A Veteran ExxonMobil Engineer Quits After Waiting For Years For Company To Change; He's Not Alone
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. From his base at Exxon’s sprawling campus outside Houston, Chang helped the company maximize production at far-flung oil and gas projects, from Guyana to Qatar to America’s fracking fields. 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.
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. He had hoped to find a job in the renewable energy sector, but meanwhile, he poured himself into his new Geos Neighborhood, where residents hold monthly meetings to discuss how to lighten their load on the planet. A small herd of goats graze on undeveloped lots, the community’s fossil-free answer to weed control. A blue Nissan Leaf and a black Tesla Model 3 sit side-by-side in his garage, plugged into chargers fed by solar panels on his roof.
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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. Another former employee, Enrique Rosero, has said in interviews that he left Exxon last year after being punished for speaking out about climate change. Exxon’s announcements in October that cratering oil prices would force it to cut thousands of jobs globally has delivered more cause for anxiety.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08022021/a-disillusioned-exxonmobil-engineer-quits-to-take-action-on-climate-change-and-stop-making-the-world-worse/