Processing My Reuters Climate Karma
What could my reaction to an oil and gas conference staged by my former employer reveal about how collective trauma shows up in me?
“Speak the truth, but not to punish.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, as quoted by James Hoggan.
Resonant World #32
The climate crisis can seem at once so immense, amorphous and all-encompassing as to defy attempts to make it mean something — apart from when it shows up tangibly in the form of heatwaves, floods or other disasters on our doorstep.
That may be because the deeper meaning of the crisis isn’t to be found in these phenomena — which are merely symptoms. The climate crisis is the logical outcome of a global system, based on a vast tapestry of cultural agreements, many imposed by force (Resonant World #6), and accumulated over hundreds — arguably thousands — of years. This system has at once pushed earth’s geophysical systems dangerously out of balance; developed science to discern the peril in ever more granular detail; and proved incapable of mobilising an appropriate response.
Most of us who live in industrialised societies are so immersed in this system that it passes for “normal.” To cope, we must dissociate to some extent — compartmentalize our thinking to allow us to continue to participate in daily life and work, without being overwhelmed by our dawning awareness of the scale of the harm caused by the system we’re both enmeshed in, and serving, to varying degrees.
But there are moments when there’s a glitch in the matrix, so to speak. Even in our culturally-induced trance, we encounter something that seems so wildly contradictory that it holds our attention; triggers strong emotions; and — even if we don’t immediately act on these energies — we struggle to let them go.
My latest such experience occurred when learning about a conference called Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023, taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the Omni Houston Hotel, Texas.
The conference is gathering more than 400 oil and gas and tech executives under the banner: “Scaling Digital To Maximize Profit.”
“Time is money which is why our agenda gets straight to key pain points holding back drilling and production maximization,” the conference website said.
This wouldn’t normally have triggered such a strong reaction in me, but for the fact that the conference is being organised by Reuters Events, a subsidiary of Reuters News & Media Ltd. I began my career at Reuters, a company to which I owe some of my most formative professional experiences, and for which I still harbour a deep sense of affection and gratitude, having resigned for the final time just over a year ago.
I’d never thought of Reuters as a fossil fuel company. But oil majors sending delegations to Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 included ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, according to the Reuters Events website. (Incidentally, Chevron is also the main “diamond” sponsor of Reuters Impact, a business-focused climate event Reuters will host in London in September).
The more I trawled the Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 website, the more disturbed I felt. I began to experience such an intense mix of thoughts and emotions that I decided to unpack them here as a case study of the links between self-inquiry, collective trauma and the climate crisis — the core interests of Resonant World.
Reuters made this statement in response to a detailed set of questions I sent in relation to the points I explore below:
“Reuters Events serves multiple professional audiences involved in the most important discussions of our day; facilitating these discussions is an important part of the Reuters events business,” a Reuters spokesperson said.
Initiation
I joined Reuters in 1998 as a trainee fresh out of university. Mobile phones were still such a novelty in those days that the newsroom had a communal handset you could take out on stories. The hothouse training scheme felt in many ways like an initiation into adulthood — at least of a kind — and I developed deep friendships then, and during later tours in the company, that bring me enormous nourishment to this day.
My path zigzagged in and out of Reuters over the ensuing years: Paris; east and west Africa; the invasion of Iraq; Pakistan and Afghanistan — and latterly, a stint as a climate correspondent, and then enterprise reporter, based in London.
My climate reporting for Reuters included some career highlights, such as working with the late great editor Kari Howard on the Ocean Shock series on the impact of climate change on marine communities, published in 2018. Nevertheless, I resigned from Reuters in April last year to join DeSmog, a nonprofit climate investigations platform, to focus on climate accountability journalism. (The Reuters trainee in me lives on, however, and I try my best to infuse my DeSmog work with the rigour drilled into me by The Baron, as Reuters is affectionately known among staff).
Scrutiny
Reuters says that its news — produced by 2,500 journalists in nearly 200 locations around the world — reaches more than one billion people every day. As such, it is self-evidently a systemically important global actor at a time when the climate and ecological crisis has placed the viability of modern civilization in doubt.
For that reason, I believe the company deserves more external scrutiny through a climate and ecological lens than it tends to receive.
But the question that’s preoccupied me for the past couple of weeks, is: Am I the right person to supply that scrutiny?
