Do Oil Executives Need Trauma Healing Too?
What happened in Gothenburg took me by surprise.
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“As one CEO wrote: ‘my feelings around the subject as a whole: Armageddon kind of feeling.’” — Britt Wray in Generation Dread.
Resonant World #75
Back in September, I made a two-day train trip from London to Gothenburg, which happens to be the home city of my favourite band: Swedish duo Carbon Based Lifeforms. Sadly, catching up with Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Vadestrid, whose track Derelicts — to my ear at least — seems to foretell the impending sunset of the fossil fuel era, wasn’t on my agenda.
I was attending a gargantuan four-day conference for 2,000 journalists from more than 110 countries hosted by the Global Investigative Journalism Network, an organisation doing amazing work to support nonprofit organisations like DeSmog, the climate accountability newsroom where I’ve worked for the past two years.
I’d been invited to speak at a day-long session on the eve of the conference on the “investigative agenda” for climate journalism. I gave a short presentation about DeSmog’s work on “false solutions”, notably the wild fantasy that the oil industry will build what amounts to a new version of itself — only twice as big, and in reverse — to capture enough carbon dioxide to matter to the climate.
It was a privilege to share a stage with contributors including Amy Westervelt of Drilled, Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and the Environment, and Damian Carrington of the Guardian — and meet Emily Atkin of Heated, another climate hero of mine. (You can read a report based on the seminar here, co-authored by my former colleague Deborah Nelson; and see a webinar reflecting on the findings here.)
Unexpected Turn
There were many memorable moments from these presentations, unpacking inspiring work journalists are doing to confront a crisis that now seems ten times more terrifying than it did even a year ago, as extreme weather, heat and ocean temperature data literally zigzags off the chart — or off the wall the chart is hanging on, as Bill McKibben once quipped, darkly. (For what truly great climate journalism really takes, I recommend this essential and moving essay by Amy; and for an unflinching look at where we are on climate, I invite you to read this piece by British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt).
There was also something unexpected that happened in that room that’s been working in me ever since, and I want to explore it here.
Because I think that moment revealed something about the connection between the climate crisis and collective trauma — and how we can use these glimpses of a larger reality to open up the new, more generative conversations we so badly need.
“Shame Them”
In a room of maybe 100 journalists meeting to discuss climate coverage priorities, you can imagine that there was a lot of talk about investigating the fossil fuel industry. At one point, an audience member asked our panel a question along the lines of:
“What kind of stories do we need to tell to actually make these companies change their behaviour?”
There may have been a flavour of:
“How can we shame them into changing?”
Now, that’s a big question.
After all, the revelations journalists have dug up about the oil industry are already pretty shameful.
What could be more shameful than spending billions of dollars to deny climate science, buy off politicians to avoid taking action, and deceive the public about the consequences? As Mark Hertsgaard wrote in June 2021, as a result of the actions of the fossil fuel industry “every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.”
And yet despite these revelations, these companies have proved extraordinarily resistant to pressure.
They’re certainly not about to voluntarily wind themselves down on a pathway aligned with the transformative action now required to slow climate change enough to preserve a semblance of the world we know.
The only possible avenue I can see is to continue building mass movements to mobilise the critical mass of citizens capable of demanding governments — themselves bought and paid for by these companies — to embrace far deeper change than any industrialised country seems willing to even imagine.
But I didn’t want to go down that road.
It felt like familiar terrain.
Arid.
Circular.
And at least in that moment, devoid of new possibility, or even real feeling.
And so I was in some ways surprised at my answer — which I almost hesitated to give, because it felt like I was moving beyond my safe edge.
‘Armageddon Kind of Feeling’
Because what came up for me in response to the question about shaming oil companies was a flashback to a conversation I’d had with Britt Wray, the Canadian science communicator and author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, a couple of months earlier. (Do check out the Gen Dread newsletter).
I’d been recording an interview with Britt for the Collective Trauma Summit 2023 and had asked her about a scene in her book where she describes being invited to give a talk to a group of Nordic oil executives.
Britt had seen this as an opportunity to see the “complex humans behind the professional titles” and create space for “authentic emotional engagement.”
She wrote:
“In my forty-five-minute talk, I discussed what I call the spectrum from denial to distress. Backed by internal industry memos, I laid hard into the outright denial that’s been funded for decades by the fossil fuel industry. How often do executives in the field talk about this? I wondered. I shared psychoanalytic research about the disavowal most people peddle in and how existential terror affects our behaviour…I wrapped up the talk by sharing evidence about the psychological turmoil many children, quite likely the same age as these executives’ kids, are now feeling about even being here.”
What followed was stunned silence, then a couple of awkward, perfunctory responses from the oilmen, before the host abruptly terminated the session.
