Science is no longer above suspicion. Once trusted as an impartial guide, it is now entangled with politics, corporate agendas and selective narratives — nowhere more so than in climate policy.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has evolved since the 1990s, but its framing has not always been neutral. In its early reports, greenhouse gas emission blame often fell on countries with large populations and livestock herds, casting developing nations like India in a negative light. While India pushed back internationally, it also adopted domestic reforms aligned with this framing — mechanising agriculture, reducing reliance on animals and licensing modern slaughterhouses.
“The boundaries between science, politics and profit have blurred.”
Today, attribution is more precise, yet the political selectivity remains. Agriculture in the Global South continues to face disproportionate scrutiny, while industrial supply chains in wealthy economies largely avoid the same glare.
Agrochemical and seed companies deploy strategies that echo the tobacco industry — funding favourable research, undermining independent studies and manufacturing doubt to delay regulation. Pesticide firms ghost-write papers, weaken rules through lobbying and political donations and re-license harmful chemicals, while seed corporations patent genetically modified and hybrid varieties that restrict farmers’ ability to save seeds.
Both sectors shape policy through trade agreements, the revolving door with regulators and aggressive intellectual property enforcement. While branding themselves as champions of innovation and food security, they marginalise traditional practices, biodiversity and indigenous knowledge, discrediting critics to protect their dominance and profits.
At the COP climate conferences, the dynamic is even starker. In the past five years, the process has shifted from negotiation to implementation of agendas forged in elite forums such as the World Economic Forum. These agendas often hinge on expensive technologies and finance controlled by developed nations — shifting the climate burden southward. Meanwhile, discussions have narrowed to carbon emissions, ignoring intertwined crises like plastic pollution, biodiversity loss and chemical contamination.
The Net Zero mantra has become climate policy’s magic phrase. In theory, it balances emissions with removals; in practice, it often means “burn now, offset later”. This keeps current profit structures intact while delaying systemic change. Critics argue this isn’t science challenging power — it’s science speaking the language power wants to hear.
“Net zero has become climate policy’s magic phrase — burn now, offset later.”
The mistrust deepens when we look at the “micro-environment” — the genetic and biological sphere. Gene editing, mRNA platforms and lab-grown foods are now promoted as climate solutions. Denmark’s use of Bovaer, a methane-reducing feed additive that alters a cow’s gut microbiome, is one example. It has been approved and tested, but public suspicion remains high, fuelled by a sense that these interventions serve markets more than ecosystems.
Nature is complex and bounded by limits. Yet the dominant climate strategy is to re-engineer nature through technology and finance, rather than adapting human systems to those limits. That may be good business, but it is bad ecology.
“The dominant climate strategy is not to live within nature’s limits, but to re-engineer them.”
Science can and must regain public trust — but only if it is willing to confront power rather than conform to it. Climate action must be re-anchored in the principles of nature, not the economic systems that created the crisis. Otherwise, science will not save the planet — it will help sell its future.