Back in January, the Guardian carried a story about Forum for the Future having decided to no longer work with Shell or BP. I explained the grounds on which we came to that decision, and while acknowledging “our failure” to turn what were once good working relationships with both those companies into anything resembling sustained traction, I also reminded readers that this experience had, if anything, reinforced our commitment to working with those companies in other sectors intent on bringing about real transformation.

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The response to the article has been illuminating – broadly supportive, apart from a number of hostile voices pointing out that we should have severed our ties with Shell and BP many years ago. But I’ve been particularly struck by the reaction from old colleagues either still working in the sector, or only recently out of it, reminding me yet again of the very personal dilemmas faced by many people working in “big oil” and other fossil fuel businesses.



First, an historical anecdote. Back in 1997, John Browne (BP’s CEO at that time) made a bold decision to pull out of the Global Climate Coalition, the principal voice of climate denialism inside the industry in those days. Externally, the response was uniformly positive, apart from the other oil majors, who were vitriolic in their contempt.

Internally, this decision (and Browne’s subsequent initiatives under the Beyond Petroleum rubric) was enthusiastically received. As Browne himself said at the time: “You need the will and the minds of the people inside a company to achieve anything.” It went down particularly well when exposed to the “dog and duck test”: among friends and families, BP employees noticed a marked uplift in warmth and positive reactions to their company. One of my BP colleagues at the time described it as the Beyond Pariah effect.

It is impossible for most BP and Shell employees not to have some kind of personal stake in the overall positioning of their companies on climate change. And that stake is all about the interface between science and personal morality.

As we all know, the science of climate change is highly dynamic. But almost without exception, most climate scientists would now agree that the evidence of accelerating, manmade climate change has got increasingly robust since the late 1980s, let alone since 1997. Teams of people inside these oil majors track the state of that science carefully, and as the consensus deepens around the threat of severe (and possibly irreversible) impacts of climate change on humankind, the personal moral dilemmas deepen proportionately.

For a few, it gets to the point where they can no longer justify working in the sector. For many, the level of discomfort may be somewhat amplified, but the pros of sticking in there continue to outweigh the cons, not just because of financial reasons, but because of loyalty to colleagues and (rather more rarely these days) a feeling that it may still be possible to turn their particular oil tanker around.

It’s only fair to add, in my experience, that most employees do not spend a huge amount of time explicitly defining that discomfort threshold. After all, their companies have a clear and continuing licence to operate from governments, regulators and citizens alike, they do their best to stay the right side of the law, and many of them as individuals are as uncertain or complacent about the potential impacts of manmade climate change as the rest of society.

But once acquired, through proper application to the science, knowledge about causes and consequences cannot easily be put aside. Many Shell and BP employees are themselves scientists and engineers, and correspondingly uneasy about decision-making processes in society that may present themselves as evidence-based policy but are, in effect, exactly the opposite.

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Let’s personalise this for a moment. Imagine a relatively senior employee, perhaps in strategy, investor relations or upstream, diligently tracking the cut-and-thrust of the scientific debate, fully informed about the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and curious enough to track down the work of the outliers – both on the heading towards apocalypse end of the scale and those in the more sceptical or outright denialist camps. Then imagine that those inquiries led that person to the following unavoidable conclusions:

1. That climate change is indeed predominantly manmade.

2. Is already impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

3. Is likely to get much worse, much faster.

4. Is giving rise to phenomena in the Antarctic and the Arctic that are already described by some scientists as potentially irreversible.

At that point, the personal moral dilemma may well become too onerous to bear. Or at least, too onerous if their company has shown no serious sign of transforming their role in the energy economy.

I’m trying to avoid being judgmental here, in some kind of absolutist way. It’s always much more nuanced and complex than an article like this can ever do justice to – which means I have little time for the kind of extremist critics who describe all employees in fossil fuel companies as morally bankrupt. And though I’m a huge admirer of the eminent US economist and commentator Paul Krugman, I find it hard to buy into his idea that anyone who denies the evidence about climate change should be “punished in the afterlife” on the grounds that “this kind of denial … is an almost inconceivable sin”.

But neither am I prepared to condone those who think it’s somehow OK to go on living out one’s well-paid working life in a morality-free zone. No one has that right. And as the moral dimensions of accelerating climate change become more present in our debates, I suspect that more and more employees in the world of fossil fuels will find anxiety slowly turning to anguish.

Forum for the Future will be delving into sustainability issues from a rather different, more reflective perspective at the Reconnections at Findhorn course, taking place at the Findhorn Foundation from 26-30 April.

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