November 21, 2025 • 39 mins
Misinformation, double-dealing, character assassination - lobbyist Don Pearlman will stop at nothing to prevent the world from agreeing to cut carbon emissions. This arch disrupter, who works for fossil fuel companies and oil-producing nations, is determined that the climate talks in Kyoto, COP3, will fail. Will Don's tactics succeed, and what will it mean for the future of the planet?
Tim is joined by playwright Joe Robertson to discuss Kyoto, the political thriller he and co-writer Joe Murphy based on 1997's international climate negotiations.
Kyoto is currently on stage at the Lincoln Center in New York https://www.lct.org/shows/kyoto/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. They're exhausted. Many haven't slept properly for days, but
the fraud talks go round and round. Thirty people have
been hospitalized from overwork. The interpreters are about to leave.
World leaders are making each other cry. Others are threatening
(00:38):
to walk out. Welcome to the Kyoto International Conference Center.
It's December nineteen ninety seven, and for ten long days,
representatives from one hundred and fifty eight nations have been
in the ancient Japanese city trying to strike the world's
(00:59):
first legally binding climate agreement. This is the third conference
of the Parties. COP three, an alliance of small islands,
makes the case for swift action in the face of
rising sea levels. Oil producing countries demand compensation for potential
(01:21):
loss of income. Developed nations express concern about the economic
impact of moving away from fossil fuels, while delegates from
developing countries argue they shouldn't be held responsible for the
mess made by the industrialized West. There are breakout sessions,
huddles and corridors, walkouts, squabbles about wording and punctuation, and
(01:44):
ultimately stasis. Now it's three pm on the final day
of the conference. Delegates are dropping like flies. Raoul Estrada
o Uela, the Argentinian diplomat chairing COP three, has disappeared
(02:04):
and no targets have been agreed. Don Hurlman, lobbyists for
the oil companies, rubs his hands with glee. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to portionary tales right now. Delegates from
(02:42):
around the world are meeting in Belame, Brazil for COP thirty.
There they'll seek to reinforce global cooperation and seek to
speed up the implementation of existing UN climate agreements and commitments.
But audiences in New York are being invited to go
(03:03):
back in time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I think we're going to agree on one thing. The
times you live in are truly awful. There's food shortages,
runaway inflation, culture wars, real wars, brace riots, fake news,
consain insurrections, global pandemics, and on top of all of that,
a planet in a literal meltdown. And if you're a
(03:26):
guy like me looking at a time like now, the
main thing you think is wow, Man, the nineteen nineties
were freaking glorious.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That was Don Perlman, as played by Stephen Counkan in
the play Kyoto about the historic Third COP After sellout
runs in Stratford upon Avon and London, the Royal Shakespeare
Company's production is currently on stage at the Lincoln Center
in New York. Kyoto was written by Joe Robertson and
(04:00):
Joe Murphy, and I am delighted to say that Joe
Robertson is with me now. Joe, welcome to Cause Retales.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Thank you so much him. It's an absolute pleasure. Huge
fan of the podcast and of all your work, So
thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Oh, it's a pleasure. It's terrific to have you on
the show. So the inner machinations of an international climate conference.
I don't scream theatrical thriller, but that is what you've created.
So how did you come across this story and what
convinced you of the dramatic potential.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We had an interest in polarization. This was a good
few years ago now and looking around at a sort
of coarsening public discourse and an ever more divided society
where conversation felt, you know, more strained and more difficult
to have, and we wanted to write about that and
find a way of talking about that in a dramatic
(04:50):
and exciting way, and actually stumbled on the story of
Kyoto by accident, and we're immediately inspired by this parable
of agreement, and it felt to us like that spoke
quite amazingly to this very divided world that we live in.
