There are few women in the oil and gas industry who’ve ascended to the rank of CEO. But only one who in 2019 took a monster risk with a monster acquisition just before the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction. 2020 was a brutal year for Vicki Hollub. Only four years into her stint as CEO of OXY, the first woman to lead a major American oil company went toe to toe with energy giant Chevron to acquire Anadarko Petroleum. Hollub won that prize for $55 billion, becoming the largest Permian operator in the world’s richest oil field.

Reese Energy Consulting today spotlights Oxy’s intrepid leader, who recently appeared in a New York Time’s Climate Forward forum held in N.Y. where she was set to be interviewed by a Times’ moderator. But before the interview could get underway, and with Hollub seated, an activist group took control of the live stage later posting they had “made the whole audience of 100s evacuate.” Hollub, however, didn’t leave the forum. Unfazed by the interruption and the activist group’s disparaging social media posts about her as a woman, Hollub returned to her seat. And she had a lot to say in that interview.

She not only made her case as a CEO of an oil and gas company applying billion-dollar technologies to reduce and capture CO2 emissions but ripped the moderator for his lack of education and interview preparedness apparent in the questions he posed. And then Hollub educated him—live on stage—to kindergarten explain Oxy’s net-zero ambitions, while chiding “See, you should know this like the back of your hand.” She also pointed out the dearth of communication between climate scientists and oil and gas companies as a pain point of progress. Those folks tend to hang up on her when she calls. Finally, when addressing the moderator’s solution to climate problems is to “phase out fossil fuels as rapidly as possible”, Hollub replied “I find it really hard to understand how we got to where we are that people like you believe that.” Rock on, sister.