After a decade on and off at Reuters, and given the size of the organisation, and the friendships I maintain there, I remain in significant respects entangled with the company — if not formally, then mentally and emotionally. How might I be able to discern between a genuine impulse to serve the public interest by shining a light on what I might see as significant climate failings, and any unconscious impulses, or projections, shaped by the lasting imprints of the many profound moments — both joyful and painful — I’d experienced within Reuters’ walls?
That’s why I’ve had to sit with this edition of Resonant World for longer than usual. I ultimately concluded that the best way I could serve would be to be as transparent about my own process in relation to Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 as possible.
Triggered
Why did reading about the conference trigger so much activation in my nervous system, to the point that I started to lose sleep?
If I track the feeling of anger, I discover it is connected to an underlying belief that Reuters Events was crossing an ethical boundary by voluntarily setting out to use the company’s reputation to enable the closer integration of Big Tech and Big Oil.
Tracing this thought further, I noticed that there were several distinct layers to my ethical objections, which I could broadly group into “betraying human values in general” and “betraying Reuters’ values in particular.”
I notice as I write how judgmental these sentences could sound. But when I sense into these words, I also notice they seem congruent with my inner landscape, and my whole system feels more relaxed now that I am giving my discomfort a voice.
Panopticon
In May, 2021, Reuters’ reported that the Paris-based International Energy Agency, one of the main authorities on climate and energy, had concluded that there could be no further developments of oil and gas fields if the world was to have even a vanishing chance of meeting the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and thus avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. (While 1.5C is a political target, it’s clear that letting temperatures go much beyond that will unleash a range of consequences so horrifying they are hard to contemplate, including: erasure of many coastal cities; loss of 99 percent of coral reefs; accelerated death spiral for the Amazon and other tropical rainforests; mass crop failures, and vast human death, starvation, dislocation and suffering, to name some).
At the same time, it has been widely reported that tech companies are using their cloud computing resources to enable oil and gas companies to analyse vast amounts of data so they can drill faster — thus bringing such outcomes closer. Indeed, harnessing data to maximise production is the express goal of Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023.
In August last year, Mark Bergen and Matt Day at Bloomberg (Reuters’ closest competitor) wrote that it had been a “blockbuster” summer for oil companies posting record profits thanks to surging energy prices. The journalists added:
“There are other, quieter beneficiaries: Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and the other cloud-services companies that are increasingly responsible for the computing horsepower behind the oil giants’ efforts to find and extract more oil and natural gas.
Among other things, Microsoft is making it possible for Exxon to analyze reams of oil field data. Amazon is helping drillers run simulations to maximize how much oil they can pump from existing wells.”
The story noted that Microsoft and Amazon justified their data contracts by pledging to accelerate a transition from dirty oil to sources that emit less carbon dioxide. There were also examples of tech companies helping oil companies with climate-friendly projects — such as reducing methane emissions. (Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023’s website also makes several references to “decarbonization.”)
But the tenor of the story was sceptical, noting that neither Amazon nor Microsoft had provided evidence to show that their emissions-reduction projects offset the damage caused by increased oil and gas production from their biggest clients.
And there was more. A few years back, I’d read this anonymous account by a Microsoft engineer under the headline:
“Oil Is The New Data: Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all.”
The engineer provided a jaw-dropping account of a work trip to Kazakhstan, where Chevron, diamond sponsor of this year’s Reuters Impact climate event, was working with Microsoft to harness cloud computing to not only optimize oil production, but introduce “panopticon" surveillance of its workers:
“When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete normalcy. The TCO [the acronymn for Chevron’s Tengizchevroil oil project] managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn’t convincing in the slightest. We knew that they simply wanted a way to discipline their low-wage Kazakhstani workforce. We knew they wanted a way to squeeze as much work as they could from each worker.”
I also resonated with the following line, which describes how a Microsoft coworker had shared her climate concerns, but displaced her responsibility by assuming the agency to drive change only exists “at the top.”
“During the workshop, I asked a coworker how she felt about Microsoft working with Big Oil. She responded sympathetically, understanding my concerns about climate change. But she also seemed to feel there was nothing we could do. For her and many other colleagues I’ve spoken to, change has to happen at the top.”
This idea that change can only happen “at the top” is an artefact of the system, and part of the compartmentalization response we adopt to resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by understanding the climate threat while working for companies that make it worse. That’s how ThomsonReuters, Reuters’ parent company, can pledge to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 — but still allow one of its subsidiaries to host Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023.
