Read a transcript of this week’s episode, which features testimonials from people who quit their jobs to pursue work focused on climate change.
(Bloomberg) — In Episode 21 of the Zero podcast, we hear from listeners about their climate career stories: a war crimes lawyer on his transition to climate law, an Expedia executive on becoming the chief technology officer at a solar installer, a restaurant critic on founding an urban reforestation company. Listen to these stories and others like them in the full episode below, learn more about Zero here, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify and Google to stay on top of new episodes.
Our transcripts are generated by a combination of software and human editors, and may contain differences between the text and audio. Please confirm in audio before quoting in print.
Akshat Rathi
Welcome to Zero. I’m Akshat Rathi. This week: climate quitting. Last year, we put out a message seeking stories of people who decided to quit their jobs to spend their day working to tackle climate change. We received a lot of responses and we have listened to them all here at Zero. So in the New Year’s spirit, I wanted to share some of those stories with you. You’ll hear the producers of Zero — Christine and Oscar — introducing them. Enjoy.
Oscar Boyd
Hello Christine, happy New Year.
Christine Driscoll
Hello Oscar, happy New Year to you.
Oscar Boyd
One of the things we hear a lot about while working on this podcast is how many new jobs the green economy will create. But even though that transition is already well underway, I think it’s often talked about in the future tense. It’s something for later this decade, or maybe even next. So we wanted to hear from some of the people who have already taken a very deliberate decision to work in the climate space.
Christine Driscoll
Yeah, and I find people who’ve changed their careers really inspiring. I really enjoy hearing these stories. To switch fields is very difficult and scary, especially if you’ve already sunk years into your industry, you’ve got a lot of financial responsibilities and there’s always this feeling of “is it too late?” But as you’ll hear, the green economy is very real, and people found new jobs.
Oscar Boyd
Last year we put out a request for people to send us their own climate career stories. And we asked for four things.
Christine Driscoll
One: What job did you quit and what is your new role? Two: What moment made you quit? Three: What were your expectations, and what was the reality? And four: What advice do you have for others?
Oscar Boyd
And we heard from listeners from all over the world, and with all sorts of different career paths.Jackie Turner
I used to work in reality television in Hollywood.
Simon Berthoud
I left my job as a management consultant at BCG.
Aarne Grandlund
I live in Liperi in North Karelia, Finland.Rebecca Cooke
I decided to move in with my partner on a completely off-grid island.
Kristen Kammerer
Four and a half years ago, I quit my corporate job in the beauty industry in order to fight climate change.
Oscar Boyd
Unfortunately we won’t be able to play all of them, so really sorry if we don’t get round to yours. But thank you so much to everyone who sent in their stories. Christine, would you like to introduce the first one?
Christine Driscoll
Yes. The first story we’re going to hear comes out of the US, and it starts with disaster.
Laura Brown
My name is Laura Brown. And my story on this really starts in March 2020. It was March 3, in the middle of the night, when a massive tornado just completely wiped out my neighborhood in Nashville, and caused over one and a half billion dollars in damages to the Middle Tennessee community.
Newsreporter
It’s been one year since the mid-south witnessed history. A tornado outbreak taking the lives of 25 people, and changing the lives of countless others.
Laura Brown
That was then made worse when a week later the Covid lockdowns happened, and nobody in my community had any place to go, we didn’t have power, most everyone’s house was just completely destroyed. So we were basically climate refugees during the first part of the pandemic.
Christine Driscoll
Laura’s career had been on the upswing. She was a publisher for a travel magazine, she’d recently had a big promotion and been given a bigger budget. But when the pandemic hit, it shut down the travel industry, and forced her to rethink her career.
Laura Brown
And honestly, like the tornado really put a fire under my butt, that climate change is sort of no longer an issue that I can ignore. So I went to business school and took a bunch of extra classes on sustainability, ESG and running business for good. And then I spent about six months on the job search.
