Navigating Politics and Polarization With Josh Garrett
This episode features a conversation with CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, Josh Garrett. It was recorded in November 2023.
Having spent more than half of his almost two decades of strategic communications and marketing experience committed to clean energy and climate tech, Josh co-founded the climate-focused advisory and public relations firm Redwood Climate Communications in September 2021 and has since led the growth of the company while maintaining its commitment to facilitating climate progress.
Over the course of his career, Josh has led campaigns for climate organizations large and small, including Google Nest, Stem, and Sunrun, as well as environmental non-profits like The Nature Conservancy.
Amongst other things, Josh and I discussed the state of political polarization on climate issues in the United States, what this poster child of partisanship can teach us about communicating climate change across the aisle, and which bright spots we might look to for inspiration.
Additional links:
Visit the Redwood Climate Communications website
Check out Rewiring America and Pique Action
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication’s 6 Americas of Global Warming
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you and me improve our abilities to engage, empower and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, Josh Garrett. It was recorded in November 2023.
Having sent more than half of his almost two decades of strategic communications and marketing experience committed to clean energy and climate tech, Josh cofounded the climate-focused advisory and public relations firm Redwood Climate Communications in September 2020 and has since led the growth of the company while maintaining its commitment to facilitating climate progress.
Over the course of his career, Josh has led campaigns for climate organisations large and small, including Google Nest, Stem, and Sunrun, as well as environmental nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy.
Amongst other things, Josh and I discussed the state of political polarisation on climate issues in the United States, what this poster child of partisanship can teach us about communicating climate change across the aisle, and which bright spots we might look to for inspiration. So, let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Josh Garrett.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Josh: Really, I think of two things. Number one is communicating the stakes, which I think as a human society, we've gotten a bit better at, making clear that climate change is happening right now and it's affecting everyone. And because of climate-driven weather impacts and other sort of events, more and more people know that and feel it in a way they didn't maybe 10 or 15 years ago, but saying it and drawing those connections, making them very explicit. “Hey, that heat wave you experience that really disrupted your life or in some cases did some pretty serious damage to your own health or those you care about,” that was made however many times, more likely by climate change.
So, I think that's one of the last bastions of holdouts against climate action is saying, “Oh well, it's a future problem and it's fine now and we can, you know, adapt here and there and worry about it in 50 years.” And I think that's been proven very much not to be the case. And so just drawing that explicit connection, making clear that each individual person does have something to lose by ignoring climate change, I think is important.
And now the flip side of that is that it's depressing. OK, we're all going through this horrible thing together at the same time. And man, if we had just done something about it, like a few decades ago, we've been a better spot. But we're not. So I think my second part of the answer is very important and that is, we can absolutely do something about it rather than I think what a lot of people have unfortunately come to believe, “Oh, either we hold to 1.5° or we're all screwed and if we get to 1.6°, it's all over and we should just give up.” It's absolutely not the case. Every 10th of a degree, every hundred, every thousandth of a degree of global average temperature that we can prevent from moving upwards, is a little bit less of that risk of a heat wave or a hurricane or a flood that could do a lot of damage to life and property. So, I think those are the two most important things that communication can do is, in many, many different ways, anywhere from white papers to, you know, peer reviewed scientific reports, to one minute comedy videos, can make those two points in ways that stick with people and get them thinking a little differently, hopefully acting differently when it comes to climate change and climate impacts.
Dickon: I wondered if you could share some insights into the current state of climate change communication in the US, particularly in the context of political polarisation.
Josh: Sure. So, if I had to give it a letter grade, I'd say maybe like a D+, up from an F a few years ago. And I say that because when it comes to elected officials speaking about climate impacts, climate action, climate-oriented government programmes, they often say things that aren't true, they misrepresent, they intentionally omits facts that are relevant and often supportive of climate action.