As Britt explained:
“Later on, I received a couple of emails from attendees who explained that my talk was very intense for them to take in, and they were simply at a loss for words. As one CEO wrote: ‘my feelings around the subject as a whole: Armageddon kind of feeling.’”
In my response to the question about “shaming” fossil fuel companies, I gave a very brief summary of this story.
As I spoke, I sensed that the energy in the room had changed.
Subtler Field
People were leaning in, certainly more so than when I’d been regaling them with my entirely unsurprising observation that ExxonMobil tends to neglect to mention in its Twitter videos that its carbon capture projects inject the CO2 straight back into the ground to push out yet more oil.
It wasn’t that people necessarily sympathised with the oil executives, I don’t think.
But it did feel like some of the us-versus-them vibe that had been building in the room had softened, and begun to alchemize into a subtler field of awareness.
A field capable of holding more complexity, perhaps.
In any form of campaigning (especially on an issue as extreme as the climate crisis), there’s a tendency to focus on the responsibility borne by the “bad people” seen as the source of a problem (fossil fuel executives, for example).
And there’s of course a lot of truth in this.
I feel grateful that my job at DeSmog is to expose the lying, gaslighting, manipulation, future-faking and all the other narcissistic behaviours the oil and gas industry has deployed to turn a crisis that might once have conceivably been manageable into today’s cataclysm.
(For a textbook example of how DeSmog punches above its weight in this regard, please see this story by my colleague Phoebe Cooke, whose meticulous reporting exposed how the gas boiler lobby in the UK was spreading misinformation about heat pumps via a PR agency. Phoebe’s investigation has just been cited in parliament by the energy efficiency minister, who was outraged by what he’d learned about the industry’s tactics).
I’m also very fortunate to be working in a newsroom that’s unequivocally focused on exposing the vested interests blocking climate action, rather than actively collaborating with them — like my former employer Reuters, which hosts multiple oil and gas industry trade shows via its events business, and produces propaganda for companies such as Shell and Saudi Aramco via its Reuters Plus content studio.
But I also notice myself feeling discomfort when I sense an “in-group” forming.
Grounded Clarity
After seeing so clearly the many ways in which the roles of victim, perpetrator and rescuer alternate in the collective and inter-generational trauma work I’ve been engaged with via Thomas Hübl and his team, I’ve become very interested in the distinction between two different ways of meeting wrongdoing:
A grounded clarity that’s good at discerning the presence of destructive traits and behaviours (in myself and others) in order to respond appropriately
A lower-energy state of us-versus-them judgment, that narrows my vision, and tends to lead to familiar patterns of thought, devoid of breakthroughs
Like a lot of people, I tend to alternate between these states, depending on my mood.
But the collective trauma work has strengthened my sense of responsibility for maintaining the daily personal practices and regular group work needed to ensure I can spend as much time as possible at least moving in the direction of “grounded clarity” — especially when I’m writing or speaking publicly.
So yes, as journalists it’s absolutely our job to document perpetration and hold power to account. And it’s also our job to notice when we’re slipping into judgment and power-over mindsets — and thus replicating the dynamics of the systems we’re trying to transform.
And I wonder if something about the story of the shell-shocked fossil fuel executives in Britt’s book spoke to that challenge, without framing it explicitly in those terms.
Britt had reminded her readers that — whatever the fossil fuel industry has done over the past half-century — it’s run by people.
People who must themselves be deeply conflicted — at some level — about their role, even if that inner conflict is buried pretty deep, mostly.
Strategic Survival Personalities
I wrote a few weeks ago about how people in leadership positions in business, politics and the media are very often operating from the “strategic survival personalities” they developed due to attachment disruption and trauma in childhood.1
Examples of these personality styles at the top of the oil and gas industry abound.
Let’s take Exxon CEO Darren Woods — who literally blames the public for climate change — as an example of gaslighting par excellence.
Bill McKibben excoriated Woods’s recent interview with Fortune magazine here:
“Because (Woods) explains to his nodding interlocutors that the world “waited too long” to start developing renewables. Or, in his particular brand of corporate speak: “we’ve waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets in terms of what we need as a society.”
Just to recite the relevant history, as quickly as possible. Forty years ago, Exxon’s scientists learned all there was to know about climate change — they forecasted the temperature in 2020 with remarkable accuracy. And the company’s executives believed them — among other things they began building their drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting out which corners of the Arctic they would drill once it melted. What they didn’t do was tell the rest of us: instead, they helped erect a huge architecture of deceit and denial and disinformation that kept us locked for three decades in a sterile battle about whether or not global warming was ‘real,’ a fight both sides knew the answer to from the outset. But one side was willing to lie.”
Strategic survival personalities were also on display at COP28, the last round of annual UN climate talks held in Dubai in December, and presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the head of Abu Dhabi’s national oil company. Al Jaber’s exchange with former Irish president Mary Robinson ahead of the talks showed why he badly needs to go a men’s circle — though I’m not counting on him embarking on years of trauma integration work any time soon. (Resonant World#68).
