Short abstract:

This study examines AI's role in addressing the environmental crisis as portrayed in world- leading science journals and challenges the prevailing technological optimism.

Long abstract:

Whatever AI may actually be, it is by now presented by many, including scientists and engineers, as relevant -if not the key- to addressing the environmental crisis. Building on ongoing research of an Athens STS research team on the rhetoric surrounding AI and, further, the way energy renewability may be actually defined, we propose to present a paper on the way the connection between AI and the environmental crisis is being portrayed in world-leading science journals, like Nature, Science, Scientific American, New Scientist. The research to be presented can usher in exposing the flaws in the current technological optimism (frequently: techno solutionism) by closely examining what counts as AI in this literature and how exactly it is supposed to save the environment. Moreover, from the other end, how the environmental crisis is framed in the context of being presented as something that can be addressed by AI.