Christine Driscoll
That job search was much harder than she expected. She had an MBA, and she saw that people were talking about climate jobs, big institutions were putting money into climate, but —
Laura Brown
The reality was the jobs that I was applying to were largely looking for someone who already had climate experience. I think for every interview I got, I probably got 25 nos and probably another 50 times where I sent my resume into the ether and then didn’t ever hear anything again.
Oscar Boyd
I think anyone who’s recently applied for a job can identify with the agony of sending in applications and hearing nothing in return.
Christine Driscoll
Yes, I really loved her word choice of sending them into the ether.
Oscar Boyd
But she did eventually find a job?
Christine Driscoll
Happily, yes she did.
Laura Brown
And my advice to others is: You just have to make the decision and then stick with it. We’re in this for the long haul. This is not a problem that’s gonna go away. And there’s a lot of really great, profoundly empowering work to be done. Thank you.
Christine Driscoll
Thanks, Laura. Oscar, who’s next?
Oscar Boyd
We actually heard a lot of stories of people leaving the oil and gas industry. We heard from one listener called Jan, who was working in the public and government affairs department of Exxon in Germany, and he called quitting the company the best decision of his life.
Jan Bohnerth
I moved to Sweden, studied sustainable development, and even met my wife.
Oscar Boyd
But there was one story that really piqued my interest, and that came from Dimitri Lafleur.
Dimitri Lafleur
I was a geoscientist at Shell. And a geoscientist provides views and analysis on the hydrocarbon reservoirs. What they look like, how big they are, how much oil or gas is in there. Where you would drill to optimize oil or gas production.
Oscar Boyd
Dimitri had spent more than a decade working for Shell, and after a few postings in Europe, he became an advisor for the company’s offshore gas fields in Western Australia, which were exporting LNG to Asia.
Dimitri Lafleur
The moment I quit was the confirmation that Shell was not moving fast enough with diversification of its business portfolio. And at the time, I was thinking that Shell should use its competitive advantage to develop geothermal energy and move into the electricity sector. At the time, the idea that Shell would be moving into the electricity sector was laughed at.
Oscar Boyd
Dimitri says he was told Shell wouldn’t be committing any serious money to alternative energies for 15 years, and he realized he didn’t want to spend the next decade and half working on gas projects. So he left the company.
Christine Driscoll
So what went into that decision?
Oscar Boyd
Well, he told us that his job at Shell had given him a lot of security, and that the company was seen as a good employer when he joined in the 1990s. But when it came down to it, his values no longer matched the company’s, and that was the deciding factor.
Dimitri Lafleur
My expectation was that I had to go back to university to do a degree in climate change or energy transition to be able to transition to the renewable energy industry. The reality is that doing a PhD wasn’t necessary, but it did make me realize that the transition of a workforce is not easy. How do you effectively repurpose the skills that are present in an industry that fundamentally has to change?
Christine Driscoll
So what’s Dimitri doing now?
Oscar Boyd
He’s using his skills to evaluate the emission plans of big polluters.
Dimitri Lafleur
My role today is chief scientist at Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR). And we analyze the climate transition plans of big greenhouse gas emitters to understand how, and if, they are decarbonizing in line with the Paris Agreement.
Christine Driscoll
Let’s talk about another listener. This time, a restaurant reviewer.
Catherine Cleary
My name is Catherine Cleary. And I quit my job as a restaurant reviewer.
Christine Driscoll
Catherine was a food critic at the Irish Times in Dublin. And the turning point for her was reading a report that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, released in 2018. That report outlined what’s likely to happen if we exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming in the next few decades.
Catherine Cleary
I burst into tears at my desk. I was working from home at the time, so it was less embarrassing than it sounds. But the 12-year timeframe really hit me hard. My youngest son at the time was eight years old. So that 12 years would bring him to literally becoming an adult, coming of age in a world that was rapidly becoming uninhabitable.
Christine Driscoll
Fast-forward a couple of years and the pandemic hits. Restaurants close. And Catherine ended up using that time to start a new venture.