You know, how do you get that many people to
agree on any let't alone something as difficult and contentious
(05:11):
as laws and climate laws, which have tentacles in every
part of our society. Now, at that point, we didn't
know it'd make an exciting play, but we've started talking
to people who were involved, to diplomats and delegates and
ministers and scientists from many countries and from all across
the divide, and in every one of those conversations were
struck by the drama and the emotion and the jeopardy
(05:33):
of these negotiations to often go on till early in
the morning, the intrigue, the back corridor deals, but above
all a real dedication and devotion and pride in what
they do. And that then inspired us to go, if
we can translate that and put it on a stage,
that might be a really great thing to do as writers.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
The conference is nineteen ninety seven, end of nineteen ninety seven,
but the play begins a little earlier. Than that. So
the end of the Reagan administration conversations happening around nineteen
ninety just paint us a picture of the climate conversation
in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
During the nineteen eighties it had started to really really
gather pace. There was a big summit in Villias in
the Austrian Alps with leading scientists coming together in the
late eighties, you know, with great concerns about what the
climate models and the meteorological models were showing about a
warming world, and there was a great deal of suspicion
that man made omissions were influencing those trends that they
(06:30):
were seeing and odd of that group then was formed
in nineteen eighty eight, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
which was a un body that was tasked with bringing
together all the available science at that time and producing
the sort of report that they could then share with
governments and ministers all around the world, you know, with
their summary of the best available evidence and their advice
(06:51):
about you know, how much of a problem this really
was to worry about. Although there was strong evidence there
wasn't a smoking gun, there was a lot of work
going on to try and understand it, you know, with
nascent computer models to try and to try and figure out.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, climate's complicated, you know, even.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Today, there are trillions and trillions of inputs. It's a vast,
vast system, you know. Distilling the evidence into a clear
thing that not only they can understand, but that everyone
can understand is sort of one of the major problems
at the heart of this discussion.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
I think you've told the caution metale really and what
we do on caution detales is we try to find
some vivid character at the heart of the story that
will help us bring it out of the realms of
the abstract and to really introduce a figure that can
help our listeners understand the story and they can follow
the decisions of this person. The person you chose, I
(07:40):
think is quite interesting. You chose a man called Don Perlman,
who's a real person, but he wasn't an environmentalist, he
wasn't a politician. He was a lobbyist for the oil industry.
So might choose him as the person through whose eyes
you're viewing much of the story.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
You know, as we were researching and we spoke to
scores of people, read every book and sort of report
that we could find, learned the language and the lingo
of climate and of the un It's a lot of acronyms,
and we kept discover this name, Don Pulman, often in footnotes,
often as sort of vague references. There's not much about
him online or in the literature. And the more we
spoke to people, the more we understood that he wasn't
(08:20):
an American lobbyist. He'd worked in the Reagan administration and
the Department of Energy under Don Hodell as a sort
of chief of staff, and after George HW. Bush's election,
went into the private sector and started representing a wide array,
although basically unknown, group of oil companies and oil producing states.
And he was an absolutely brilliant strategist, a brilliant lawyer,
(08:43):
a brilliant mind. Because we wanted to write a story
about agreement and a story about climate, which is often
it can be earnest and it can be serious, and
it can be you know, lofty, the idea of writing
a story of agreement told through the lens of this
agent of disagreement at the heart of it felt like
quite an exciting dramatic device that could undermine some of
(09:04):
that earnestness but also show what he and other lobbyists
like him back then, but also to this day, how
they operate within the multilateral systems which decide everything from
climate to trade to you know, you name it. How
they operate within those systems to obfuscate and stall and
direct the outcome of those negotiations. And there are not
(09:26):
many people as effective as Don Palman doing that. He
really was a thorn in the side of those trying
to find a way to move the world forward. At
that time.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You can't look away from him on stage. It's it's
a fantastic performance. I come at this from a slightly
different angle, which is for my book The Data Detective,
It became very interested in misinformation and disinformation and the
fact that some of these tactics were first used by
the tobacco industry. Who I mean, it's not quite the
(09:59):
same problem, but it's a similar problem, which is like,
there's an emerging scientific and census that your products are
killing your customers, although you know, what is the science,
what is a consensus? All of this sort of stuff.