An example of that is, unfortunately right now, the current speaker of the House of Representatives in the US is on the record saying that climate change is nothing to worry about, and it's a natural thing and humans didn't cause it and therefore we shouldn't do anything about it. This is the person that’s third in line for the US Presidency, so he absolutely holds real power and it’s just so frustrating and disappointing to see someone like that gain that office and I think that a more informed electorate would not allow that to happen. But for a lot of different reasons that that's where we're at.
I think the sort of table stakes about how politicians or other government officials talk about climate change are essentially like, you can kind of get away with saying things that are not true at all. And you don't have to pay a price for it either on election day or in terms of your own colleagues supporting your bill or whatever sort of initiative you have, so I think that's the main problem.
That said, I think where it's been has been even worse. We obviously had a president that on his 7th or 8th day in office took the US out of the Paris Agreement. And of course he's famous for saying things like, “wind turbines cause cancer” or “solar panels will cut your property values in half.” It's just stuff that's not true and there's evidence out there that makes it very, very clear that it is untrue.
So, what I'm trying to arrive at is, although decades ago you had asinine things happening in government like a senator bringing a snowball onto the floor of the chamber to demonstrate that it's snowing therefore global warming isn't real. That's pretty bad. But there's still very bad things happening, they're just not quite as wacky and extreme. And to try to end on a positive note, I will say the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act is a massive, massive step forward. We're not really seeing the impacts of that yet. The money is not yet in the hands of the many people and businesses it will be going to in most cases.
Once that money starts getting spread around and creating jobs and improving air quality and all the great sort of ancillary benefits in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that IRA will provide. I'm confident that that will change the tenor of discussion, at least a little bit. And maybe bring us up to like a C minus or maybe even a regular C in the in the next couple years.
Dickon: I recognise that it feels like a cheap shot, maybe to look at the US, but I think it can teach us a lot about our own respective contexts. The US has been at the heart of this kind of characterisation of polarisation on climate, but of course it's a phenomenon we find in so many other places. I'm interested also about it because of the way that it's so attached to party lines.
Josh: Not a cheap shot, it's fair because we're the second largest emitter and the largest economy, so, our influence looms large. Climate change is not a political issue, it's inherently apolitical. It effects every human being on the planet, and I think tragedy is the best word I can use to describe how it has been so terribly politicised here in the US.
I just heard a report on NPR yesterday about weather people, weather reporters, meteorologists at TV stations in the in the Midwest. One pretty well reported story from earlier this year, a guy in Iowa had a mandate from his station, like, tell us about climate change and how it's related to our weather. And he was qualified to do that. And he did it. And he started getting death threats. One of the things he mentioned was many of his critics said, “Why are you bringing politics into our nice little town into our weather report?”
But to go back to communication, I think there is a way to creatively communicate, make those connections between the threat, the solution, and benefits that come with that solution, and policies in government, without getting too partisan about it.
And I think there are organisations that are doing that, Rewiring America, I just can't give them enough credit for being a really informative, helpful, and frankly entertaining, in many cases, proponent for climate action without ever getting political. And so that's one of the few organisations I look to as both model and a leader when it comes to effectively communicating climate action and climate imperatives in a pretty nasty political environment.
Dickon: What are some effective strategies or approaches for engaging individuals from different political backgrounds in meaningful climate discussions?
Josh: Great question. I'll do another plug to start my answer because I think Dr. Katherine Hayhoe is really the foremost thinker and speaker about this. Number one: find shared values. Like I said, this is a problem that affects every human being. As humans, we share so much, right? You know, we all have the same needs. And many of us have the same wants of a nice comfortable life, safety, and positive experiences for our family and loved ones. And so the wrong way to do it would be, “Hey, the world is on fire and you're doing enough.” Rather than doing that, you start with, “Our kids, go to the same school. We want our school to be safe. We want their indoor air quality to be good. So, let me tell you about how heat pumps are a great heating and cooling solution.” I’m actually involved in conversations about this in my kid’s school right now. Or, “Hey, we both enjoy fly fishing or hiking and there's ways to help protect the lands where we do that. Let me engage you and talk about how we can work together.” So just starting with shared values.