Degree of Intimacy
I’m under no illusions.
I’m aware that some of the world’s most dedicated climate advocates have engaged with oil companies for years without result. See this 2023 article by former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, for example, explaining why she was wrong to believe oil companies would change. And Jonathon Porritt, the British environmentalist cited above, went through a phase of working with oil giant BP before he concluded it was pointless.
I’ve seen others who’ve made sincere attempts to reason with the oil industry more recently come away similarly despairing that the executives they spoke with could even see them in their basic humanity.
And yet — the fact remains that something about Britt’s scene of the fossil executives, and the “Armageddon” email she received — spoke to that room of 100 journalists more powerfully than anything I’d said about the carbon capture scam.
Why was this?
Was it because Britt — by meeting these executives on their own turf — had somehow established a degree of intimacy with the targets of our coverage that we rarely have an opportunity to achieve?
Had she seen something that we couldn’t?
Or was it because we all, at some level, recognise our complicity — trapped as we are in a system so toxic that we can’t even do our weekly shop without buying a basketful of products that contribute to the climate, ecological and human rights catastrophes we abhor? (Resonant World#35).
(As for my pious low-carbon train journey to Gothenburg, I took that route partly so I could meet an old friend in Copenhagen on the way back. Though I have by no means ruled out flying ever again, I do now feel much more conflicted about getting in an aeroplane than I did when I flew all the time during my career as a correspondent).
And perhaps there was something else about the scene Britt painted that touched another collective trauma layer that was present in the room, that I can’t yet name.
Glowing Ember
Afterwards, I got chatting to somebody who proceeded to relate a by then third-hand version of Britt’s story, not having realised I’d told it.
I found this electrifying. It was if an ember of the spirit of the online Collective Trauma Summit had skipped over to Gothenburg and kindled a new flame: a form of journalistic inquiry that acknowledges that the climate crisis starts in our own psyches.
Clearly, journalists absolutely need to redouble our efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry and its enablers to account — including the media, advertising and PR industries, which we’re writing a lot about at DeSmog these days.
What happened in Gothenburg was a reminder that we also need to expand our vision of the kind of stories we tell.
It’s Resonant World’s mission to explore the role of individual, inter-generational and collective trauma in fuelling global crises — because the only way to solve them is to understand their roots. The fascination with Britt’s vignette of Nordic oil executives stunned into silence by the magnitude of their complicity in climate breakdown suggests to me that more journalists than I’d imagined might be interested in teaming up to adopt this kind of approach. (Resonant World#73).
The trend lines on the climate graphs are chilling.
But what I’ve learned from my immersion in collective healing spaces is that we possess far subtler capacities to attune to each other — and thereby shift our personal and collective destinies — than we’ve mostly been taught.
And that fact alone — no matter where the data’s pointing — makes March 2024 an exhilarating time to be alive.
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I first heard the term “strategic survival personality” used by psychotherapist Nick Duffell in his book Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and The Entitlement Illusion, a Psychohistory.
Keep up the great work. Somehow we have some overlap of influences in this field. I’ve never been a journalist but I’ve searched out the greats to research for my book, The Impossible Conversation.
Your mention of Amy Westervelt starts a long list of those greats. I’m inclined to mention Dahr Jamail as well for his impeccable journalism delivered wrapped in heart and soul. Perhaps you’ve read his book The End of Ice?
Where we seem to overlap profoundly is in the realm of embodied coherence and healing.
Your inclusion of core distinctions from that work in your article about FF executives was like water on the desert for me.
I’ve been facilitating deep coherence ritual and healing work for 40 years. Nothing like the immense scale of Thomas Huble’s work but some important similarities.
While we did have occasion to work with corporate leaders, and their depth and healing was profound, when it came down to seriously shifting anything about their business model there was that stunned silence you relayed from Britt’s story.
I’ve known we are on a self-terminating path since the late 70s. Hence the name for my book.
But that doesn’t diminish my love of this work of heart and soul one iota. It is a calling I respond to without hesitation. I guess that love of the work comes from having almost 50 years to re ally let go of this self terminating culture and to work with others to reduce suffering some small way.
Wow, thanks for reading through all that and thank you again for your blend in your journalism and written sharing.
Thanks
Matthew, this article is brilliant.
"So yes, as journalists it’s absolutely our job to document perpetration and hold power to account. And it’s also our job to notice when we’re slipping into judgment and power-over mindsets — and thus replicating the dynamics of the systems we’re trying to transform."
This is a remarkable blend of leading edge healing work - and piercingly direct reporting on our self-terminating global culture.
Thank you.
Dean Walker
safecircle@gmail.com
Living Resilience: the inner work of collapse