Five Questions With Redwood Climate Communications CEO Josh Garrett
Interviewed by Randall Woods and Kylie Harrington
In the race against climate change, communication might just be our most powerful tool. As breakthrough technologies emerge and policy landscapes shift, the challenge isn't just developing solutions — it's ensuring they're understood and embraced by business leaders, policymakers, investors and the general public. Few understand this better than Josh Garrett, a veteran in climate tech communications who's been translating complex innovations into compelling narratives for over a decade.
From the beginnings of a heating oil collective to the cutting edge of clean fusion, Garrett's journey mirrors the rapid evolution of the climate tech sector itself. Today, he’s CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, SBS Comms’ climate-focused partner agency, where he helps clients like The Nature Conservancy, Mast Reforestation and Electric Hydrogen achieve their business goals through strategic communication and storytelling. We sat down with him to explore the art of climate communication, the industry's most exciting breakthroughs, and why he believes we're only at the beginning of the clean energy revolution.
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Five questions with…Josh Garrett, Redwood Climate Communications
SBS Comms: Can you give a brief overview of your professional background and why you decided to get into climate tech comms?
Josh Garrett: I was always a communicator. I majored in English and Theater as an undergrad, and then picked up a few jobs in marketing and advertising. When I moved from LA to New York in 2008, jobs were very hard to find, so I took the first one I could that had anything to do with writing and communicating, and that happened to be for a heating oil collective, which was totally new to me. During that time, I learned that if you take biodiesel made from cooking grease and put it in a heating oil tank, it works just as well as regular heating oil and creates 80% fewer emissions. That blew my mind and led me down the rabbit hole of clean energy technology, and the things I discovered continued to blow my mind.
I realized, “It's 2009 and we figured out the whole energy problem. We know how to use energy in a way that doesn't create emissions, or at least as many emissions. These technologies are here, they're just not out in the world, being disseminated and used widely.” My thesis was that we need policy backing, investment, and public support to get these technologies out there and realize those potential gains in terms of reducing emissions and curbing climate change. And that's a communications problem. You have to convince investors, policymakers and the public that this is a great idea. We need to get on to these clean energy technologies and off fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
That made me realize, “I'm already in this business. What if I just applied my whole job to solving those problems?” I decided to do that. I went to Columbia, got my master's in environmental science and policy to build a foundation for the new focus of my career. And then it was off to the races.
SBS: You mentioned you saw a communication problem. Do you think we're any closer to resolving that?
JG: I think we're closer than we were in 2008, but we're about 1% in that direction, where I would have loved to be 100%. So certainly, trending in the right direction, but I think the progress is just too slow. We need to speed it up. And I think we need more professional and talented communicators hammering away at that problem.
SBS: And you mentioned this idea of converting cooking oil into fuel. Are there other big changes in the climate tech industry that have surprised you in recent years?
JG: That’s one of the things I love about working in this category. And I like to call it a category because it's not an industry; it's many, many different industries. And the surprising technologies come fast and furious, and if you pay attention, you'll see amazing breakthroughs like nuclear, which is generating electricity with nuclear energy in a way that is essentially perfectly clean, much less dangerous, and almost completely self-perpetuating. We’re not there yet, but there have been major breakthroughs.
There’s also battery technology, where lithium-ion batteries that store clean electricity (or any electricity) have gone down in price and up in capacity. It’s not very sexy, but it's super important. After all, energy storage gives us the kind of flexibility that's going to be a huge advantage when it comes to making our whole electricity system cleaner.
SBS: When you talk to the press about these types of technologies, do you see that they're receptive to covering them, or do they see them as pie in the sky? And what I'm getting at here are the unique challenges to doing PR for clean tech.
JG: Just like tech PR, you can pitch a company that has a great idea and they have a few million dollars of investment, but no reporter is going to care because it's not real. It’s the same with climate tech, maybe even more so. Ten years ago, just the idea of clean energy was enough to get reporter buy-in; those days are long gone, with good reason. It's part of the evolution of a collection of industries. Reporters we pitch tend to be savvy. They've seen a lot of these technologies come and go. We must show we understand the context and the technology, and can provide proof points – investments, deployments, contracts signed. And we've gotten very good at getting those facts out of our clients.
SBS: Are you finding that there are fewer reporters covering these types of technologies?
JG: Actually, no. Something that we have going for us on the climate tech side is that, even as newsrooms shrink, the slice of the pie that climate-related beats are taking up is growing ever so slightly. It’s not universal; CNBC laid off their entire climate reporting team just a few months ago, which was terrible. But because the climate crisis is all encompassing, reporters across beats find themselves covering climate and climate technology; they’re looking at workplace technology or economics or the insurance industry and coming across connections to the climate crisis organically. Climate is massively influencing a multitude of industries, so we interact with different reporters across multiple beats.