Devon Thicket doesn't exist, but he should. Or maybe he shouldn't. That's precisely what he's trying to figure out. If he did exist, he'd be sitting in a Denver coffee shop on a Tuesday morning, laptop open to a job offer he's read approximately forty-seven times, each reading producing a different emotional response. The offer is from a company his nonprofit spent three years suing over methane emissions. They lost. Now they want to pay him $340,000 a year to make sure they don't get sued again.

For the purposes of this conversation, let's say Devon is real enough. Real enough to have spent fifteen years filing climate litigation that occasionally wins and frequently doesn't. Real enough to have two kids who need braces and college funds. Real enough to wonder if he's been effective or just employed.

You've been doing environmental law for fifteen years. What's the decision you're facing?

So, okay, the simple version is I got offered a job as General Counsel for Sustainability at a Fortune 500 energy company. The complicated version is everything else.

The money is absurd. More than triple what I make now. My wife looked at the number and just said "holy shit" out loud, which is not her usual vocabulary. But the company is one we've been fighting for years. Not the worst actor, but definitely not winning any awards. They want me to build out their legal strategy around their climate commitments, which on paper sounds like real impact, but I've read enough corporate sustainability reports to know that "commitments" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

When you say you've been fighting them for years, what does that actually look like?

We sued them in 2019 over methane emissions from their natural gas operations. Spent three years on it. Mountains of discovery, expert witnesses, the whole thing. We lost on standing—court said we couldn't prove direct harm to our specific plaintiffs. Which is the thing about climate litigation, right? The harm is everywhere and nowhere. It's like trying to prosecute someone for making the air slightly worse. Good luck getting a judge to care about parts per million.

But here's what happened: during the lawsuit, they voluntarily reduced their methane emissions by 40%. Not because we won. Because the lawsuit was expensive and annoying and they figured they might as well fix the problem rather than keep paying lawyers to argue about it.

So we lost and also kind of won? That's been my career in a nutshell.

How do you think about those kinds of wins?

Long pause.

Some days I think we're threading a needle—using the legal system to create just enough pressure that companies change behavior even when we don't win in court. Other days I think we're providing cover. Like, they get to say "we're being responsible, look, we even settled with environmental groups" while emissions keep going up.

The year we started that methane case, global CO2 was 411 parts per million. Now it's 427.¹ We won some battles. We're losing the war.

And that's what makes this job offer so... I don't know. Seductive? Terrifying? If I take it, I'd be inside the building instead of outside throwing rocks at it. Maybe I could actually move the needle on their transition planning, their supply chain, their capital allocation.

Or maybe I'd spend five years writing very sophisticated legal justifications for why they need to keep extracting gas while they "transition" and then wake up at 50 wondering what the fuck I did with my 40s.

What would the job actually involve?

They're creating a new division focused on climate risk and compliance. They want someone who understands both the legal landscape and how environmental groups think. Laughs. Which is a polite way of saying they want someone who knows how they'll get sued next.

I'd be reviewing their climate commitments, making sure they're defensible, working with their business units on emissions reduction targets, handling any litigation that comes up. They've got a 2050 net-zero pledge and they need someone to figure out what that means legally. Can they count offsets? How do they disclose scope 3 emissions? What happens when shareholders sue them for either doing too much or not enough?

It's actually interesting work. That's the problem. It's not like they're asking me to defend coal plants. They're trying to navigate this impossible space where investors want climate action, regulators are tightening rules, but their entire business model is still built on extracting and selling fossil fuels.

Someone has to help them thread that needle, and it might as well be someone who actually gives a shit about climate rather than just another corporate lawyer who sees it as a compliance exercise.

You said "might as well be someone who actually gives a shit." Do you believe that?

Runs hand through hair.

I don't know. My colleague at the nonprofit, she said "Devon, they're not hiring you to change the company, they're hiring you to make it harder to sue them." And she's probably right.

But also, if I don't take it, they'll hire someone else. Someone who maybe doesn't care, who'll just help them greenwash their way through the transition. At least I'd push for real reductions, real accountability. Right?

Or maybe that's what everyone tells themselves. Maybe the last guy who had this job said the same thing.

What does your wife think?

She's practical. We've got a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old. We're in Denver, which is expensive. I make $115,000 at the nonprofit, which sounds like a lot until you're paying for childcare and a mortgage and trying to save for college. She's a teacher, so she makes teacher money. We're fine, but we're not "don't worry about orthodontist bills" fine.