Also, word choice, terms that people like you and I, and probably most of your listeners are very familiar with: 1.5 C, fossil fuel phase down, you know, so many phrases that we know exactly what they mean just have no meaning to the average person. And so you need to be self aware and you know. Keep it simple. Keep it direct and you know to say, “Hey, this hurricane was made more likely by climate change.” That's a pretty easy to understand way of framing it, right? So being aware of that and, you know, making sure your vocabulary matches your audience. Going back to where we started the conversation. Talk about the local impacts. This is a global problem with local impacts, so it's very easy for someone to dismiss a conversation about something that's happening on the other side of the world. But if you can say so, using myself as an example, I live in a town that's pretty close to the Hudson River, which is a very large river. When there's a storm surge in the ocean that starts in New York harbour, that could cause flooding along the river and there are thousands of people that live along the river in New York State. This is something that could happen at any time, any day, happened during Superstorm Sandy and it will absolutely happen again. It's just a question of when, and we don't know when, but we do know it's more likely because of climate change. So, there's a local impact that if I'm speaking to a neighbour, I could say, “This is something we, you know, both need to think about and be aware of and engage with our fellow community members and local government on,” so, I think shared values start from a place where you can both agree on something, use words and phrasing that your audience can understand, and then, you know, really emphasise those local impacts. And the second part of that is emphasise things you can do locally to feel like you're attacking the problem and make some progress together.
Dickon: It's literally only just occurred to me, and this is bonkers… 1.5°C The second biggest emitter in the world doesn't even use that scale.
Josh: So true. It's so true. Yep. Yeah. And that's a great point. Like, that's 300,000,000+ people in America. I actually just heard it in a news report this morning, so I could tell you that's 2.4°F. Had I not heard that this morning, it would have been like, I don't know 5? Or 3 1/2? So yeah, and that's part of the problem here. And on another podcast, we can talk about the merits of the metric system versus imperial. But yeah, for now, I think it's just the reality that Americans have no idea what a centigrade is.
Dickon: What role can the framing of climate issues play in depoliticising the discourse and encouraging bipartisan or cross-party cooperation?
Josh: Don't talk about climate change. That's it. Climate change is manifested in so many different ways. Talk about all those other awesome benefits you get by embracing a climate solution. So, the example I often give is electric vehicles. They are just better cars than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. They're more fun to drive, they work better, they're cheaper to fuel, they're cheaper to maintain. You don't have to go to the garage, you know 3 or 4 times a year. You got to replace your brakes, your tyres and your wiper fluid, and that's pretty much it. Plus, for people, especially here in the US, who know what it's like to try to merge onto a crowded highway. It can be incredibly nerve wracking and difficult to do. Every electric vehicle, even the cheap ones, do it with amazing acceleration. And man, it's also really fun to just feel the rush of very fast acceleration. So, anybody who likes cars, even people who don't like cars, I'm not much of a car person, but I can appreciate that difference. Electric vehicles are a climate solution, but it's also just a better version of what came before. So I think that is often a great way to take the politics out of it.
And we don't even have to talk about emissions. If you're advocating for the construction of a utility scale solar plant in your town, and it's going to replace a natural gas power plant. Talk about how the elimination of that power plant will improve our local air quality and we won't have to worry about the massive price fluctuations of natural gas that could then impact our electricity prices in a major way. So many ancillary benefits to taking climate action. I think that's probably where I would want to start.
The phrase just transition is another sort of loaded phrase that means a lot to people like us, but to the average person, they have no idea what that means, which is totally fair. But to break that down for a less informed audience or less interested audience and just say, not only do we want to transition to cleaner energy, but we want to do it in a way where people who have been historically marginalised and historically felt the negative impacts of fossil fuels and legacy infrastructure, you know, in such an intensely negative way and in such an unequal way, we want to build that into plans. We want to rectify that and make sure what comes next isn't going to continue that history of marginalisation. There's no way, at least in the US, we're going to completely, you know, separate it from politics, but if communicators are able to weave in those themes, I think it's a lot harder for anyone except for the hardest hardliners to just dismiss it and say no and not give it a thought and say I'm that sounds pretty nice.
