A Disillusioned ExxonMobil Engineer Quits to Take Action on Climate Change and Stop ‘Making the World Worse’

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022021/a-disillusioned-exxonmobil-engineer-quits-to-take-action-on-climate-change-and-stop-making-the-world-worse/

 

By Nicholas Kusnetz
February 8, 2021

For 16 years, Dar-Lon Chang worked as an engineer at ExxonMobil. Fresh out of graduate school, he was by all accounts exactly the type of person the company is known for hiring: smart, driven, diligent.

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He’d had an interest in alternative energy since his college days, and thought science and technology would blaze a path towards a future without fossil fuels. Exxon, he believed, could help lead the way. When he could, Chang tried to nudge the company along in small ways, holding out the hope that change would come.

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But with each passing year, Chang watched the climate crisis grow more urgent, while the company he had devoted his career to only deepened its commitment to oil and gas. Eventually, he became disillusioned.

So in 2019, without any prospect of future employment, he resigned, packed up with his wife and daughter, who had known no home other than Houston, and moved to a net-zero community outside Denver built around environmentally-conscious living.

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“I didn’t want the rest of my career to be wasted on something that I felt was making the world worse, when there was all the possibility to make things better,” he said recently.

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Exxon has become the corporate embodiment of the industry’s intransigence. It has remained committed to a future of expanding oil and gas production and was the last of the major multinational oil companies to adopt corporate-wide emissions reduction targets, announcing the pledge only in December. And while the company’s finances have crumbled in recent years, it remains by some metrics the largest of the Western investor-owned oil companies.

There is no evidence of any formal movement within Exxon’s ranks agitating for change. But Inside Climate News spoke with people who have worked at Exxon who expressed views similar to Chang’s.

One worker, who asked not to be named because she was not authorized to speak to the media, described a generational schism, saying she guessed that most employees under the age of 50 thought climate change was a serious issue. She recently left the company.

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One of the greatest appeals of a career at Exxon, Chang said, was the chance to work on a diverse range of projects that could help supply the world with energy. But as the climate crisis grew more dire, he said, the company’s management showed no interest and resisted calls to move into lower-carbon products.

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In 2018, Chang said, it became clear that the performance ranking system would remain the same. That fall, Chang’s daughter came home from school one day to report that her teacher had told the class she wanted to teach about climate change but was forbidden from doing so. “That kind of tipped me over the edge,” Chang said, “that I can’t let my daughter continue to grow up in this environment.”

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 But Coffin said people also found themselves caught between a career that prepared them only for oil and gas and their growing concerns about climate change. “People feel trapped,” he said, “because they have on the one hand a well paying job, and the mortgage and the family that they need to support, but on the other hand they have a personal ethical dilemma about working for an oil and gas company.”

A recent global survey of oil and gas workers found that only slightly more than half the respondents would choose to join the industry if they were entering the workforce now. A similar number said they would consider switching to the renewable energy sector.

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September. Chang said he’s been surprised by how difficult it’s been for someone with a Ph.D. in engineering, and a decade-and-a-half experience at one of the world’s top oil companies, to find employment helping to build clean energy.

“There are a lot of folks who would be happy to move from the oil and gas industry to renewables if there were enough opportunities, if they could make the switch relatively easily,” he said. “It’s very difficult, so something has to change along those lines if you want to have more people speak up and if you want to have more engineers be able to bring their skills to fight climate change.”

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