Policy Unstuck with Catherine Witherspoon, the former Executive Officer of the California Air Resources Board, and Senior Adviser at ClimateWorks Foundation. Interviewed, edited and titled by Tom Hashemi.

When Schwarzenegger came into the governor’s office, he was action, action, action, as if nobody had been doing anything before he got there. He was very open to ideas, but to reach him you had to get through the secretary over your department, the person in the governor’s office who covered your area, the under-secretaries and the chief of staff. 

If you ever got into his actual office, you were given one piece of paper: three bullets, in 14-point font. Bullet one: what’s the problem? Bullet two: what’s the solution? Bullet three: why is this good for him, or for California? Why now, and how will it play?

Most people don’t understand that you need an elevator pitch to talk to anybody. He was simply enforcing it. You always need to get to the point and be damn sure it’s relevant to whoever you’re talking to. ‘So what?’ is the most important question to ask yourself before reaching out. Not ‘so what?’ to you but ‘so what?’ to them: why should they care given everything else on their plate at that moment in time?

How often do people meet that standard? Five per cent of the time.

When I asked for the big answer before anything else, my engineers and scientists were very frustrated. They didn’t grasp their own blind spots. Engineers are extremely logical, but they can’t write. They often can’t explain why something matters, or foresee the political questions coming. 

Researchers would seize on a fact as if it explained itself, without asking what it meant for policy. Do we need to reverse course? Is there a threat we’re not addressing? Or is it just another soundbite in a long history of soundbites? The ability to stand back and ask ‘so what?’ is everything.

We need to draw a line between publicity and strategy in communications. And within strategy, draw a further distinction between framing the conversation versus pulling the trigger. Framing may take the form of think tank articles, op-ed pieces, rhetorical flourishes, or big ideas. Whereas pulling the trigger might be demonising a bad actor, calling a strike, or getting out the vote for an environmental proposition. Public outreach and education are somewhere in the messy middle.

As it relates to policy, the most important communications are the ones that make politicians vote for the proposal. Which usually—but not always—means drumming up support in their home districts, making the cause a media darling, running defence against industry attacks, and recruiting influential champions. Each one of those parts requires a different comms approach and product. People don’t realise what the full spectrum of strategic comms entails.

Often comms teams are completely divorced from programmatic teams. They’d want to put out a press release, and I’d ask: why? Who are you talking to, and what do you want them to do? They were pumping out material for the visibility of the organisation, not for the effectiveness of its work. It’s polishing the apple.

Around 2010, I hosted a summit on non-CO₂ pollutants in Barcelona. My colleague from India was talking about his country’s energy transition and mentioned nuclear as part of diversifying the energy mix. A woman from an NGO nearly started crying: how can you possibly do nuclear, don’t you understand how dangerous it is? He stopped, took a deep breath, looked at her and said: 25 per cent of the people in my country don’t have any power at all.

It’s that blindness: thinking you get to choose for other people, many of whom are in dire circumstances and operating at triage level day in, day out. You dare to tell them what their priorities should be?!

How do you know you’re moralising? When you haven’t asked the other person what their top ten concerns are before you open your mouth. When you don’t know whether they care to hear from you at all, or whether you’re even talking to the right person.

Policy is driven by national conditions, priorities, social demands and the wherewithal of national budgets. It’s never going to come from the UN. 

Before COP15 in Copenhagen, various countries broadcast what they were going to do, and philanthropy refused to believe it. They thought there was going to be magic in the room and everything would change. Philanthropy flew in hundreds of young people to protest in the snow. They were protesting in completely the wrong place. They should have been in their own countries beforehand, demanding better platforms. By Copenhagen, it was set in stone.

A car wastes about 70 per cent of its fuel as lost heat, yet we think policy should be 90 or 95 per cent efficient. The world is full of massive inefficiency. That’s just human affairs: you’re never going to get everybody round the same table operating in sync. Instead, find the worst breakdown in the system and fix that. Doing better is better than where you started.

You do that through siloes. They exist for a reason: you need expertise to accomplish certain things. There should be more delegation to silos to get the job done, with judicious oversight. You’re not going to solve these problems through systems change. It’s not how the world works.

You can only deliver within the limits of what’s socially acceptable at the time.

At the California Air Resources Board, our mission was to protect public health, and the way you do that is just tons, tons, tons—just start reducing emissions. But I had people suggesting I shut down the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the economic engines of California. Someone else wanted me to shut the biggest fertiliser plant in the Sacramento Valley. This is an agricultural state. My research division found that citrus trees release compounds that contribute to ozone, so perhaps we should tell people not to plant orange trees. This is California. The dream of California is an orange tree in your backyard.

Ignore the social contract at your peril. I’m a pragmatic environmentalist. I’d go as hard as I could against the big emitters. But push too far and you lose.

Thank you to the 152 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.