Shell safety consultant quits over climate change with viral message

At 8:27 a.m. on Monday morning, May 23, Caroline Dennett emailed 1,400 executives at the oil and gas conglomerate, Shell, to announce her resignation after 11 years working as a safety consultant.

Dennett, who is based near London, asked executives and management at Shell “to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they really believe their vision for more oil and gas extraction secures a safe future for humanity.”

Dennett later posted a screenshot of her resignation email, a one minute and 12 second video in which she speaks directly into the camera explaining her decision, and a written explanation of her decision on the professional networking site LinkedIn.

In the time since, her LinkedIn post has gotten almost 10,000 reactions and more than 800 comments, some supportive of Dennett and some supportive of Shell.

Her market research business, Clout, started working with Shell in 2011 after BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico ushered in a new emphasis on safety precautions throughout the oil and gas industry. She was brought on to design, pilot and manage surveys of workers to get a sense of how rigorously safety precautions were being followed. With the information collected, Dennett would make recommendations on how to improve the culture surrounding safety among workers.

Dennett did not take the decision to stop doing business with Shell lightly.

“The nerves came when I decided to do it, which was probably a few weeks before, and I’ve mulled it over for a few months to be honest,” Dennett told CNBC on Tuesday. “You don’t make a decision like that very rashly. It’s something you have to consider.”

But ultimately, Dennett says, she could not continue to work for Shell because of the contradictions she observed between the company’s attention to the safety concerns of individual workers on location and the fundamental danger of continuing to extract oil and gas and burn it for energy.

Shell’s internal safety program is dubbed “Goal Zero” and its aim is to have “no harm and no leaks,” Dennett said.

“The Goal Zero is honorable, but they don’t equate that to the harms that are being done on a massive scale. It’s great to keep individual people safe and try to prevent leaks that cause pollution and environmental problems, but if your very core of your business is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that we know can not be sustained, we can not go on doing that in the way that we have done for the last 30 years,” Dennett told CNBC.

“Something is wrong with that.”