Dickon: You're able to sell it on so many other aspects and attributes without even needing to drop the C bomb.
Josh: Yeah. And I mean, it's kind of fun sometimes for a nerd like me to be like, “Oh, I'm having this conversation. This person doesn't seem to be, like, on the climate team so much. So, how long can I talk, you know, without ever saying emissions or climate change or climate crisis?” It's actually surprisingly easy once you start trying to do it.
The work we do is business to business. So when it comes to the B to B conversation, I think, you know, framing it as whether it's going to be the government or your shareholders or your customers or your employees, a lot of stakeholder groups have already started looking more closely at what is this company doing to make climate change worse, and how could they stop doing that or change their operations? And that's only going to intensify. So just from a pure business perspective, all those stakeholder groups I mentioned, you have to keep them happy if you want to be successful. This change is already starting. And if you start preparing for it now, you're going to be a lot better off in a couple years.
If you're an employee at a company, especially in this sort of shifting work culture where affinity for the mission of your company is a much bigger consideration in terms of when you accept the job offer right? Hearing from your company like, “Hey, we're going to do X Y and Z because it's good for our business and also it makes us better climate citizens of the world.” You're going to trust that they've put in the time to build a programme of action that actually makes sense and will benefit you as an employee, either directly or indirectly, through the future success of your company. So I think that is a really underreported and under considered factor. What we call internal communications is so much more important than it used to be. And when it comes to climate action that goes double because, you know, you join a company because you believe to some degree in what is doing is a good thing, and if you're hearing from them, “this is the right thing to do and we're going to do it,” then you're more inclined to say, “Yeah, OK, I'm going to get on board with that, or I'm going to talk about that with my friends.”
Companies have a great opportunity to educate and spur action among their employees if they put in the work and it will make your employees feel better about the work they do and make them more apartment to participate in whatever sort of programmes you're putting together. And then also the point that carries over between the broad civilian audience and the business audience is there are so many other benefits. So, if you're doing this because you're afraid you’ll have to pay a fine, I can also tell you all the ways that going to save you money in the long run, or it's going to set you up for new opportunities as a business, setting up the stakes and then talking about the extra benefits of doing something about it. It works for both businesses and broader audiences.
Dickon: Can you think of any specific examples or case studies that illustrate successful efforts to bridge the political divide on climate related policies or actions?
Josh: An example that comes to mind is the state of Texas. So, everybody knows what Texas is. Even if you're not from the US, it kind of has its own reputation, and rightly so, as an outlier, a maverick, it does its own thing. It has its own electricity grid that operates separately from the entire rest of the world. That's a cultural thing. It's an identity and part of that identity for a century or more at this point is they have lots of oil and methane gas resources and they tap into those resources and many, many people have gotten wealthy. Many, many people have had great careers getting those fossil fuels out of the ground. So, it's extra hard for someone in Texas, even setting politics aside, if they’re a decision maker, it's very hard to go out and say, “Hey, we got to get off of oil and gas because it's bad for climate,” when those have literally been the lifeblood of the state's economy for so long.
But also they generate more electricity from wind and solar than any other state in the country, because along with those fossil fuel resources deep underground that are so dangerous and disruptive and expensive to access, they have lots of sun and lots of wind and lots of space. And you know, that's a huge part of their economy now. Still nowhere near oil and gas in terms of dollar generated, I'm sure, but it's just a good example of sometimes the reality of the positive impacts of taking climate action is so powerful, even the most politically oriented climate denying person is going to say I kind of have to support that.
Publicly, on the surface, it's an oil and gas state. But under the surface, the reality is, you know, those ancillary benefits we were talking about are so great that Texas is also a renewable state.