And I was quite struck by the fact that John
Perlman in the play, his wife in her closing monologue,
(10:20):
says that he thrives on uncertainty.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I mean, you know, you spoke about punctuation earlier. It's
all about the question mark. You know, He and his
associates didn't need to present a sort of a coherent
idea of the science that conflicted with the ones that
the UN scientists and scientists around the world were trying
to formulate. It just needed to be a question mark.
And that was enough to sew doubt in a subject
as dense and as opaic as climate, where it's hard
(10:44):
enough to you know, for climate scientists to understand what's
going on, it's very easy to sew that down and
sew that discord. You know, uncertainty is very fertile soil
for someone as smart and as brilliant as Don Perlman
to operate in.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, the people who are hearing the message smoking will
give you countcer, smoking will give you heart disease. All
these fossil fuels they're warming the planet that will lead
to extreme weather. You listen to that and and you
think to yourself, do I have to believe that? Or
is there some room for doubt? And who wants to
believe it? Who wants to believe the cigarettes are killing them?
Who wants to believe that they can't fly on holiday
(11:23):
or drive their car anymore. You don't want to believe that.
So very often people are just desperate to find a
reason to delay, not even necessarily to do nothing, but
to do nothing.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Yet absolutely, and that applies in our personal lives in
terms of our behavior, but also on a global multilateral level.
I was talking to Tim Latimer, who's a US climate negotiator.
He came to see the show the other day and
now teachers negotiation, and he was saying, imagine getting one
hundred and seventy people in a room and asking them
to agree on where to go for dinner. Yeah, with
(11:54):
all their dietary requirements and their intolerances and analogies and
preferences and cuisines. How impossible it would be to choose
a restaurant Now times out by a million. When each
person is representing millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people,
and these vast complicated, inter connected economies and societies which
are hard to change at the best of times. Then
what you're phasing is this impossible task of bringing about agreement.
(12:18):
And so you throw someone like Don Perlman or these
other lobbyists into those scenarios. It becomes very easy in
a way for those negotiations to be deraled because of
the impossibility of the outcome that is desired.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Well, Don Perlman and lobbyists like him didn't get things
all their own way. After the break, we will talk
about some of the tactics that they used, but we
will also be talking about how the small island nations
found their voice to fight back. Stay with us. We're
(12:57):
back and I'm talking to Joe Robertson, the co writer
of the hit play Kyoto. Joe, one of the challenges
both for people seeking consensus on climate, but also for
you and the other Joe, while you were writing the
play is that so many people involved. The cast of
(13:18):
characters is enormous. We had one hundred and fifty eight
nations represented at Kyoto. So how did you decide who
you were going to focus on and who was going
to fade into the background.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
My co writer Joe and I went through a whole
process of Okay, how do you tell this story in
the most effective way possible. It was really important to
represent this growing, ever strengthening body of developing countries, which
is represented by the block, the G seventy seven in
the UN, you know, and they become an ever more
important voice in these negotiations. So we compressed, you know,
(13:51):
about one hundred and twenty countries down into into three
or four. Tanzania who led the G seventy seven, China,
which obviously remains one of the most important countries involved
in these negotiations. And then as you say that, the
small island States, which played a crucial role in this
whole history and still due to this day because the
problem with climate is it's you know, a little less
(14:14):
so now, but it was then a sort of a
future thing, you know, this is something down the line
we have to be worried about. And for the island
states that wasn't true. It was an immediate threat to
their states, to the health, to the continuing life of
their islands. And in nineteen ninety two they come together
and form a block, a new block, the Alliance of
Small Island States, which is like a firework set off
(14:34):
in the middle of the UN. Coming together and forming
this huge alliance is they become much more difficult to ignore,
and they become the moral compass of the negotiations.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing moment in the play.
It's really dramatic.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
The conditional tense is no longer sufficient for us. Sea
level rise will threaten survival. Western Samoa rises.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
First they support Cua bar.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
It will drown our crops. Then the Republic of Nauru
seconds this and wanted in the minute it will salinas
our fresh water supplies.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Followed by tid and Tobago, the Bahamas, Barbadoes, Bangala that it.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Will bleach our coral reefs and kill our mangrove forests.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Tanzania spans with the island states that developing world will.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
No longer be brushed aside. It will erode our coast lines.
