A reckoning: climate change and all that…
Speaking truth to power: 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d, 8e, 9, 10 & 11
Apologies to 1066 and all that, an irreverent re-framing of British history…
Resuming my previous series as news of the extent of oil&gas lobby efforts described before is emerging… and I was unwittingly part of it my entire career! Will past and future non-profits for social good ever atone for it? I suppose my Extinction Rebellion efforts were spurred by it — and I still help Media Tell the Truth even as I retired from social media and activism — but the enormity of da awl bidness’ legacy is just unfolding as here, here and here… I’m afraid the hounds of Bakersfield (image above, apols. to The Hound of Baskervilles) will chase my sleep for a while to come!
Update 1: see my next post here.
Update 2: see Al Gore say it’s not oil co. employees but oil cos. the are “the polluted heart of climate crisis” (UN Sec. Gen. Guterres), TED video at bottom
This titled my then-gushing career review riding the roller-coaster of oil&gas.
This is the stark reality of the same oil&gas industry’s eye-watering numbers.
How do you explain water to fish?
Doing business in the Middle East I used to joke: “You know in N. American barbecues you BYOB, bring your own bottle — about half drank alcohol and half didn’t, so that avoided offering the wrong drink and saved the host some expense — well here it’s BYOP, buy your own prince — develop relationships as far up the food chain as you can afford, as say, Kuwaiti National Oil Co. subsidiaries are headed by princes— and we were well placed as professionals or trusted advisors, sandwiched between ‘nationals’ who signed the cheques and white-collared W. Asians who did the work.”
Right on cue, the Guardian article above said “… “It’s a huge amount of money,” he said. “You can buy every politician, every system with all this money, and I think this happened. It protects [producers] from political interference that may limit their activities”… ”
My best friend in Calgary went to the same university a year ahead of me, started his career at Shell like me, then went back to school for a Ph.D. in oceanography to study continental margins, then the largest frontier or future exploration areas in oil&gas. He then joined ExxonMobil as a scientist, before he returned home to Calgary and then consulted… in Kuwait, missing me by a couple of months! We lost track of each other since, but at the time we joked that he cleaned up the mess I left behind at KUFPEC 😉
Halliburton anecdote: as a Canadian, I made a career recovering projects abroad, which were jeopardised by Americans trying to tell emergent national interests how to conduct buisness their way not the local way. For example in the Middle East, you first sit down and socialise over cardamom tea — coffee was customarily cut with cardamon, and the highest honour is to have the cheaper coffee cut out to be only served the expensive cardamon — and then you get onto business after a rapport is established. Americans on the other hand cut straight to the chase as they apparently had a plane to catch... Let me quote a pragraph from my other blog A Year in Kuwait:
“… And while I’m a geologist gone to the dark side in computer mapping and GIS, my violon d’Ingres or other talent was this: not only did I always keep the clients at my back (that put me at odds with my employ not a few times), but also as a French and Canadian I prided myself of listening to and adapting to other cultures who invited me to help implement technology and projects. My Canadian friend taught me to say: “I know nothing, you tell me…”, and cut through lingering post-colonial prejudices…”
I lost track of my Calgary friend as I left LinkedIn in 2010: A Calgary oil service co. thought it funny to distribute stickers mocking Greta Thunberg — the young female climate activist pushing all the old boys’ network’s buttons — feat. her trademark tresses in a cartoon positioning her such that oil jocks cannot but see her raped... And I know, I was roughneck in S. then N. Alberta, W. Canada, during two of my university years — one summer earned enough to live for the year and buy ourselves a car —see my vintage website here.
Social media anecdote: Colleagues I befriended over time agreed to follow each other on Facebook rather than on LinkedIn. But when I alienated half my N. American friends upon joining Extinction Rebellion, the other half followed me on Instagram — I built an entire new following on Twitter in the computer mapping non-oil&gas arena — I now quit social media except for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — largely to phone my family scattered over two continents and for sub-groups like Quakers and XR Media Tell the Truth — but I recovered on Facebook Messenger a large contingent of my social media followers 😊
The same best friend was on the tail end of the Exxon Production Research science studying climate change and seeking oil&gas alternatives until they were shut down in the 2010 recession. We discussed oceanography or petroleum, and family or career choices, but never climate. Like in N. America you don’t discuss politics with friends, we didn’t discuss climate… until Al Gore most inconveniently raised An Inconvenient Truth in 2006! But you know what? I was actually more interested in his Digital Earth from 1998…
My wake-up call was in 2000, when I did a Y2K project at bp… don’t adjust your glasses, that’s not BP as in British Petroleum but bp as in beyond petroleum, quipped John Browne their charismatic CEO at the time. Disgraced since, he was then rehabilitated as Lord Browne of Madingley… Did you know that’s the neighbouring borough to Cambridge, whose university’s CASP, BP Centre and Schlumberger Research attest to oil&gas ties? But none of that woke me up to smell the coffee that’s roasting at room temperature now! I exaggerate of course, but it underscores my quote opening this post.
“Their heart was in the right place, but fact-checking was not their remit.”
In closing let me quote my best Quaker friend, who did PR stints with ExxonMobil on the environment and career development. I remember his lovely lilting enthusiasm: “Their heart was in the right place, but fact-checking was not their remit”… Kah-ching! Fact-checking is what drives business, politics and climate issues now. Let me recommend in closing, for good, Simon Rogers’ book Facts are Sacred (2013 hardcover, 2022 iPad enhanced book), stemming from his Guardian column on data journalism “Comment is free but facts are sacred” a decade ago. But I digress…