So, I think that weird paradox is also happening in other parts of the country in the world, and pretty soon those paradoxes will reveal themselves and unfold into very powerful examples that more people look to and understand and replicate. And as a result, we'll get more clean energy and other good climate action.
Dickon: I wonder how it's framed in Texas. I wonder if it's framed in terms of values of independence and self-sufficiency, that kind of thing.
Josh: There are so many entry points to talking about those ancillary benefits. And yeah, if you can say like, “Hey, don't you hate paying your utility all that money and they can just Jack up the price whenever they want? I got a solution for ya, it's called solar with batteries.” And that's a pretty compelling argument if that's your biggest concern around your home energy use is, “Man, I hate the utility.” Well, you don't have to work with them anymore. There's technologies available. That's an option that you can work toward. So yeah, lots of different ways to frame climate action to speak to the different values of the audience.
Dickon: How important is tailoring climate messages to specific audiences, and what considerations should communicators keep in mind when crafting messages for diverse political groups?
Josh: Yeah. I mean, how important is it? It's everything. If I'm going to speak at a conference of climate tech founders, I'm gonna say a lot of different stuff than if I'm speaking to a 7th grade science class.
One of the good things about being in our profession at this moment is between impacts and solutions, those are expanding and changing and diversifying every single day. So you have lots of options. For me, good communications practise always starts with audience. No matter what you're trying to communicate. Who is your audience? What is your message? What do you want then to do or feel in response to your message? That's the beginning of every effective communications campaign, regardless of any other factor. It all comes down to knowing your audience. What are their values? What do they care about? Or often you'll hear if you're talking about your potential customers from a business perspective: What are their pain points? Right? What is that thing they hate about their everyday life or their job that they just wish they could get rid of? If you can go into their life and say, “Hey, I have a solution to make sure you never have to worry about that again.” That's extremely powerful.
You can take that same sort of concept and apply it to a lot of different things, whether you're trying to gen up support in your local community to pressure your town board to approve a renewable energy project, or put heat pumps in schools, or you're trying to sell your sustainably made product to a whole wide swath of consumers, knowing what they care about, why they're even interested in what you're talking about in the first place and going right there. Meet them where they are is kind of a cliche, but I think it's really important. That's a way to sidestep politics. You can say a whole lot of words about, “This is a climate solution, but also it has these great benefits and it speaks to your specific values and concerns.” You can have a whole conversation about that without mentioning anything about political parties or national leaders.
Dickon: How far across the aisle should communicators lean, and where, if anywhere, is effort is wasted?
Josh: Effort is wasted in trying to convince the hardliners. I believe it's the Yale Centre on Climate Change Communication has classified at least Americans, maybe the global sort of populous, into categories on the climate issue. And on one extreme of the spectrum is people that are like “No way you're never going to convince me. Either climate change isn't really happening, it's all a hoax, or yeah, it's happening, but it's totally natural and not caused by humans, and we're all going to be fine.” People that believe that in the deepest part of their hearts, like there's no sense in trying to talk to them. And a lot of those people, you know, that's part of their political platform. So if that's where they're coming from. I would say, don't even bother, focus on getting them out of whatever office they're in and electing a reasonable person.
That same Yale classification I think shows that's a pretty small portion. So that's where the effort is wasted. In terms of leaning across the aisle, I mean, I think it's what we already talked about, which is shared values. I actually have a lot of admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, right? Republican president at the beginning of the 1900s, also a famous conservationist, and I think it's actually really interesting to look at the language. So, you have environmentalist, conservationist, climate activist. Some people see those as the same thing. I see slight differences between the three, but I'll use conservationist because, and this came up a lot when I worked at The Nature Conservancy, politically conservative people like Teddy Roosevelt, who, let's be honest, was racist and liked to fight wars against, quote unquote “lesser people” because he thought white Americans should own many parts of the world.