It will destroy our homes, Mauritious, Saint Lucian. It will
displace us from our lands, the Cook Islands, the Malty.
It is displacing us the Federated States of Micromedia. We
will not drown in silence.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
A tidal wave of resentments old and new for the
conference hall. Another dramatic moment is the confrontation between your
anti hero Don and a scientist Dr Ben Santa is
a real character who's represented in the play. What does
Santa tell the conference and how does Don deal with him.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
With climate, what you would expect is as a missions rise,
sociould the temperature. That's the theory, right, that's the hypothesis,
and that's what's been happening basically since the start of
the industry revolution. But because correlation is not causation, you
have to find something really unique that is causing that.
Until then it could be you could write it down
to solar flares or other things. And what they discover
in nineteen ninety five Ben Santa and his colleagues discover
(16:28):
while the lower atmosphere is warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling.
They really figure out that man made emissions sort of
sit between the lower and the upper atmosphere, trapping heat,
causing the lower atmosphere to warm and the upper atmosphere
to cool. And that is what they call a fingerprint.
And it becomes the moment when the scientists feel it
is clear enough to say we can now confidently say
(16:51):
that man made emissions are influencing the global climate. And
this finds expression in chapter eight of the second IPCC assessment.
In nineteen ninety five, Ben is asked to write chapter
eight to bring together the evidence what is causing these changes?
In the climate, and so he sums it up in
twelve words, which go down in the history of all
of these negotiations and of climate law. The balance of
(17:13):
evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. And
it's all hinges on that one word, discernible. And there's
this very famous moment. It's actually in Madrid. They're arguing
over the adjective, and Don is there. He's right in
the room, and as are lots of other stakeholders, and
they debate what this word could be. And I think
they go through twenty eight possible adjectives, starting with appreciable,
(17:37):
then through observable, moderate, applausible, detectable, visible, identifiable, noticeable, until
they land on this word discernible. The balance of evidence
suggests a discernable human influence on global climate. And that's
the moment. That's the moment when they can say it's true.
And what Don and his associates do is essentially commit
a character assassination on Ben Center. This is before climate Gate,
(18:00):
before the big cases of misinformation we've seen. They accuse
Ben of changing details within the chapter that were agreed
in the room for publication. Now, what he was doing
actually was just sort of fulfilling IPCC formatting regulations so
that all the chapters of the book areligned. But they
used those little referencing changes, punctuation changes, word changes to
(18:21):
argue that actually he was committing fraud against the population
of the world. It kind of destroys Ben's life. That
the stories are horrible. The Nazi Party of Germany publishes
an address on the Internet. It's one of the first
dock things we can actually find in the history of
the Internet. They tried to get him tried at the
Hague for crimes against humanity, alongside congressional investigations and threats
(18:42):
to his job, and his son sleeps with a wooden
sword next to his bed because he's so scared of
people putting dead rats on his doorstep. And in that moment,
that's when I think the battle between the sort of
the climate deniers and those who believe in all this
gets really toxic, and it's the beginning of a new
chapter in these culture wars.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I was curious about the power that Don had in reality,
so in the play, he's really pulling a lot of
the strings. As this one really memorable scene where there's
a Japanese proposal and he basically goes to the Chinese
delegate and says, he realized this is really an American proposal.
These guys are playing with you. And then he goes
to the Americans to go he realized this is really
(19:23):
a Chinese proposal. He torpedoes everything because everybody believes him.