Catherine Cleary
In 2020, I set up a social enterprise with my co-founder called Pocket Forests. We try to reconnect people with nature in urban areas by helping them to regenerate soil and plant small pockets of native trees and shrubs.
Oscar Boyd
Catherine isn’t the only one who made their decision after seeing a major climate report. We also heard from Justin Kennedy, who was an oil and gas lawyer based in Australia for 22 years but who is now working on the construction of SunCable, a 4,200 kilometer subsea cable that will send Australian renewable energy to Singapore.
Justin Kennedy
The particular tipping point was in May 2021, when the IEA put out its report saying basically no new fossil fuel projects. And the sort of work I did was new developments. I was working on the Scarborough LNG project at the time — a massive project — and was thinking, “well, it probably is time to get out.” And so I was really, from that point on, motivated on getting a job in renewables.
Oscar Boyd
And so far he seems to be loving it.
Justin Kennedy
It’s still early days, I’ve only been doing it a couple of months. But it’s going brilliantly well, because the skills that I refined over many years, particularly in commercializing gas and LNG projects, it’s directly applicable. So it’s doing what I love doing. I’m enjoying it, it’s complimentary to my skills.
Oscar Boyd
Justin told us that the job security in his new role isn’t as good as it was when he was working as an oil and gas lawyer, but the upside is he gets to work on renewables. We heard from several people who had faced the same dilemma but no one said they regretted their decision.
Christine Driscoll
And what advice did Justin give?
Oscar Boyd
Basically to lean on your network, especially when it’s not clear what opportunities might exist for someone with your skill set.
Justin Kennedy
There’s not a lot of roles around and I do have some sympathy for people who stay in oil and gas. But I think we’re past the tipping point. The transition is happening, the roles will be there. Just keep working at it and hopefully you’ll find your opportunity.
Christine Driscoll
If you can’t find an opportunity, you can make it. We heard from Patrick Leung, who started a new enterprise, EarthShot Labs, after spending years in tech.
Patrick Leung
So I spent 11 years at Google, left Google to join Two Sigma Investments, and then I had a big awakening at the beginning of 2020.
Christine Driscoll
Again, early 2020, just before the pandemic hits, Patrick heads to Hawaii to go on a spiritual retreat.
Oscar Boyd
We’ve got Google, we’ve got finance, we’ve got a spiritual retreat in Hawaii. This is a very Silicon Valley sounding story.
Christine Driscoll
Yes, and it also taps into networks, so it continues. At the retreat, Patrick meets his cofounder and they create this company called EarthShot. And as they develop their projects they bring this tech-centric way of building things. But they slowly realize that this does not offer all the answers when it comes to something like forestry.
Patrick Leung
Adopting the traditional Silicon-Valley and financial-industry mentality of treating it like something to be optimized — like ride-sharing or building a search engine — is just not going to work. The most important thing is trusted relationships. You can’t just walk in with a technology solution and just expect people to say “Oh great, you have amazing technology, you can optimize this.” No, there’s sort of a messy, human, beautiful aspect to this that can’t just be solved using technology.
Oscar Boyd
After the break, what happens when you go to the ends of the earth for climate? And what do you do if you just want to stay put?
Oscar Boyd
Christine, you mentioned earlier in the episode what a life-changing event switching jobs can be.
Christine Driscoll
Yes, it affects everything. Your finances, how you spend your time, your relationships, and all of that weighs into someone’s decision.
Oscar Boyd
Which is why for most people, changing jobs is enough of an ordeal to want to keep everything else in life the same. But some listeners we heard from took their quest for a climate job a little bit further than others, like Rebecca Cooke.
Rebecca Cooke
I was a freelance journalist and communications professional and I was working in London. And I felt a real professional friction between what was deemed urgent by my work and what I knew to be urgent in reality.
Oscar Boyd
So what do you do when the professional friction becomes too much?
Rebecca Cooke
I quit my job. I left London as well at the same time, and I decided to move in with my partner on a completely off-grid island in New Zealand. To live completely off-grid, to be powered completely by solar, to try to get as much of our food as possible from a vegetable garden and get the water that we use from a nearby stream heated by a solar water heater.