Systematic actors that succeed in reaching Reuters’ scale are inevitably outgrowths of the system that’s driving the climate crisis. By definition, people who rise to the top in that system must accept its rules — otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to occupy leadership roles. So looking to “the top” to deliver real change is often pointless.
(For a more empowering way of thinking about change, see this superb new article by Professor Karen O’Brien et al.,featured in Resonant World #30 on “fractal agency.” This concept recognises that thoughts, ideas, words, metaphors, decisions, conversations, actions, and agency all combine to generate entangled patterns that scale:
“Rather than reserving strategic action for those at the top of political, business, or organizational hierarchies, fractal agency describes a capacity that all people can access and implement, independent of position, degree, role, experience, or authority.”
I offer this edition of Resonant World as fractal agency in action).
Trust Principles
And so I move to the next layer of activation in my system: The anger I felt as a result of the belief I’d formed that the conference also placed Reuters in violation of its own most hallowed principles — the principles I’d done my best to embody as a trainee.
Reuters drummed three values into us above all others: Speed, accuracy, and “freedom from bias.”
This latter value forms the bedrock of the Reuters Trust Principles, adopted in 1941 to guarantee the company’s editorial integrity during World War Two.
As noted in Resonant World #8, the concept of “freedom from bias” is obviously illusory — since the entire edifice of any news organisation; where its offices are located; what stories it considers important; how it frames them, and so on are always shaped by the bigger systems it serves. (A big slice of Reuters’ half a billion dollars in revenues comes from global banks — themselves huge financiers of new fossil fuels).
Nevertheless, what we might call a “narrow” concept of “freedom from bias” could be as modest as saying that the company won’t deliberately skew its news to serve overtly partisan interests, and will try to provide balanced coverage that draws on a decent diversity of sources. That’s roughly the way Reuters’ editors understand the term.
And that’s what seemed so wild — so ontologically shocking — to me about Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023. The conference wasn’t convened to address a more neutral question such as: “How Can the Oil & Gas Industry Navigate a Carbon-Constrained Future?” Reuters Events only just stopped short of stamping “Drill Baby Drill!” on the passes. The event could not have been more expressly partisan, at a time when climate scientists, politicians, civil society and millions of citizens are working to prevent the fossil fuel industry triggering the collapse of the biosphere.
Of course, people could point out that Reuters Events also organises many conferences on solar, wind and decarbonisation. Critics might in turn question these events, too, asking: Do they take due account of human rights abuses in supply chains? Or the environmental impacts of the scramble for “green” minerals?
It’s easy to get caught in a whirlpool of argument and counter argument, and feel solid ground slipping away, and then just give up and think about something else.
That’s when I try to remember to take a few slower breaths. Check in with my body. And attempt to discern the clearest outlines I can see through the haze.
And, once again, taking those deep breaths, I will say that this is what seems true to me: To voluntarily host a conference explicitly designed to enable companies such as ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Chevron and TotalEnergies to turbo-charge production in 2023 plants Reuters squarely in the fossil fuel camp in the climate fight.
Writing this now, I notice my mind starting to race. I’ve contracted slightly — as if bracing for verbal blows. It’s why I would have preferred to be reading this article, rather than writing it. And that task is not quite done.
Conflict of Interest
Staying with my process on the mental plane, I noticed myself considering the concept of conflict of interest.
I asked myself: Would Reuters journalists trust an organisation that claimed to be covering climate impartially on one hand, while serving as a handmaiden to the oil and gas industry’s expansion plans on the other? Reuters produces some authoritative reporting on oil companies, but it can at times sound a lot like a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry. The Shell-sponsored content on Reuters’ website doesn’t help.
No doubt, Reuters would argue that Reuters Events is a separate business — resorting to the kind of compartmentalization on an institutional level that we all require at an individual level to stay functioning. But the reality is that Reuters has sought to integrate the newsroom and events since it acquired the events business in October, 2019. Reuters journalists are routinely invited to propose guests and host interviews for Reuters Events — and then file stories based on what the guests say. While serving as a Reuters climate correspondent, I performed all three of these roles, including interviewing Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency — the organisation that had warned of the catastrophic consequences of the kind of new oil and gas drilling enabled by Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023. (I asked Reuters if any Reuters journalists are taking part in the conference, or if other media can attend, but the company did not provide a response).
