Jason Waskey on Why Every Company is a Climate Company
Mixing Board Studio Session
Jason Waskey is the CEO of Blue Crab Strategies, a mission-driven strategic consulting firm that meets the planet’s messiest problems with the collective power of people. Jason has worked on campaigns since 2004. Between 2007 and 2009, Waskey worked as a special assistant to the Democratic Secretaries of State of Maryland. During that time, Waskey also worked for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign. From 2013 to 2018, Waskey worked for the Climate Action Campaign as its deputy director. Waskey is also the Founder and a Board member at Civic Nation, a left-wing nonprofit that engages in social activism.
In this Studio Session, Jason and Mixing Board Founder, Sean Garrett, talk about why no single entity is going to solve the climate crisis; why we should always center people at the center of the problem and the solution; how to avoid nihilism and defeatism and move from paralysis to action; and, why it’s important for new climate tech startups to scale quickly.
SG: Tell us about your job and how you got to it.
JW: There have been two interconnected principles that have guided me for decades. The first is the idea of team building. When I was a kid, I was always the one who was organizing the baseball game or putting together a lemonade stand. I wasn’t just in Boy Scouts, I was running Boy Scouts, SGA president – just an obnoxious kid. That was me.
When I was about 11, I read this biography of Dr. King, and I read, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. That idea has just been stuck in my head ever since. I have been obsessed with “bending it” as much as possible, with my little time on Earth, and fairly small ability to bend it. The best way for me to do that is recruiting others and building teams. Those two things have always been connected.
SG: So you were thinking about bending justice at what age?
JW: I was 11 when I read this book. At the time, I was obsessed with the Kennedys and King, and just reading everything I could about them. It wasn't until a lot of years later when I went to work for then Senator Obama, that I realized this is my shot at working for our generation's Kennedy and King. When I went to college, 9/11 happened and I got really deep into the anti-war movement. That led me into community organizing.
I got started as a community organizer in my hometown of Baltimore. I went from there into politics, but always with this idea that organizing is essentially team building on a local level. Then I started doing that in electoral politics. In January of '07, I signed up with the Obama campaign. That was the first big thing that totally changed my career. I worked on the campaign trail for two years, worked in his political team in the first term, and at the end of 2012, worked on the reelection. After that I was completely out of a job, knew I couldn't do campaigns anymore, and was just looking for something new.
I was basically told you're going to be on the climate team – which was the second great thing that happened in my career. That led to me leading the political operation for the president's climate agenda for four years – which was essentially building new, bigger teams and working toward climate goals. While doing that, I met and worked with Rebecca Dane. After the administration ended, she and I co-founded Blue Crab Strategies, where we're basically aligning those two principles. We're focused on maximizing our impact in the climate space and building a team to do it.
At the beginning we said, it's just going to be the two of us, we're not going to grow. That was foolish. The team drive eventually kicked in, and now we're a team of 16.
SG: What do you do everyday? And what are the types of organizations you work with and what are they looking for?
JW: I'm the CEO of Blue Crab but my actual day-to-day is split between a few things. It’s a mix of working on existing clients, running the actual business, doing business development, working our network, and then long-term planning about where we're headed as a company. None of those I'm doing by myself, I've got an amazing set of colleagues who I'm working with on each of those.
We work with philanthropies, NGOs, and companies. Some of those are big established brands and some of those are startups that don’t even have a website yet. What we work on is essentially building strategies that are salient and possible in the real world. The climate world really suffers from paralysis. It is such a big unwieldy challenge that is super interconnected. Our team is really good at taking it and breaking it into manageable parts.
We’ve figured out how to start at the end of where our clients want us to be, or want to end up, and work backwards. We do it in a way that brings people along that journey and creates something at the end that's super actionable. That could be building a strategy, helping broker partnerships, building a communications plan, or facilitations and convenings. It takes shape in a lot of different ways, but essentially we turn white papers into reality. And at the same time, we do a lot of wonk translation to do that.
SG: Why is there so much wonk translation needed in climate when the house is literally on fire?
JW: This is a challenge that the progressive movement, writ large, has. What we want is a lot more complicated than what the other side wants. The conservative world just wants things to stay the same, or maybe roll back. Whereas the progressive world, which Blue Crab is squarely in, wants things to change. That’s a lot more complicated than just keeping things the same.
The climate world in particular is so science led – and it has historically overemphasized the scientific nature of things, both in terms of messaging and funding and focus. For one, that has made it complicated to do the real work, because it's sciencing it up in a way that's not really approachable to most people. And two, it pisses a lot of people off because big green groups will center science or the planet instead of centering on humans, which is not the way to solve the problem, nor is it equitable and just. It makes it really hard to approach. It's complicated. The nihilism and defeatism that's inherent in it, is really tough.
SG: On top of that, on one side you have nihilism, and then the other side you have perfection. Meaning that unless you come up with the perfect plan or the perfect strategy, which doesn't exist, someone in the climate community is going to poke holes in it and say, "Well, it would be better if we just did it this way." I'm sure you work with a lot of companies that face that, which creates more paralysis.