Oscar Boyd
Rebecca is now an energy and climate content writer, maintaining contact with the world through her solar powered WiFi, which doesn’t always behave itself.
Rebecca Cooke
I did see an immediate drop in my earnings. And there definitely were times when the solar inverter would blow or winter meant the batteries weren’t charged enough for the WiFi to work. Some people just weren’t happy that I couldn’t meet a deadline within a few hours because I was relying on power that was provided by the sun. But that actually didn’t really bother me because I felt a real sense of renewed purpose from living in closer alignment with what I feel is right.
Oscar Boyd
Rebecca, thank you for using your precious solar power to send in that recording.
Christine Driscoll
Thank you! And there seems to be a trend of Londoners moving to Australasia as an antidote to a frustrating job. We also heard from Neil, who was working for a London-based travel magazine when he realized he wanted to move into the climate space.
Neil Simpson
Our offices were in Piccadilly Circus, and I remember sitting typing while Extinction Rebellion was protesting outside. And I remember hearing the helicopters, and I really wanted to be there. And I just thought, “why am I sat here, writing about the new exhibition at the National Gallery, when none of this s*** matters anymore?”
Christine Driscoll
Neil quit his job, moved to Australia in 2019 with his now ex-boyfriend, and spent most of the pandemic there. He worked on a regenerative farm, and began writing articles for Extinction Rebellion.
Neil Simpson
One of my articles was about banking and how people don’t think about where their money is being saved. And then we set up this organization called Bank.green. Basically, you go to Bank.green, and you can type in the name of your bank and the country you’re in and it’ll tell you whether or not your bank is investing in fossil fuels.
Oscar Boyd
Quick side note here to say that after listening to Neil’s story I actually went to the Bank.green website, checked my bank, saw it had invested $130 billion into fossil fuels over the last 5 years, and actually moved to a new, greener bank as a result.
Christine Driscoll
Yeah, changing banks is easier than changing jobs, if you’re so inclined. But unfortunately, despite the fact that Neil is doing good work, the change has not always been easy.
Neil Simpson
The reality has been that I struggle a lot with confronting this stuff every day. But that’s forced me to make sure I have some kind of balance, make sure I do things in my life that make me happy as well, while I’m working on this stuff. And then I’m also not getting paid much at the moment. I didn’t expect to get paid a lot but the reality is that if you have to start working for free and volunteering then do it, because no one’s going to pay us to save the world.
Christine Driscoll
Finding a new job in the climate space is not that different from looking for any new job. It can take a while to find something that matches your skill set and you have to be patient.
Oscar Boyd
But a recurring theme in the messages we received was the feeling of urgency to make the switch. A feeling that if we’re going to address the climate crisis, it’s now or never. I think this next story really exemplifies that.
Ben Batros
Hi, this is Ben Batros. I’d spend about 15 or so years working as a lawyer mainly on accountability for international crimes like war crimes and genocide, or transnational crimes like people smuggling or trafficking in persons.
Christine Driscoll
I remember when we got this voice memo and you messaged me like, “Oh my gosh, a war crimes lawyer wrote in.”
Oscar Boyd
Yeah it was pretty amazing to hear why he felt working on climate change was more urgent than what he was doing before. And what Ben told us was that he was at a moment in his career where he wanted to specialize. He had two options in front of him. One was to focus on inequality and political polarization. And the other was climate law. And in the end the urgency of the climate crisis won out.
Ben Batros
There was one day, I think I was out in the garden, and I just remember thinking that with climate change, if we get that wrong, it basically doesn’t matter what else we get right when you’re looking at it on a generational timescale. There are other issues that we can come back and fix later. We can’t do that with climate change.
Oscar Boyd
His decision was also influenced by a conversation with an old friend and colleague, who stressed how important it was that people from all different industries applied their skills to the problem.
