An eternal optimist on the importance of climate storytelling
A Q+A with GreenStory’s Mike Farber
It’s hard to picture Mike Farber without a smile on his face. He radiates positivity. Below the surface, you’ll find a guy who has a stalwart connection to Mother Earth and a pressing concern for humanity’s role in fostering that connection.
Farber’s career in communications began nearly two decades ago, and since then he’s been telling stories for high-growth companies across multiple industries. Throughout his career, he’s always come back to his love for the environment and has looked for ways to foster that love in his work.
As a partner at LaunchSquad, he spearheaded the start of our climate communications practice—even before the rest of the industry had caught up. The early days required a lot of tenacity and optimism, which he has in spades. We sat down with Farber to chat about the importance of storytelling in climate, his views on the buzz around climate tech in comparison to the early days of the Internet, and his most recent venture.
You spent most of your career in tech PR, and about a decade ago started digging into the story of climate. Tell us a little bit about this journey.
Like a lot of people who care deeply about the climate, I love being outside. And I have always been interested in the intersection of policy and business and how that can drive change. So if you take those two inputs and you fast forward to Barack Obama being elected in 2008, there was a tremendous amount of momentum around having the government invest heavily in climate and help create the market for company creation going forward through policy. But because of the politics at the time, he made the decision to go all-in on healthcare and Obamacare. By the time his administration moved their attention to climate, they lost that momentum with regard to getting things through Congress.
This was the moment when I, from a work perspective, became very focused on what climate could do. In part because as you mentioned, I've always had this interest in technology as well, and there were a tremendous amount of companies at that time being created to use technology in a positive way. There was a ton of funding, the VCs went all in on it, there was all this momentum.
But in some ways it wound up being like MySpace versus Facebook in the sense that the timing was a little bit off. Let's be clear, from a planetary protection standpoint, the timing was right—but from a company creation perspective, it was a little bit premature. Investors looked at those long timeframes, realized some of the technology would take like 20 years, and that wasn't going to correlate with what they wanted as investors. They wound up pulling back.
In some ways it wound up being like MySpace versus Facebook in the sense that the timing was a little bit off. Let's be clear, from a planetary protection standpoint, the timing was right—but from a company creation perspective, it was a little bit premature.
What made you continue to move down the path despite the lack of momentum from VCs and other influential folks in the tech industry?
I think it's part of the way I'm built: I'm an action-oriented optimist, and I knew that eventually, the market timing would catch up. Companies were being created, just not as many as maybe the investment world wanted, and massive successes were happening.
The great news about clean technologies is they're better, they're more efficient, they're increasingly becoming cheaper. Just like any sort of technology evolves and changes with time, the same thing is happening vis-a-vis the climate.
There's this interesting clash in terms of how people receive information around climate now. For all the, “It's better. It works. It’s good for the environment.” there's the, “It's not better. It doesn’t work.” There's a push and pull in the space right now, so our jobs as communicators have become very critical, right?
That confusion as to what's happening—that's by design. You know, one thing that's very different from what I saw in the growth of the Internet and technology was there was no real entrenched interest that was being dislodged. And as a result, you could be a hundred percent positive and be like, “This is amazing and everything's going to be great.” With climate, you have some of the most wealthy, powerful entities on the planet who are being directly affected with regards to all the innovation that's happening, so they are using a playbook of tactics from a communications perspective and doing it wonderfully well to confuse, to divide, to scare.
That confusion as to what's happening—that's by design.
As a communications person, it's really important to acknowledge that. And then as you develop your strategies and as you develop your messaging, have that play a role as appropriate. Sometimes the role it plays is you just have to be a little grittier. You have to understand that you're going to get pushback, that people are going to say unreasonable things, and then have a strategy for that. Generally speaking, I think the strategy is just ignore it because that's part of the game that's being played. They want to bring you down and then start dividing people who have common interests.
Let’s talk more about that. Can you share a real-life example of this?
I know that you spoke to Giana [Amador] who is the co-founder of Carbon180. I was privileged to work with her for a number of years. As you know, their charter is to create and define the carbon removal industry. Eventually, the fossil fuel companies started to notice, and in some ways that started becoming a validator. But then an ongoing challenge, and this is definitely a communications challenge, is word choice. Carbon180 talks about carbon removal, which is, “If we do everything that we need to do to get our emissions to where they need to be, there's still too much carbon in the air. We have to suck some out.” That's carbon removal.
Carbon capture, which is what fossil fuel companies like to talk about, is like, “Hey, we can keep spewing carbon into the air, but we're going to have these cool technologies right next to the smoke sack and it's just going suck it back in so that we're not adding to it.” Very different thing. But there's a game being played where fossil fuel companies are trying to make carbon capture the language of choice. And one thing that I have been so impressed by Carbon180 and now in Giana in her new effort is what they're looking to do with regards to both policy and communications is to make sure that it's carbon removal that is being talked about and not carbon capture, but that's a classic example of where word choice becomes very important.
Are there moments along your journey where you landed a piece or you had a conversation with a client where you felt like, “This is having a clear impact, this is changing minds or helping people understand better,” in a way that was meaningful for you?