Setting that aside for the moment, he also believed that, like nature had an inherent value in existing as it is and the outcome of that perspective and that value that he held as a president was the creation of national parks and conservation as national policy. That's great. So, reaching across the aisle to me might involve if you're talking to a Congress person from Montana. “Hey, I understand your fly fishing industry is under threat because waters are warmer, more wildfires, and all those tourist dollars are starting to slow down their flow into your state. That's a climate issue. Let's talk about a) what we can do to help you adjust to that and protect those jobs and protect those beautiful natural lands that your state is famous for, and b) attack the larger problem of climate change and try to get a handle on that.” If they are a conservationist and outdoor person, which is likely coming from that part of the world, then they'll at least listen, and I think that's the key is setting aside, “Hey, your party leader says this. Well, that's wrong and I hate it.” And going to, “As an individual, as a policy maker, you know, what are your values and if, you know, you agree with the idea of conservationism, there's lots of stuff we can do as lawmakers to further that cause and at the same time make some progress on climate. You don't even have to tell that to your constituents. But let's work on it together. I can tell that to my constituents in, you know, Massachusetts or New York City or whatever, and you can leave that part out and just say you're protecting the fly fishing industry and the survival of trout species in Montana.”
I think that works really well on an individual level, it's when you get to the like very high level aggregate “Republicans say this, Democrats say that” where it becomes almost impossible to get anywhere.
Remember that people are humans and they have values. Often you share with them and making progress on that local one to one level is going to be how we actually move things forward, at least in the US. Certainly not, you know, in a presidential debate anytime soon.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communication endeavours?
Josh: I'm gonna say optimism. Like, we can do something about this. We are doing something about this. I tell my kids when they ask about climate change. Like, is it really that bad? And I usually say, “Well, it's not great, but there are so many smart, talented people with more drive and determination to fix this problem than maybe any other problem that the world has ever faced.” So that makes me hopeful and I have the privilege of interfacing with some of those people on a regular basis and they inspire me a lot.
So just pointing to all the great stuff that's happening now. I think that's probably the most important thing. If we're talking about broad audiences with the goal of broadly defined, however incremental, climate progress.
Dickon: Conversely, what's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Josh: Shoulding people. “You should do this. You should eat less meat. You should drive less.” Personally, I believe that individual action you know has a place, but collective action, institutional action is absolutely what's needed far and away before you even start worrying about how many hamburgers you eat a week.
Don't “should” people don't make them feel bad for living their life in the way they do. Inform them, give them optimism, and give them options.
Look at all these cool things you can do. You can actually get that same F-150 pickup in an electric version. And by the way, you can power your house with that truck when the lights go out in your rural community. So stop shoulding people because the instinctual reaction is “get out of my face." What are you even talking about? You don't get to tell me this,” is a very American thing. “You don't get to tell me how to live. Not only am I not going to do what you're saying I should do, I'm going to go the opposite direction.” That's a terrible habit that environmental and climate activists have had for decades. And we just got to leave it behind.
Dickon: I had a fantastic time talking to Josh for this episode, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, it's the reminder that most of us who feel passionately about climate, we tend to find it hard not to focus on the environmental aspects of the whole thing. Oftentimes we're just projecting our own values and concerns onto those we're attempting to engage and that's not a great strategy. The values-based approach that Josh outlined echoes insights from previous guests like Funmibi Ogunlesi and Florencia Lujani, focusing more on what makes broad audiences similar than on what makes specific audiences different.
Meanwhile, being able to ground those high level shared values in common local concerns adds specificity and relevance to the picture. Choosing which aspects to focus on at which scale then seems to be an important factor in successful engagement.
So that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Josh Garrett for sharing his time and expertise with the show, it was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes. Thanks also to you for listening to Communicating Climate Change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave at a rating or a review? You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find Communicating Climate Change on LinkedIn too. And if you think the series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction?
Remember, each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits to help us develop the tricks and techniques that we'll need for this pressing task. So be sure to stay tuned for more for anything else. Just head over to communicatingclimatechange.com. Until next time, take care.
