3 weeks Fossil fuel companies are barely hiring for clean energy positions Fast Company

For all the promises fossil fuel companies have made about greening their portfolios, they’re not hiring a lot of people for the job.

Legacy energy companies operating in oil, gas, and coal accounted for only about 4% of jobs postings in the clean energy industry, according to a Fast Company analysis of Google Jobs listings between June and August 2024. That’s a fraction of the number made up by mostly younger firms devoted to developing and operating clean energy projects, and designing and manufacturing clean technology and equipment, which made up 36% and 35%, respectively. The numbers, which were compiled months before Trump’s electoral victory, are likely to further diminish.

The disconnect between oil and gas companies’ PR pronouncements and the activity in their HR departments is not entirely surprising. In 2022, the climate-focused think tank InfluenceMap found that 60% of the public relations materials published by the five largest supermajor oil companies mentioned a claim of the company’s greening efforts, while only 12% of their capital expenditures went to expanding their renewable portfolios or mitigating climate risk.

That same year, members of the House Oversight & Reform Committee publicly acknowledged that the industry’s promises were effectively little more than bluster. The memo, written by Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney and Chairman Ro Khanna, accompanied a trove of internal documents showing that “fossil fuel companies have been misleading the public about their purported commitment to reduce emissions.” In reality, the industry had refined its “resist and block” strategy to counter any regulations while greenwashing its public image.

Despite the availability of subsidies for clean energy development under the Inflation Reduction Act, the American fossil fuel industry has not been incentivized to stop business as usual. The International Monetary Fund estimated that the American fossil fuel industry benefited from $757 billion of explicit and implicit subsidies—both those direct incentives that allow it to charge below the cost of its supplies, and those that allow it to evade the costs of its own externalities, like pollution and carbon. That makes the level of subsidies reaped by America’s traditional energy sector second only to those received from the government in China, and one place ahead of those received in Russia.

“We know that the clean energy economy is full of opportunities,” says Cathy Collentine, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. (The Sierra Club recently co-authored a report on tax abatements and incentives for the the liquified natural gas industry in Gulf Coast states.) She believes that “the clean energy economy and the economics around moving to renewable energies will, at the end of the day, prove to be a better investment. And they’re not willing to take it.”

Interested in reading more about clean energy job market? Check out Fast Company‘s full report on Where the Clean Energy Jobs Are.

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