Ben Batros
He said that climate change is an all-hands-on-deck emergency. But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to kind of do the same thing. We don’t all need to go out and become, you know, solar panel installers. We should all look at how the skills and expertise that we have can be deployed to address the climate crisis. And that requires some humility, because that may not always be the most exciting or high profile pieces.
Oscar Boyd
Coming back to what you said earlier Christine, it took Ben a lot of time, and a lot of patience to move into the climate space. He couldn’t just jump into working on the highest-level climate litigation, as much as he had the passion for it. So instead he built up a portfolio taking on climate projects here and there until he was able to land his new role.
Ben Batros
My new role, I work as director of legal strategy at a small NGO supporting enforcement action and litigation that address climate harmful activities: CCCA, which stands for the Center for Climate Crime Analysis.
Christine Driscoll
OK, so after that serious story. Oscar, have you heard of the solar coaster?
Oscar Boyd
That’s Disney Land’s new attempt at greenwashing?
Christine Driscoll
Sadly, no. It’s how people in the solar industry talk about how fast it’s changing, as our next listener found out.
Sandy Anuras
Hi there, my name is Sandy Anuras. And I’m the chief technology officer of Sunrun. I quit my job as senior vice president of Expedia Group’s commercial integrations department. It’s been three months since I joined Sunrun, and when I first joined someone said to me, “welcome to the solar coaster.” And I wasn’t quite sure what they meant by that. But it has been just a wild ride.
Christine Driscoll
Sunrun is a company that installs solar panels and batteries in homes across the US. And in just the first three months of Sandy working there, there were dramatic changes in how solar gets paid for. Some that were good for the solar industry, and some that were not so good. And then of course, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, extending tax credits for solar across the US. But for Sandy, that wild ride has been worth it.
Sandy Anuras
My advice is that life is really more than just about the dollars and cents. And so as you’re going through a decision-making framework for yourself and what might be next, I really encourage you to consider the types of problems that you’re solving and the impact that you’ll have to the world in the intangibles portion of your compensation package. Thanks.
Oscar Boyd
The transition to a green economy will create millions of jobs directly involved in climate issues. But the majority of companies will not be directly involved. They won’t be installing solar panels, or helping write climate legislation, but they will need to decarbonize. So what do you do if you’re a climate conscious employee, but aren’t looking to leave your job? Lucy Piper has some ideas:
Lucy Piper
Hi my name is Lucy Piper, and I run workforclimate.org.
Oscar Boyd
Lucy quit her role as a senior manager at a travel company to become the director of Work For Climate, which offers blueprints for decarbonizing companies from the inside.
Lucy Piper
I had the best job on the planet. I got to travel all over the world to make films about the communities and destinations that we visited. But the moment that prompted me to make the decision to quit. I’d recently become a parent, I was on my daily commute into the office, and Greta Thunberg had just given her first speech to the UN. And I found myself moved to tears uncontrollably when she said the words “we will never forgive you.” It really crystallized for me in that moment that, by doing nothing, I was complicit in the potential collapse that lay ahead.
Oscar Boyd
Lucy’s advice is this: If you’re in the position to make change from the inside, pursuing that might be just as effective as switching jobs.
Lucy Piper
The corporate sector is responsible for over 70% of global emissions, controls enormous capital that flows into the fossil fuel industry, and more importantly has the power to lobby governments for progressive climate policy. So employees have so much influence over how corporations behave. Good luck, thanks.
Christine Driscoll
Lucy’s advice about trying to make a change first is good and sober but as we’ve heard from many of our listeners, it’s not easy to do, especially if your job is tied to fossil fuels. Our final story is one of those.
Joe Daniel
Hello, my name is Joe Daniel. And in 2010, I was working as an engineer for the oilfield services company Baker Hughes. The moment that made me quit was when I pitched an idea that would help cut our refinery’s wastewater pollution in half and best of all, it would actually save the company money in the long run.
Christine Driscoll
But, the company rejected the idea.