The irony is that Reuters Events trades on a reputation for editorial excellence established by generations of journalists who have devoted their careers to upholding the Trust Principles. Many have risked — or sacrificed — their lives in this endeavour. Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 and similar events put the company in the curious position of seeking to monetise this hard-won reputation while simultaneously setting it on fire.
All this compartmentalization has a cost. As the facilitator Thomas Hübl writes in Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds, internal conflicts we avoid don’t disappear — they are simply repressed under the surface of the “dark lake” of our collective unconscious.
As long as the contents of this “dark lake” go unacknowledged, our disowned emotions will shape our experience and beliefs about reality without us even realising. Compartmentalisation allows us to be complicit without feeling the cost of that complicity in our bodies. And that’s how the system has succeeded in leading us to a point where — days after the Reuters newsroom in Times Square was shrouded in smoke from Canadian wildfires — the company was pressing ahead with Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 as if nothing had happened.
An Alternative Vision
So how can the global collective trauma healing movement help resolve this impasse?
Perhaps skilled facilitators could make confidential spaces available for people working in corporations to come together to explore the psychological toll of compartmentalisation and examine what new possibilities open up when their repressed emotions are fully felt and integrated. Such processes might even unlock more effective forms of employee activism. As Bloomberg reported last August, Google pledged in 2020 to stop selling machine learning tools for oil exploration after an employee backlash. (A similar backlash at Amazon and Microsoft had less tangible results).
Looking back, I couldn’t have imagined myself organising anything that rebellious at Reuters. I was too loyal, at some level, to what still felt like my tribe. But I can’t help imagining the scene if I’d followed the example of 64-year-old Rosemary Anne Penwarden, a grandmother in New Zealand, who sent a fake email to companies registered for an oil and gas conference in Queenstown in 2019 announcing the event had been cancelled. (Warning: The system lacks a sense of humour. Penwarden was found guilty last week of forgery and will be sentenced in September).
Nevertheless, Reuters’ newsroom has shown backbone when pushed. Two years ago, parent ThomsonReuters announced a partnership with the UK government to boost hiring of British military veterans. The newsroom was outraged — seeing the move as a flagrant breach of the “freedom from bias” clause in the Trust Principles that could endanger reporters who might be perceived as aligned with British forces. The parent company backed down and cancelled its participation in the scheme.
Of course, there was no money at stake. And with Reuters cutting costs, Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023 — where VIP passes cost $2,999 — is clearly a cash cow. I’d like to imagine this edition of Resonant World might be the spark that lights the tinder, prompting Reuters’ staff to demand an end to fossil conferences — both to defend the Trust Principles, and the future of our species. I doubt that will happen, sadly.
Nevertheless, let’s assume for a moment that Reuters did start cancelling such conferences. What could it do instead?
I’ve often imagined what might be possible if the company committed to harnessing its global convening power and huge reach in a genuinely transformative way.
What if Reuters brought together fossil fuel executives with expert facilitators who could lead them through processes to explore and process their own individual, ancestral and collective trauma?
The company could become a catalyst to help liberate the stuck energy tied up in the buried grief, anger, shame and fear we all at some level feel in the face of climate and ecosystem collapse. In my experience, that’s what can deliver genuine breakthroughs.
In Healing Collective Trauma, Hübl writes that we find ourselves at a profound moment in history, standing together at an inscrutable edge — the brink of destruction; or the cusp of unprecedented change.
“One thing is clear: We can’t convince ourselves into the necessary transformation based purely on the facts. We must feel the deeper reality of our time in order to know the crucible it presents and thereby empower ourselves to change it, to make real a new future.”
That’s something that’s best done in community.
For any former Reuters colleagues reading this, I salute you. I’d love to hear how this edition of Resonant World has landed in you.
You know where to find me.
Resonant World is not brought to you by Chevron. Support from readers is a huge boost — and that includes forwarding, sharing, or commenting in response to my posts. Any variety of coffee most gratefully accepted! Thank you for reading.
Thank you so much Matthew Green - brilliant! This felt a bit personal to me as well, as I was a long-time employee of Reuters (way before your time!), and always held the company up to be a bastion of integrity. I also offer my skills as a facilitator free of charge for anything you feel worth suggesting. I regularly offer 4-day retreats (see "The Edge" https://heartcommunitygroup.org/the-edge-a-4-day-retreat/) in the gift. Thank you.
Appreciate you poking at the painful mess we are all entangled in—and your suggestions for how things could be different bring in new light and energy. Doing the work here.