As Oil Companies Stay Lean, Workers Move to Renewable Energy

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

77% : Sam Johnson, 30, has been interested in renewable energy since high school.
62% : Just four months later, she landed a job with Fervo, a young Houston company that aims to tap geothermal energy under the Earth's surface.
62% : By comparison, employment in wind energy grew nearly 20 percent from 2016 to 2021, to more than 113,000 workers.
62% : "The oil industry so massively outweighs renewables and will for a very long time."
61% : In more than a dozen interviews, energy workers and executives said they had switched to renewable energy because they felt that the oil and gas industry's best days were behind it.
60% : But the number of jobs in renewable energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and battery businesses, is rising.
56% : "The basics are the same," Miguel Febres, a petroleum engineer who worked in the oil industry for 19 years and is now a planner for wind and solar projects at Enel.
55% :Some workers who have left oil and gas companies said they had been frustrated with how slowly their previous employers embraced clean energy.
53% : Executives and workers in energy hubs in Houston, Dallas and other places say steady streams of people are moving from fossil fuel to renewable energy jobs.
51% : Mr. Cervantes was a consultant to oil companies before joining Sunnova two years ago, after he was laid off during the Covid slowdown, he said.
50% : He said he had initially hoped that oil companies would change how they did business.
50% : Working from home, he became more isolated as one colleague after another quit -- frequently to work at renewable energy companies.
45% :Some lawmakers in Washington and union officials have said the transition to green energy could hurt workers because jobs in oil, gas and coal tend to pay better and are more likely to be unionized than jobs at solar and wind companies.

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