Hello and welcome to outrage and optimism. My name's Tom Rivekarnack. So this week we're all

on holiday. Christina's home in Costa Rica and I'm down in a Cornish fishing village in the west of England with my family and Paul is doing

Whatever Paul does when he goes on holiday so my colleagues are not with me today, but we're still bringing you the podcast

But rather than the usual conversation between the three of us

we're just going to go straight into the interview and we have a very

interesting conversation for you this week. Today we speak to John Ashford, once a country and Western disc jockey, and then in 1992 turned

entrepreneur. In that year he founded the Hawthorne Group, one of the most well-recognized

public affairs, communications, and lobby firms inside the

beltway in Washington, D.C.

I met John way back in 1994. He had been a classmate of my brother Jose Maria at the

Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And when Jose Maria decided to run for

president of Costa Rica, he asked John to help on the campaign,

given the fact that we already knew that he was a brilliant political strategist.

So I had the pleasure of working with John on my brother's political

campaign. Now political campaigns are part of what John does or used to do, he's actually more of a communications,

strategist, and lobbyist for energy companies.

And given the fact that he founded his company way back in the 1990s, it should come as no surprise that those energy companies in the United States were fossil fuel companies.

It's a good thing that John has now turned the page, but

today we take him back to the days in which he was working as one of the most effective

communicators for the fossil fuel companies and in fact he is credited

widely with having conceived the term clean coal.

And he is definitely the person responsible for having run the clean coal campaign in the United States.

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