Joe Daniel
And the reason that they gave was because they were afraid it might mean their permit would get more stringent down the road if regulators saw that they were able to do so much better than the current permit allowed. It opened my eyes to just how much policy had to be the driver for change. And that most policymakers didn’t have engineering backgrounds.
Christine Driscoll
So Joe decided to take his engineering experience and enter the world of policy. Joe’s now a manager on the carbon-free electricity team at the think tank Rocky Mountain Institute. He expected that the climate movement would be full of philosophical and political debates rather than the kind of practical problem-solving he was used to.
Joe Daniel
And I couldn’t have been more wrong. The movement is incredibly diverse when it comes to expertise and skill sets. Could it be more diverse? Sure. But I was coming from oil and gas. My reference point was a world of a homogenous workforce. But there’s an incredibly deep bench of economists and engineers and data scientists working on these issues. My advice to others is if something isn’t working, it’s always a good idea to try something new. Oh, and never, ever waste your time engaging trolls or anyone acting in bad faith. Your time is too valuable.
Oscar Boyd
And talking of valuable time, we have already taken up enough of yours. Thank you very much for listening, and a special thanks to everyone who sent in a recording. Happy New Year from all of us at Zero, and if you’ve got a climate story to share, we’d love to hear from you. Please send it to zeropod@bloomberg.net.
Christine Driscoll
We couldn’t play everyone’s story in full so before we go, here’s some of our favorite bits of advice from listeners.
Christine Driscoll
We heard from Amber, who used to work as a luxury brand consultant:
Amber Nuttall
My advice for others really is just to be unashamedly and unapologetically passionate and idealistic.
Oscar Boyd
We heard from Michiel, who founded a climate-focused design studio:
Michiel Cornelissen
We need great and beautiful and wonderful designs and innovation. Especially for this climate-positive age. Don’t leave all this work just to the engineers and the accountants, we really need the creatives.
Christine Driscoll
Simon, who quit his job at BCG in Switzerland to become a climate activist:
Simon Berthoud
Get surrounded by people who support you. It’s not easy to go against the current and to give up a fixed job and its privileges. So being surrounded truly helps.
Oscar Boyd
Jackie, who gave up her job in reality TV in Hollywood to work on climate and food:
Jackie Turner
As one single person it sometimes feels like I went from making no impact at all to just like a drop in the ocean. But if enough people make this change and make their climate views known and part of their life and their values, I think we can make a tidal wave.
Christine Driscoll
Martin, who left his job as a data scientist at AirBnB to found a company focused on decarbonizing the textile industry:
Martin Daniel
I used to suffer from eco-anxiety like a lot of people. I was reading news, I had just had a little daughter, and reading IPCC reports and what the world would be like in 2050 was pretty depressing. So if you’re suffering from eco-anxiety, my advice is to start doing something about it. It doesn’t mean the news will get better. It just means that your perception is that at least I’m trying. At least I’m doing something. And that has a calming effect.
Oscar Boyd
And Kristy, who grew up on a boat and worked for 15 years at a sustainability focused engineering firm:
Kristy Walson
I, as a 45-year-old Gen-Xer, will not be experiencing the brunt of climate change. That will be experienced by the younger generations, my children, our children’s children. And for that reason, I have this piece of advice. Please harness the amazing endless energy of our youth. Mentor them, invite them to the table, allow them to post everything we do, allow them to have side hustles and keep them engaged. Get them up to speed as fast as possible because we need their energy and we need their optimism. And then we can all gather collectively to work toward a carbon free future.
Akshat Rathi
Thanks so much for listening to Zero. If you liked the show, please rate review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps others discover the show. Tell a friend, or tell someone who doesn’t really like their job. If you’ve got a suggestion for a guest or topic or something you just want us to look into get in touch at zeropod@bloomberg.net. Zero’s producer is Oscar Boyd and senior producer is Christine Driscoll. This episode was written by Zero’s producer Oscar Boyd with assistance from Senior Producer Christine Driscoll. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly. I’m Akshat Rathi, wishing you a happy new year. We’ll be back next week.
–With assistance from Akshat Rathi.
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