This offer would change that. We could actually save. We could travel. We could stop having the "can we afford this?" conversation every time something breaks.

She asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to keep fighting. She said "okay, but fighting for what?"

And I didn't have a good answer. Fighting to delay things getting worse? Fighting to make companies slightly less bad? Fighting because it feels like giving up to stop?

How do you measure whether your work at the nonprofit has mattered?

Laughs bitterly.

That's the question, isn't it? We've won some cases. We've forced some companies to disclose climate risks. We've pushed some governments to strengthen regulations. But the temperature keeps going up. The disasters keep getting worse.

I spent two years on a case trying to stop a pipeline expansion. We lost. The pipeline got built. Did I waste two years?

Or look at it differently: maybe we slowed things down. Maybe without climate litigation, emissions would be higher. Maybe the threat of lawsuits makes companies think twice. But I can't prove that. I can't measure the harm that didn't happen because we were annoying enough.

And then there's this other thing I think about. I'm 42. I've got maybe 20 more years of peak career productivity. Do I want to spend them filing briefs that mostly lose, or do I want to be inside a major company actually implementing emissions reductions? Even if they're not moving fast enough, isn't some movement better than none?

What would you tell someone at your nonprofit who was considering a similar move?

Pauses.

I'd probably tell them not to do it. Which is fucked up, right? But I'd say the nonprofit sector needs good people, and if everyone talented enough to get corporate offers leaves, we're just conceding the fight. I'd say corporate sustainability is often performative, and they're hiring you to make it look legitimate. I'd say once you start making that salary, it's really hard to go back.

Maybe we need people in corporate sustainability who actually care. Maybe that's how things change—from the inside.

I don't know. I'm arguing with myself.

Have you asked anyone who made a similar jump what it was like?

Yeah, I talked to a guy who left another environmental nonprofit to go work for a tech company on their climate program. He said it was amazing at first—so many resources, so much ability to actually implement things rather than just advocate. But after a year, he said the bureaucracy was suffocating. Every decision got filtered through business units worried about costs and PR and shareholder reactions. He'd propose something ambitious and it would get watered down until it was basically meaningless.

He lasted three years and then left to start a consulting firm.

But he also said he doesn't regret it. He learned how corporations actually work, which made him better at his consulting work. And he paid off his student loans and bought a house. So there's that.

What's the timeline on the decision?

They want an answer in two weeks. Which feels both like plenty of time and no time at all.

I've made a pros and cons list, which is such a lawyer thing to do. Pulls out phone. Want to hear it?

Pros: Money, obviously. More resources to implement change. Less stress about funding. Better work-life balance, theoretically. Getting to see how corporate decision-making actually works. Potentially more impact per hour worked.

Cons: Might be selling out. Could be used to greenwash. Will lose credibility in environmental community. Might hate the corporate culture. Could wake up in five years and realize I helped delay real action. The company could fire me the moment I become inconvenient.

The lists are about even, which means I'm fucked because this should be obvious one way or the other.

What would make it obvious?

I don't know. If the company was actively evil, it would be easy to say no. If they were genuinely committed to transformation, it would be easy to say yes. But they're in the middle—trying to transition while protecting their current business, making real changes while also doing performative bullshit. Which is probably where most companies are.

Or maybe if I knew for sure that climate litigation was working, I'd stay. But I don't know that. I think it helps on the margins, but the margins keep getting narrower.

Long pause.

You know what really gets me? I became a lawyer because I thought the legal system could force accountability. That if we could just prove the harm, establish the causation, get the right precedents, we could make polluters pay and force change.

Fifteen years later, I've learned the legal system is really good at delay and really bad at prevention. By the time we win a case, the damage is done. We're fighting over who pays for the cleanup, not stopping the mess in the first place.

So maybe the real question isn't nonprofit versus corporate. Maybe it's whether law is even the right tool for this problem.

Is that what you're really deciding?

Laughs.

Fuck. Maybe. Maybe I'm just tired. Tired of losing, tired of the funding stress, tired of explaining to my kids why daddy's always stressed about work. The corporate job would be easier in a lot of ways. And I could tell myself I'm still fighting, just from a different position.

But I also know that's probably bullshit. I know I'll compromise things I didn't think I'd compromise. I know I'll justify decisions that past-me would hate.

And maybe that's okay? Maybe that's just growing up, getting realistic about what's possible.

Stares at laptop screen.

I've got two weeks to decide. Ask me again in 13 days and I'll probably give you a completely different answer.

Footnotes

1. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide ↩