I was curious to what extent you know, exaggerated that
for dramatic effect, and to what extent you really think,
actually know it? What's this one guy? And if it
hadn't been for this one guy, everything would have been smooth.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, there is an element of dramatization. Everything is as
much as possible based on the research. We got a
lot of information from brilliant book Merchants of Doubt. The
sequence you describe is early in the play when we're
sort of showing that the toolbox of tactics that people
liked Don, and it wasn't just Don, but Don was
very much at the forefront, and you know, probably the
(20:00):
most effective of all of these kinds of lobbyists. So
that's called double diplomacy, sort of playing countries off against
each other. They challenged the science, they emphasize the costs
of action, and for Don, most importantly being present in
every single second. Almost no one else in that entire
period of time was every second of the talks more
than him, and that includes some of the heads of
(20:21):
delegations and that level, that sort of total immertion in
every detail, every word, every meeting. He was so ahead
of everybody else that he knew the rules of procedure,
you know, back to front, you could quote it. He
knew how to play the system. He had these alliances
with states as well as with individual delegates. I mean,
a good example is in Berlin. He realizes that in
(20:43):
the rules of procedure there's a problem. How do you
adopt a protocol is a big question. And in the
convention that was agreed in nineteen ninety two, it only
said that each country has one vote. And so through
his proxies in the Saudi Arabian delegation, they bring it
up and they say, well, you know what majority is required?
Is it two thirds? Is you know, three quarter majority
or whatever? And when it's clear that there is no clarity,
(21:04):
they bracket the rule. It's rule twenty two. I believe
they bracket the rule. It means it's no longer sort
of enshrined, it's up for debate and without voting rule.
It meant that every decision, every sort of adoption of
a protocol could essentially be vetoed by an individual country.
One country could stand up at the end object and
(21:24):
you know, to go back to our analogy, that would
mean that one hundred and sixty nine people didn't get
dinner if one person objected to the restaurant. That rule
still applies to this day. Even at COP thirty this
year in Blem and Brazil, they will be operating under
a consensus model of agreement that began, you know, as
a result of Don and the OPEC states back in
nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So we've been talking about the anti hero. Let us
talk about a surprising hero, a man who I think
will be known to British listeners, certainly British listeners of
my age. John Prescott President, who was the deputy Prime
Minister of the UK elected with Tony Blair in nineteen
ninety seven, so he'd only been deputy Prime Minister for
(22:05):
about six months when the Kyoto talks happened. Tell us
about press and the role he played.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
He has this sort of reputation, you know, as the
one who connects with voters with his fist as it were, and.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Somebody threw an egg it in and he just punched
the guy.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
On the election trail. Yeah, he's a bit, you know,
a little bit of a joke sometimes, but in researching
the play, what we realized he was absolutely integral to
the success of Kyoto. His history of negotiation went all
the way back to his youth when he was working
in the Merchant Navy in the Union and his job
would be to to mediate between sailors and the companies
(22:40):
and between sort of raw in factions within the union
and put down riots of thousands of sailors who were
drunk and refusing to go back aboard. And so he
comes with this amazing ability to sort of cajole and
with a huge amount of resilience, but also intellect understanding
how to listen, how to find out people's bottom lines,
how to keep them talking, how to find roots through
(23:02):
when things seemingly are intractable. And you know, he did
the same in the Labour Party in the nineteen nineties,
from sort of an old labor to it new labor.
He was this sort of mediator in the center of that,
and he was central in Kyoto. So he arrives. I
think it's the Netherlands is supposed to be representing the
EU in the negotiations, and the EU negotiates as a
block of fifteen countries at that time, and the Netherlands
(23:23):
just doesn't turn up. So he is unexpectedly becomes the
lead negotiator for the European Union. And his big slogan,
his big sort of creed occur was We've just got
to keep walking and talking, and that's what he does.
He manages to get Japan up to six percent, he
manages to get America on board. He's in all the
backrooms and corridors. He famously makes the Japanese delegate cry
(23:45):
because of the power of his persuasion. And when we
spoke to Raul Strada, he said John was a warrior.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
But despite his best efforts, there were still a huge disagreements.
