Smart and pragmatic! They see no future in oil or gasm because there isn't any!

The problem is the dinosaurs and troglodytes, who are so up themselves and the pursuit of easy wealth! That they can't or won't change!

They see a light at the end of the tunnel, but fail to realize, it's a steaming (annihilation event) express, thundering toward them at breakneck speed!
Alan B.

Corection and apoligies, or gasm, should be read as, or gas!

Are you coming? No, just breathing heavy.
Alan B.

Simply, it's a blue-collar job: the same city-born people who won't do it are the same people who won't become farmers either.

Millenials may not want to work in the oil industry, but they are happy to consume its products in most of the things they buy and yearn for, including cars. Car ownership and use has been the driving force (excuse the pun) for the three great social revolutions of the past 60 years; (a) the opportunity of low income families to escape the slums of the inner city where they were trapped by immobility to live close to where they worked and to relocate to more spacious, affordable and attractive residential sites in the outer suburbs, (b) the entry of mothers of dependent children into paid employment (increasingly professional employment) because access to their own car gave them the opportunity to combine home responsibilities with work commitments, and (c) the explosive growth of mobility among ageing retired people able to enjoy the benefits of a longer life-span. Until the inevitable development of autonomous cars powered by zero emissions the vast majority of the world's growing car owners will depend on petrol powered motor cars.

The oil industry seems to have a number of problems in recruiting Millennials. One of them is that its image does not appear to be an idealistic industry to work in.

For an overall perspective on the influence of fossil fuels on human history Ian Morris’s “Why the West Rules for Now” (2011) and “Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels” (2017) are good starting points. Morris’s thesis is that societies’ development depends on how efficiently they utilise the energy available to them and that in turn the source of energy which a society uses determines the ethos and beliefs of that society. According to Morris’s arguments, a society which relies on fossil fuels is open, democratic and has many of the liberal attitudes which we have in our Western, and some Asian, societies today.

The fossil fuel industries of coal, oil and gas have therefore been one of the great liberating forces in the world. Let’s take slavery as an example. Ever since the agricultural, revolution slavery was the only source of mass labour. Tribes and societies fought each other for both land and slaves to work the land, mines and for other large projects. Philosophers such as Aristotle rationalised the need for slaves. This situation continued until about the 18th Century in Britain.

There is a reason why the British were in the forefront in the abolition of slavery. Before the abolition of slavery, there were already Abolitionists lobbying for such abolition. However, while Britain was dependent on human labour (slavery in the colonies, various forms of bonded or contractual labour in Britain itself), the Abolitionists were not making much headway. With coal as a source of energy, slaves were no longer needed for the economy and Abolitionists’ ideals could be fulfilled.

(Continued from above)

Similarly, in the United States, it was in the industrialised north that Abolitionism took hold. There were surely Abolitionists in the South, but because slaves were so necessary for the economy, the aims of the Abolitionists could not be brought to fruition. Having won the Civil War, the North could impose its values on the whole of the Union as it was constituted at the time. These values included the idea that slavery was evil and had to be abolished, an idea easily accepted in the victorious North because it had no need of slaves because of coal.

In South Africa, the Apartheid system was originally designed for a mostly agricultural economy. However, with industrialisation, the need for both more educated and mobile labour developed, and the Apartheid system started to crumble as its simplistic structure and attitudes were overwhelmed by a complex industrial economy. It is a controversial point with the current dispensation in South Africa, but Apartheid was ended largely by economic changes in South Africa rather than by the (very limited) guerrilla war conducted by the ANC. The energy needed to drive the South African industrial revolution was derived from coal.

What coal did in the past, oil does now, and more. Perhaps executives, recruiters and PR hacks of oil companies should read Ian Morris and develop a recruiting program around these ideas. If today’s Millennials wish to include an idealistic component in their jobs, then the oil industry could do worse than mention some of the above points in their recruiting campaigns. The instances of pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels can be egregious at times, and the perpetrators of these ecological disasters should be made to clean their mess and be punished for making the mess. However, a regulated fossil fuel industry is better than slavery.

As for perceptions that the oil industry is dangerous, perhaps one should do some surveys to determine the accident rates of various industries and see where the oil industry sits.