JW: 100%. There's a fear of any type of progress or action. We shouldn't give space to greenwashing, especially companies that are just spewing bullshit – but progress is still progress. A little bit of a detour story – one of the great fortunes I've had, I was mentored by a great man, Elijah Cummings, who was a congressman from Baltimore for a long time. I was mentored by him for a little over a decade. When I was working on the Obamacare fight in 2009, 2010, and Joe Lieberman screwed everybody and pulled out the public option. A lot of progressives were really angry and they wanted to abandon it.
I remember calling Congressman Cummings. I was pissed off, I was like, "This sucks." He said, "This bill, if we pass it, it's still going to help 30 million people get health insurance. And that ain't nothing." He talked about when Social Security passed, when unemployment passed – all of these big landmark things, they didn't cover Black people or women. It wasn't perfect in the beginning. But progress never happens perfectly the first time. That's definitely playing out in the climate world.
SG: I'd be curious what your take is on the current state of climate-tech startup communications. There seems to be a wide gap in between overly complicated product-first comms and “we’re changing the world” stuff.
JW: It's complicated. You can't be paralyzed into an inactive state because of the daunting nature of the task. At the same time, “move fast and break stuff” works if we're sharing photos on our phone and delivering groceries. But “move fast and break stuff” doesn't work, if it's the future of humanity and lives are at stake.
There's somewhere in between those two that companies, in particular, need to hit. Being honest about what it is that they're trying to solve – because this is a big, massive, complicated, interconnected problem. One, a company can't come in and be the savior. No one entity is going to solve climate change. Whenever anybody's putting themselves out there as the big thing, they're already set up to fail.
The other thing, that the tech world in particular always struggles with, is again, putting humans at the middle of it. The climate world is led by scientists, like the tech world is led by engineers, or the VC world is led by finance bros. And they're not good at putting people at the center of the problem or the solution. For a company to work in the clean tech, clean energy, climate solution space – they've got to understand, what's my piece of the big puzzle that I'm trying to solve? Remember that it's just one piece of a really big complicated 10,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. Then understand what impact they're going to have on communities and people, as they're trying to solve it, beyond just trying to make money and sell their company.
SG: You work on a topic that you can literally feel every day. It's the hottest summer ever in the history of the world. Then there's a big hurricane, or a fire in Greece, or a monsoon in Japan. There's this constant conversation about climate, that just unfortunately doesn't stop escalating. How do you organize or operate or give advice as this stuff plays out, and this conversation just continues to increase in heat?
JW: It's something that my colleagues and I spend a lot of time thinking about. The work is really hard. It's not just complicated, but heavy, as you're alluding to. I personally, and we as a team, really try to leverage the negatives to spur us forward in action. It's empowering to wake up in the morning and read some apocalyptic headline, and be like, well, I can't fix it, but I can do a little part of fixing it. I can chip away at this big complicated problem. I try to use the doom and gloom headlines, or just lived experience, to push me to do that.
The other thing is really focusing on positives and the wins. The progressive world is so bad at winning because it's not a 100% perfect victory. But good things are happening. More money has been invested in clean energy in the last 12 months in the US than ever before. Things are moving in the right direction. Not fast enough, not comprehensively enough, but things are happening.
For example, four and a half years ago Donald Trump mandated drilling in the Arctic Refuge in Alaska. One of the most pristine and important lands to indigenous people. In October, Biden killed all of Trump's leases. We are headed in the right direction, and we need to spend some time celebrating that.
Also being well aligned with one another. One of our three values as a team is to act with respect for humanity. That is outwardly how we do our work in the world, but also even more importantly, how we do our work internally.
SG: You mentioned the spend in the last 12 months on clean energy and climate. Is more to come? How could it potentially shift things, not just for climate tech companies, but for the broader industry?
JW: We're headed in a really good direction. The IRA and market trends in general are aligning to just supercharge. The federal government has barely started to spend all of the money it's going to spend. That's going to continue to happen over the next handful of years. Private equity's paying attention. Everyone is moving in that direction.
The biggest challenges will be figuring out how to show up as a brand or as a company and talk about the work you're doing authentically. The other thing too is there's a big implementation challenge. Having good tech or solutions in a lab or in a factory setting is great, but figuring out how to actually deploy them is really complicated. We read a lot of headlines about deployment for clean energy and energy transmission, but it cuts across EVs and heat pumps, and just all this tech that we're going to need. And then changing trends, and how people spend their money and do things. The movement in that direction's good, but taking everybody that you need with you is going to be really complicated.
SG: The shift is more comprehensive than some geeky thing on the margin, it’s really going to impact everybody's lives in different ways. People are going to be along for the ride, whether they know it or not. People who are not shopping for an EV car today will be in five years. People will know what a heat pump is.
JW: Everything is climate now. It used to be that being a good environmentalist was to turn off the lights and recycle. Rightfully, it has expanded to every single aspect of your life. The clothes you're wearing, the food you're eating, the travel you're taking or not taking – that's on the personal front.
