"Climate quitters" are leaving their jobs because employers are worsening the planet. But where do they go next?
Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash
One subset of those involved in the Great Resignation after Covid-19 have been identified as “climate quitters” - those who realise their current job is contributing to the problems of climate change, and make an ethical commitment to shift to something better. The personal stories told can be instructive and motivating.
This Bloomberg piece gathers some American stories of climate quitting:
Joe Daniel used to work for oilfield services company Baker Hughes. “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,” he says. But the company rejected the idea because, he says, it risked making their wastewater permits more stringent in the future.
“It opened my eyes to just how much policy had to be the driver for change,” he says. “And that most policymakers didn't have engineering backgrounds.” Daniel eventually joined the Rocky Mountain Institute think tank, where he now works to influence policy. His advice to others: “If something isn't working, it's always a good idea to try something new.”
Catherine Cleary, a restaurant reviewer, left her job after reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 report on what will happen if the world hits 1.5C of warming.
“I burst into tears at my desk,” she says. “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.” In 2020, she founded Pocket Forests, which helps people connect with nature in urban areas, helping them to regenerate soil and plant native trees.
Laura Brown, whose neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, was wiped out by a tornado on March 3, 2020. The overall damage totaled $1.5 billion. “We were basically climate refugees during the first part of the pandemic,” she says. “And honestly, the tornado really put a fire under my butt, that climate change is sort of no longer an issue that I can ignore.”
Brown quit her job, went to business school, took extra classes on sustainability and then searched for a new job. It took her more than six months to land one, which she says was unexpected given how much she’d heard about the growing green economy. Many of the jobs Brown applied for required prior experience working on climate issues.
Eventually, she did get one; her advice to others seeking climate-related jobs is: “You just have to make the decision and then stick with it. We’re in this for the long haul. There's a lot of really great, profoundly empowering work to be done.”
This piece from WorldCrunch gathers together younger Italian voices of climate quitting:
Matteo Turrino, 34, is an Extinction Rebellion activist who previously worked as a programmer for a UK company in the financial sector. “In order to work in that environment I had to completely abstract myself,” he says. “How could I go to the office thinking that in 30 years a billion people will be without water? I remember a business trip to Dubai: I was sitting in front of my computer inside an air-conditioned skyscraper while it was 50 degrees outside and dozens of workers on construction sites in the sun. At that moment I asked myself: why am I here and why are they there?”
Matteo had a steady contract and a good salary, but he still decided to quit his job. “I wondered: does the work I am doing respect my values? Do I really need all this money? To change my way of life, I moved to the mountains with other likeminded people. For many, work is a form of activism. I would like activism to become a job: going back to the life I had before is not an option.”
Marcella Pozzi, 29: “I used to work in the clothing industry for big fashion brands….We were making garments Made in Italy, with natural yarns, but then I discovered a series of behind-the-scenes issues: how the dyeing of the fabrics takes place, how much waste there is, how underpaid the labor is.
"Plus, I felt exploited: I had a temporary contract, I worked at a very stressful pace, and I had to clock out even to go to the bathroom. At some point I couldn’t take it anymore: I quit my job and went to work in a small knitting mill. They paid me less, but I was happier. One does not go to work just to earn money: if what you do goes against your values, how do you go on?”
Marcella now teaches at a professional fashion institute. “The garment industry is one of the most polluting in the world: with students we address climate change issues, reflect on workers’ rights, and study circular clothing design, making repairs or reusing materials, such as coffee bags.”
Andrea Grieco: having returned to his native Italy, Andrea found a job for a consulting firm on what he'd been told were "sustainability budgets." The work was interesting, with a permanent contract and a good salary.
"One day I was asked to work on the green strategy of one of Italy’s largest oil companies," the 31-year-old recalled. "I said I disagreed, but they told me that this was a client they couldn’t do without. So I decided to quit.”
“Most of our days are taken up by work: it is important to put these energies on the right side,” Grieco explains. “After a few months I was hired by a publishing company where I was writing about sustainability: I was earning much less, but I felt good about myself. Now I work for the United Nations, doing communications in support of the global campaign against climate change. Today everyone calls themselves as activist, but deciding what profession you want to do is also an important form of activism.”
More here at Worldcrunch and Bloomberg.
This Euronews report gives some attitudinal surveys to back up these claims, calling them “conscious quitters”:
A recent survey from consulting company KPMG of 6,000 office staff, students apprentices and recent university leavers looked at their attitudes to work.
It found that 20 per cent of them had turned down job offers because they thought a company’s environmental, social and governance factors didn’t match their own. This percentage was much higher for those aged 18-24.
A different study from last year also found a third of UK employees were willing to quit their jobs if their employer didn't take action to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint. The figures come from a survey of 2,000 UK office workers carried out by Supercritical - a platform that helps companies to measure, reduce, and offset their climate impact.
This sentiment was even stronger among Gen Z with over half of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they would be willing to leave a company based on its net-zero credentials.