The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil

Prologue

NEW HAVEN: GIRL MEETS OIL

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, Connecticut.

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.

I was a first-year MBA student at Yale, wondering whether I would find inspiration in the private sector after years of working in government and ...