Falling in, and out, of love with Big Oil.

AuthorBader, Christine
PositionTHOUGHT LEADERSHIP

From The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil by Christine Batter. Copyright [c]2014 by the author. Piiblished by Bibliomotion inc. (www.bibliomotion.com).

BIG OIL AND I GOT TOGETHER in the summer of 1999. It all started a few months earlier, in a packed lecture hall in New Haven, Conn. I was a first-year MBA student at Yale.

John Browne, chief executive of what was then British Petroleum, came to deliver a speech about his ambitious plans to reduce the company's greenhouse gas emissions. He had recently broken ranks with his oil titan peers to become the first head of a major energy company to acknowledge the reality of climate change and urge action.

"Companies are not separate from the societies in which they work," he said. "We don't make our profits and then go and live somewhere else. This is our society too."

Ten years later this would be standard CEO prose, but at the time Browne's lofty rhetoric was catnip to me. I landed an internship in BP's executive office in London, excited to be there for a few months but unsure whether it would prove anything more than...

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