On the corporate front, the old way of dealing with the environment was either CSR, we're going to give some money to plant some trees to offset this shitty company that we're running, or a sustainability department that's going to get us marginally better year over year. But we're still inherently a bad company, and we're just trying to get a little bit better.
The ESG movement was a midway point, but we're heading to this place where soon companies of every single size, whether you are Coca-Cola, or the corner store selling Coca-Cola, are going to have to think about climate when it comes to supply chain, distribution networks, financing, worker health, and wellbeing. People dealing with heat waves and catastrophes and what that's going to do. What COVID did to all of those things, will be happening, not all at once everywhere in the world, but in lots of miniature ways continually.
It's a hell of a challenge, trying to figure pieces of it out. Figuring out one little piece of that jigsaw puzzle feels like a big accomplishment.
SG: If you're an organization that is either new in the climate, you have a climate business, or you're a big existing corporation who needs to level up how you talk about these issues – one of the opportunities/challenges is that there’s this entire ecosystem of conversations, big events like COP, thousands of smaller events, and new reports continuously happening. Can you talk a little bit about how one even enters into this conversation?
JW: Using COP as an example – COP is like trying to break through at the Olympics. But it's not an inspiring moment, it's confounding. And no one's really paying attention. The whole world's not watching, there's no TV coverage so there are no TV ad campaigns. So it’s like the Olympics, but depressing, and no one's paying attention. You've got 40,000 people in one place from every country in the world, nonstop events happening simultaneously, and everyone's got this unique story that they're pushing. Only Michael Phelps breaks through that. Everybody wants to be Michael Phelps, but there's only one.
For any company going to COP, or trying to enter the climate conversation, they've got to know who their audience is and what they're actually trying to get out of people. If it's just to make people feel good about your brand, it's not going to change anything. It's important to focus on the story that you’re trying to tell. Who am I trying to tell it to? How does it connect in with all these other stories that are adjacent? For companies trying to emerge in crowded spaces, you have to carve out a role for yourself, and it's not easy. You’ve got to do it really intentionally, and you should do it before you launch. You’ve got to figure it out before you’re ready to go to market.
SG: For US companies thinking closer to home, you have DC, states, and localities. Are we still in an era where companies can come to DC and do just basic education on an opportunity and inform folks about what they're doing?
JW: The good people that are working at the White House and Department of Energy are spending billions and billions of dollars, but there's a lot of stuff they just don't know about. They're really looking for leaders to come to DC, or them to be invited to come see what's possible.
The other big complicating factor here is the federal government's going to spend a lot of money, but a lot of that money is actually moving to states and localities. Those states and localities are going to have to ultimately spend it. In more than half the states, you've got Republicans in charge who are anti-climate action. Some are just passive, many of them are hostile to it. That's going to be a challenge.
On the local level – I got my start working for a mayor of a major city. That is a day-to-day operation. There's little big long-term planning. Companies working hand in hand with localities where they want to locate new manufacturing or states where they want to roll out new tech, those types of partnerships happening early is the best way for companies to be successful and for the states and localities to spend the money and deliver on the results that they want to deliver.
The big thing about the IRA, is that it's not punitive, it's incentivizing. That allows a lot of justice issues to be ignored, a lot of frontline groups didn't get from the IRA what they should have gotten. In the past, the federal government wanted to penalize coal companies, oil companies, frackers, big polluters; which yes they deserve to be penalized. But the IRA is more about how to incentivize all of the clean. That's why we're seeing all startups galore and big companies figuring out how they can capitalize. And it's creating this amazing clean tech arms race with Europe and China. Leaders in Europe are pissed about the IRA and how they need to now go above and beyond. For a while Europe was positioned first in the world, and now they're not. They have some catching up to do, which is good for all of us.
SG: For people who want to get into this type of climate work full time, especially for those just coming out of college, how should they think about a career in climate?
JW: Well, the awesome thing is, everything is climate. Every role at a company, in the next few years, will have some type of climate component to it. But there's this great website out there, Work on Climate, that's a really good place to start.
Part of the allure of the Gen Z workforce is that they've grown up with climate. They know the vernacular, they understand the issue. So it's not having to teach people. They just come prepared, which is pretty awesome. For people who are early in their career, you can take any type of job and put a climate spin on it. For those who are more seasoned, the way to move over into climate is to look for companies that are already shifting themselves. If you're working in the marketing department, legal, or wherever, injecting climate or understanding how climate is going to be baked into that work is important.
If you just want to leave where you are and go work somewhere in the climate world, all of those new startup tech companies, VC-backed companies – they've got the smart engineers, they need good marketing, good comms, good C-suite folks who can come in and help build their company. Part of the challenge with all these startups is that they need to scale really quickly. They can't be on the same timeline that startups traditionally have been, or we just lose the climate fight. Figuring out how to get it right from the beginning is important because the stakes are so high.
Interested in learning more about how to engage with the Mixing Board community of comms and brand marketing experts? Curious on how to become a member? Feel free to reach out via the “Get in Touch” button on our site.