Tech4Bad in the Oil and Gas Industry: Exploring Choices for ICT Professionals

Fossil fuels contribute 86% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. These emissions must decline rapidly every year to reach Net Zero by 2050 in order to stay within internationally agreed limits for climate change. The oil and gas industry makes extensive use of information and communication technology (ICT) to run their business of supplying these fuels. In this paper, we investigate the role of ICT in the oil and gas industry, and explore how ICT professionals might reason about their involvement in this deeply unsustainable sector. Through a scoping review, we find that ICT is an essential enabler of the fossil fuel sector with ICT budgets in USD billions and tens of thousands of ICT staff. We map out case studies of collective action against unethical corporate practices and survey pragmatic and ethical bases for deciding whether to leave or stay in the oil and gas industry. Using reports from the activity of ICT professionals, we identify patterns for action. The results show that there are important gaps in the literature on the role of ICT in the oil and gas industry. To counter this, we propose a research agenda to better understand the extent to which ICT enables this damaging industry (“Tech4Bad”) and how ICT professionals think about their role within it.