Tell me about your background. How did you get into climate communications?

I used to work in manufacturing, with my brother, in a family business making roof tiles. That’s quite an odd place to come from, but I suppose there are a few things that come from that experience which define why I ended up doing this.

The first is that it made me climate aware. We would burn about a million pounds’ worth of gas every year to fire ceramic clay tiles. We weren’t in the league of any of the multinationals, but we were an intensive energy user. Back in the early 2000s, there were conversations about carbon. The EU was looking at whether to restrict emissions, and the high-intensity energy use industry was saying, ‘Well, we’ll just move manufacturing overseas and import the product if that happens.’ That conversation injected climate into my brain probably earlier than for most people.

Then I read the Stern review¹ and George Monbiot’s book Heat. I felt this pull to action – of not being allowed to continue being an observer – because at that point we had sold the business and I was financially comfortable. I guess when you stop worrying about your mortgage, you just start worrying about something else. I realised that the grown-ups hadn’t turned up and solved the problem, so I felt I had to act. And I’ve always worked in comms and marketing, PR, so I understood that communication and messaging are key.

Eventually that led me to connect people up with the climate science I was listening to, but no one else was.

Were there any other particular moments or experiences that made this feel more urgent for you?

I saw a video clip from Professor Kevin Anderson, the climate scientist. I was struck by it because my son was at uni at the time, and in the video it looks like he’s gone into a lecture theatre in a basement somewhere and recorded this on his phone. It had bad lighting, bad sound, but the words that Kevin was saying are kind of the most important words on the planet. That’s not hyperbole, he was just spelling out where we are versus where we should be. Yet, you’re watching it in the context of something that looks fringe, unimportant.

I just thought, this content should be on the BBC, on the news. He shouldn’t be in a basement saying this. So that was what tipped me. I realised I wanted to do a communications project with people like Kevin Anderson. I wanted to spend the money that I would have left for my children – some of it, anyway – and to find a way of putting him in a context that’s appropriate to some of the words that he was saying. That’s all I had to go on, and I just started reaching out to people from that point.

I tried to avoid the bubble in those conversations. I met two gentlemen who run the Utopia Bureau, former creative directors from the ad industry, and that’s exactly what I wanted – people who would apply the hard and fast rules of advertising to the climate message. I didn’t want climate people doing this work. I wanted it to be people who understood how to get us to buy things.

They became my co-founders, and brought in all the clever thinking about using comedians, and how to create content that would cut through. So in a way, I just came along with a problem and a little bit of money, and they turned that into a concept that took off.

Have you brought in any other sources of funding for the two projects beyond your own?

Both of those projects started without any other funding, and I don’t know whether they would have happened otherwise. It’s quite hard to get funding for things that aim to shift the culture because it’s really hard to measure. Our conversations with other UK funders amounted to nothing, and we ended up working with family foundations in the US who were interested in supporting Climate Science Breakthrough without making us jump through hoops. That’s how we ended up with the [US comedian] David Cross video. Those funders just said, ‘There’s nothing happening in the culture sector; we need this’, and we didn’t have to prove a whole load of things.

The National Emergency Briefing was the same: my brother initially funded it and when we joined forces, I added some funds. That made it, not easy, but uncomplicated to deliver, and at speed. But now, for Phase Two, rolling out the film, we’re running a crowdfunder.

Can you explain what the National Emergency Briefing was in more detail?

The National Emergency Briefing was inspired by COVID, when experts stood behind podiums and told us very serious things, and by a vast majority we listened and took it seriously.

It’s different with the climate, isn’t it? Because it’s not here and now, like a pandemic. But that was the inspiration. We had nine experts delivering very concise, ten-minute briefings on everything from climate and nature to national security, food, health, the energy transition – all things that relate to our day-to-day living, with a real focus on the specific impacts here in the UK.

People are awash with end-of-the-world headlines, but they’re all very global, about faraway places, so we wanted to really zero in on the UK.

We prioritised the attendance of parliamentarians and had 100-plus in attendance. We also went out to wider society with representation from music, culture, business, finance, faith. The idea was for everyone to be in that room and witness the briefing from experts.

Let’s talk about your influences. You’ve talked about joining up with the Utopia Bureau guys. Who else have you learnt from, or worked alongside that have changed the way you’ve done things?

I’ve had several influences in terms of climate communications, including Professor Kevin Anderson and Professor Katharine Hayhoe. In terms of the giving, that’s been a lonely old journey – conversations with Julia Davies and Nick Marple [both featured in this collection] have been helpful, in terms of getting someone else to walk you through the process of giving something away that you’ve been taught to nurture and not be irresponsible with.

But ultimately it was me that helped me. I had a mental exercise where I tried to have a conversation with myself in the future – 2030 or 2040. I really tried to visualise myself (which was quite hard to do; using your imagination is harder to do these days) and imagine how I would feel if I hadn’t used some of my time and money to do something. That was probably the thing that made me most resolute about getting on with it.

What do you feel have been your successes so far?

This is when the big vision comes down to cold, hard reality, isn’t it! We’re trying to contribute to a social tipping point. The research into Climate Science Breakthrough in both the US and the UK shows that it shifts people’s thinking, and it shifts the salience of climate change particularly – it moves it up the list of priorities that people are concerned about. In the UK, we got Jo Brand and Professor Mark Maslin on GMTV, where anyone coming on to talk about climate is normally ripped apart by Richard Madeley. But because there was a professor there, he couldn’t do that. That was a huge moment for us, because we took it out of the fringes and into the mainstream.

In the US, we got David Cross and Professor Michael Oppenheimer on CBS. The usually acerbic presenter was saying, ‘This is the best piece of climate communication I’ve seen, this really reached me.’

With the National Emergency Briefing, I think the measure of success now is the extraordinary number of organisations and institutions that are knocking on our door saying, ‘What can we do to help?’ We’ve had requests from the CEO of Kew Gardens, some of the unions, parts of the NHS, the National Trust, members of the clergy who all want to host screenings of the film of the briefing.

From where do you derive your sense of hope or optimism to keep going?

We have so many solutions in each sector. If you look at food, climate impacts are super scary – we could run out of food. But the solutions are also super inspiring – if the UK shifted to plant-rich diets, we would free up an area of land the size of Scotland! That’s because to grow plants in order to feed animals for us to eat is massively inefficient. It uses up huge amounts of land.

If we decarbonise the planet, we save $12 trillion, just because of the knock-on effects. So behind each massive climate problem is more or less always a story of, ‘Yes, but if we did this, it would actually be amazing, it would be brilliant.’ If we didn’t have all those options at this stage, I don’t think I’d be doing this. It would be bunker time.

My sense of hope comes from the potential of unlocking all of this massive, positive change, which we more or less know how to do.

There’s a bit of outrage in there as well. I’m programmed to be outraged when people abuse power, I think I got it from my mother. Outrage is an important ingredient. The climate communications researcher Genevieve Guenther talks about this. If you just scare people, they obviously retreat because they don’t know what to do. But if you add outrage to fear, people act. Outrage is a great source of energy.