I would mention a consumer example, which is Ministry of Supply. I love that company. We were able to work with them when they produced their first net-zero dress shirt. Is it making a massive impact on emissions of the world? No. Is it an aspirational thing for the manufacturing sector where they recognize that it's possible? Yes: Through changing up the supply chain and using different materials to create a product that is literally net zero.
Part of what's fun about working with companies, and particularly with consumer companies like Ministry of Supply is that there's a thing, there's a product. I can buy one for my son. That's always super gratifying. Plus they’re a pair of amazing founders.
Let’s talk about your current venture. I'm curious to hear about what led you to today and what you're hoping to accomplish.
It's called GreenStory. We're an environmental storytelling agency focused exclusively on companies that are combating climate change. I have a business partner, she's amazing—she's a journalist and a professor at Middlebury College—Megan Mayhew-Bergman.
What we want to do is what I call the pollinator effect. We want to touch as many companies as possible with one of the biggest challenges that they face in this super cluttered environment, which is storytelling. We want to work with them to figure out what are the right stories for them to be telling. And let's be clear, we're not coming in there and writing their script, we're listening, absorbing, pulling out the things that matter, and then equipping them to be able to tell those stories and then moving to the next one.
We've alluded to it a little bit, but could you share why you think the storytelling aspect is so important?
Storytelling matters for a lot of reasons. First off, people are just overwhelmed with information. It's just mind-numbing statistics and the jargon. They can't tell what's real and what's not real. And people are pessimistic. Many people are like, “What the hell? We have no shot. What are we going to do here?” And fundamentally, story does a lot of things, but what it does in this context is it helps people have hope. It helps companies have hope. It provides real, human examples of success of things that are going to happen. It makes it tangible. It doesn't become this theoretical, negative conversation with trolls. It becomes about what is possible in the future. What's happening, I think with regards to sustainability now as a whole, is every single business is going to change for the better because of what's happening with regards to this.
'“Story helps people have hope. It helps companies have hope. It provides real, human examples of success of things that are going to happen. It makes it tangible. It doesn't become this theoretical, negative conversation with trolls. It becomes about what is possible in the future.”
Where do you see the next opportunity for climate initiatives and growth? Everything is obviously very important, but is it in batteries or home systems like HVAC? Is it offsets?
Everywhere. I mean it. And that's having gone through, oh, eight or nine eras where it was biofuels and then algae.
But climate is everything now. Climate is absolutely everything now. And as a result, I think every industry, from banking to fashion, to commerce, to the all the big kinds of things like power and heat are all changing. And I think that's what is such a great opportunity, both for people who want to affect positive change, but also for people who want to create careers.
One of the things I do is I get to mentor people, too. College grads ask me, “What should I do?” And I say, “You should go into climate.” It’s like being told you should go into the Internet in 1997, in my opinion. I really think it's that big a no-brainer.
You mentioned the Internet—do you feel similar energy in terms of then to now?
I do and I feel it more from a deep tech and science perspective. I've had a number of interactive sessions down in the MIT area and just speaking to these founder-scientists all with PhDs, one- or two-person companies who have these ridiculously complicated, but important ideas that they're building into businesses and knowing that I'm just seeing a little bit of that and that's happening all through the world, it's awesome.
College grads ask me, “What should I do?” And I say, “You should go into climate.” It’s like being told you should go into the Internet in 1997, in my opinion. I really think it's that big a no-brainer.
You’ve mentioned you’re an optimist. What makes you feel hopeful in terms of climate and the future?
Two places. First it's happening. I think it's under-reported, but market forces are moving towards renewables. You just have to look at the growth rates in the United States: the market forces are moving. So that's reason number one I'm optimistic.
Reason number two, I'm optimistic is people are engaged. People are engaged across the board. I see it from a company creation standpoint and from seeing these entrepreneurs. I am a firm believer in entrepreneurship and the power of entrepreneurship, and you see this happening across the board.
I think we should all be optimistic. I do think that storytelling communications is one of the most important pieces that needs to be brought to the fore.
(Water) Cooler Talk
🍺 Hop(e) springs eternal
Climate change might soon impact the hoppy flavor of your favorite brew, according to a new report. Drought is causing lower yields globally, and the high temperatures aren’t conducive to the alpha acids that give IPAs and other bitter beers their signature taste. Brewers and farmers are uniting to find creative solutions to keep their beers tasting hoppy in the face of these climate challenges.
💡 Sustainable Strategies
One antidote to the feeling of, as Farber described it, “What the hell? We have no shot. What are we going to do here?” is to help reduce the amount of waste going into landfills. That includes food waste, which causes eight to ten percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Check out tips from Brian Roe, a farm-management professor and the director of the Food Waste Collaborative at Ohio State University in The Atlantic. To waste less stuff, tap into the circular economy in different ways beyond just donating to Goodwill.
💚 Green Good News
Last week, PwC released its 2023 State of Climate Tech report. While investment is down across industries, investment in climate tech remains on the rise as a proportion of startup investments. Check out this summary from Axios for the TL;DR. And for promising data around Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act one year in, to the rise of “climate dads,” give Bloomberg’s good climate news roundup a read.