The Climate Researcher Who Left Academia to Work for an Oil Company — and What She Learned

Two young climate researchers were sitting in adjacent labs on a calm December morning at Stanford, with the campus mostly closed for the holidays. They were separated by a philosophical canyon and a hallway. One of them, Rebecca Grekin, had received funding from ExxonMobil for her entire academic career, including her PhD, research stipends, time spent in the Amazon rainforest, and access to an entire office building in Houston for experiments. Yannai Kashtan, the other, saw that as an issue. They had a close friendship. They spent the entire day arguing about it.

One of the most subtly painful issues in climate science at the moment is the conflict between working inside a system you fundamentally distrust and standing outside it shouting. It doesn’t end over lunch at a Burmese restaurant in Palo Alto, where Grekin and Kashtan ultimately found themselves, still at odds but still in love. Furthermore, the industry that initially funds it does not resolve it.
There is a certain icy logic to Grekin’s viewpoint. She recalled seeing a huge ball of flame shoot from a flare stack while standing close to Exxon’s expansive refinery in Baytown, Texas, early in her internship. Her sustainability research seemed ridiculously insignificant in comparison to what was blazing in front of her at that precise moment. However, she has since changed the way she thinks, making it difficult to completely discount. She claimed that the downstream effects on one of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world would be far greater than what a single flare could produce if she could change Exxon’s behavior by even 1%. She might be correct. It’s also possible that a very large company would find it helpful to have that kind of reasoning.

It’s important to take Kashtan’s skepticism seriously. In the past, he worked on electrofuels, a technology that uses renewable energy to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and transform it into liquid fuel. In theory, it seems like something that might be beneficial. However, Kashtan came to believe that these technologies, which are often financed by venture capital from oil companies, serve more as justifications for delay than as solutions because the economics and energy math don’t hold up at scale. Keep people’s attention on a potential but far-off solution, and they will be less inclined to make energy-intensive changes to the source of the issue. “They’re exactly what fossil fuel companies want,” he stated. It wasn’t a compliment.
This argument seems to have been going on for years in coffee shops and faculty lounges all over the world, but it is rarely given such a clear name. Venture capitalist John Doerr gave $1.1 billion to start the Doerr School at Stanford, but it soon came under fire for taking donations from fossil fuel companies. A satirical advertisement made by a nonprofit associated with filmmaker Adam McKay, which has been viewed over 200,000 times, accurately depicted the ridiculousness of a school committed to combating climate change boasting about its Big Oil friends. The joke essentially wrote itself, which is why it went viral.
Patrick Brown, on the other hand, approached this discussion in a completely different way. Before joining the Breakthrough Institute, Brown worked as a climate scientist at Stanford and San Jose State for a number of years. In 2023, he made national headlines by publicly criticizing his own study, which was published in Nature and showed that climate change increased the risk of explosive wildfires in California by 25%. Brown did not argue that the results were incorrect. He supported them. His issue was more specific and, to many of his colleagues, more frustrating: he claimed that journals such as Nature routinely favor frightening, single-variable results over more intricate, solution-focused research. He believed that he had unintentionally molded his own work to suit that inclination. He later stated as much in The Free Press. In a matter of hours, Fox News arrived in his inbox.
What came next was both foreseeable and depressing in equal measure. His remarks were exploited by right-wing media to imply that climate data was being falsified. He was referred to by left-leaning pundits as a provocateur feeding the disinformation machine in the vein of Sokal. His real argument—that the climate publishing culture prioritizes catastrophism over complexity and that this may be making it more difficult to find workable solutions—was lost in the commotion. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the content of what he was saying—which a number of other climate scientists privately concurred with—basically became unacceptable the instant it was presented in an unwelcoming setting.
There are other researchers who have experienced the pull away from traditional academia, including Brown. Paleontologist and ecologist Silvia Pineda-Munoz spent years researching how mammal species have changed over 11,700 years in North American climates. Her team’s study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, largely vanished behind a paywall after revealing that two-thirds of modern mammals live in climates that are not compatible with the historical range of their species. Soon after, she quit her job in academia. Not for a petroleum company. for narrative purposes. She came to the conclusion that science that was only read by other scientists and published in peer-reviewed journals was fundamentally incomplete.
Every one of these tales—Grekin inside Exxon, Kashtan outside it, Brown criticizing the journals, and Pineda-Munoz completely giving up on the journals—describes an individual attempting to ascertain the true source of leverage. What is the best place for a climate scientist to work? In an attempt to gently push the problem-causing industry in the direction of sanity? Fighting for papers that tell more complex and honest stories in academic publishing? Converting complex research into something that regular people could actually read and use on YouTube or Substack?
Whether any of these routes consistently bend the emissions curve is still unknown. It’s evident that the previous approach—publish papers, have faith in the policy-making process, and wait—is not clearly effective. It feels less like a debate between right and wrong and more like a conflict between two distinct forms of hope when you see researchers like Grekin and Kashtan sitting across a table from one another, genuinely fond and genuinely divided.