carbon emissions, or forms of pollution, can be critically assessed, and when popular claims of “carbon neutrality” or “net zero” are misleading, as they are often based on controversial carbon offsetting programs (Fankhauser et al., 2022). I agree with other environmental media scholars that Big Tech's discursive and data infrastructural efforts, whether they are already being executed or remain speculative, have effects on political decision-making, economic investments, the energy sector, local communities, biodiversity, and more broadly, what constitutes as knowledge and progress (Andersen, 2022; Goldstein and Nost, 2022; Jaikumar and Grieveson, 2022).
To conclude, the environmental impact of the tech sector, the unfeasibility of “green” solutions, their volatile goals, and the optimistic tone taken by the companies are reasons for concern. While critiques of green growth accumulate (King et al., 2023), tech companies still launch campaigns to promote such initiatives and shape what counts as environmentalism. Techno-solutionist tendencies are not new, but with the environmental situation more dire than ever, the critical scrutiny of greenwashing and its myriad, constantly changing, manifestations is also more important than ever.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Niels Niessen, Anne Helmond, Inga Luchs, Anneke Smelik, and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research has been financed as part of the research project “Platform Discourses” led by Dr Niels Niessen and funded by the European Union (ERC Starting Grant, 850849). The work is also supported by a Spinoza grant of the Dutch Research Council (NWO), awarded in 2021 to José van Dijck, Professor of Media and Digital Society at Utrecht University.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.