” Photo Credit: Michael Kodas/Inside Climate News

By Nicholas Kusnetz, Inside Climate News

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.

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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. 

“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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Chang belongs to a generation of engineers, environmental scientists and computer developers who entered the fossil fuel sector just as the world was waking up to the grave threat posed by the industry’s products. While oil companies are already under pressure from investors, governments and society at large, Chang’s story reflects another emerging challenge for the industry: a younger generation of workers who are worried about climate change and their own role in determining what kind of future their children will inherit.

“We as an industry underestimate the intense pressure that oil and gas employees are under,” said Tisha Schuller, founding principal at Adamantine Energy and the former head of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. Schuller has argued that the industry needs to engage with its growing workforce of millennials, who, she noted, are more likely to be concerned about climate change and are facing peer pressure over their work. 

“I feel confident that more than half of the millennials working in the oil and gas industry are interested in seeing our industry take on an assertive, solution oriented role,” Schuller said.

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.

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