And I think this is not just about disinformation or
trouble making. Was a fundamental clash of interests between China
and America. China this huge developing nation now by far
the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but at the
(24:11):
time they were not. But everyone could see it was
on the way, and they felt that it was unfair
that they should have to curtail their ambitions when the
world had basically been polluted by the Americans and the Europeans,
not by them. Meanwhile, the Americans are looking over their
shoulder at the Chinese and saying, well, why do we
have to curtail our emissions if these guys China and
India don't do anything? And it led to I think,
(24:34):
genuine deadlock for a long time.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
It seems to me this is the central tension at
the heart of the climate movement since the very beginning
and to this day. You know, it's about whose responsibility
is this problem to solve? And you know China and
India and lots of developing nations who you know, at
that moment were developing at pace doing what the West
had done one hundred years before. Their central argument was,
(24:59):
we didn't cause this problem.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
You did.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
You have enjoyed the status of economic superpower built on
the limitless use of fossil fuels. Why should we be
denied the same You have caused the problem, it must
be yours to solve. And at the same time we
should be allowed to develops as fast and as quickly
as you did using the same resources that you did,
and how you've squared that circle is the fundamental problem
of solving climate change.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So on the final day of the conference, the Chinese
are threatening to walk out, the Americans are threatening to
walk out, the Europeans are dancing around numbers, the island
nations are reminding everybody that they're very survival depends on
radical emission cuts, and the Saudi Arabians are demanding compensation
for potential loss of earnings. It's utter chaos and to
(25:46):
capital the chairman of COP three has disappeared. So where
is a strata canon agreement be reached and do we
need global unanimity to cut emissions? Find out? After the
break we are back and I am talking to Joe Robertson,
(26:09):
who is one of the writers of the play Kyoto.
So it is the final day of the Kyoto Conference.
It is hurtling towards disaster. And Joe, you've had the
privilege of interviewing many of the people who were there
on that day. What did they tell you about the atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It's a mixture of sort of PTSD and sort of
utter excitement. So Estrada, the chairman, he disappears and he
he actually goes for a naw wise man. The wise
man absolutely and has an app goes back to his hotel,
has dinner with his wife, Letitia, and then comes back
to a conference center, which is a bit like Dawn
of the Dead. You know, you've got delegates literally sprawled
(26:51):
out a sleep Coffee is run out, food has run out.
There's rumors that toilet roll is running out as well.
The conference staff are clearing away furniture because they've got
an event the next morning. Some people say there was
a wedding next morning with a bride and groom waiting.
So when you enter this final negotiation with Estrada, who's refreshed,
he just absolutely powers through. They don't start the final
(27:12):
SESSI until about eleven fifteen at night. The interpreters leave
after midnight, so suddenly people have got to sort of
translate between themselves. Then the president of the conference, the
Japanese president of the host, hiroshi Oki, suddenly resigns in
the middle of the final session. He just takes off
his badge and says, I've got to go back to
Tokyo because my prime minister is facing a confidence vote.
(27:33):
So he heads off to the Bullet train. They spend
about four or five hours arguing over emissions trading, which
is just one paragraph in one article of twenty eight,
and then when that is finally a compromises agreed at
about four am or something, they then start an article
one through twenty eight and spend another sort of six
hours going line by line through every sentence of the protocol.
(27:55):
The scenes are sort of fascical but kind of amazing.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We could separate the paragraph dash.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
From the article on commitments comma to create an interim
arrangement question mark, not without.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Bracing the ellipses with an apostrophic comma, so we can
properly parenthesize the quotation mark exclamation mark. Point well made,
mister Chairman Comma. We object to italicizing the close rackets
to colon the question mar.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
They are arguing over commas, but they're not only arguing
over commas because you know, whether developing countries participate or not.
It's like that's not a side issue.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Absolutely, And just prior to the actual conference itself, the
US Senate had voted unanimously not to ratify any protocolic
greeding Kyoto that didn't include developing countries. So you have
from the get go, the sort of damocles hanging over
the conference, because without that, America won't ratify. And you know,
if America doesn't ratify, what's the point in having a protocol.
(28:48):
And the commas, you know, commas are really important in
this process. As a writer, commas are about punctuation, is
about creating clarity in climate negotiations, They're actually about creating ambiguity.
A comma allows for a slight ambiguity in a sense
that allows two different delegations to go home and claim victory.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
And there's this dramatic moment where Raoul Strada is just
gaveling his way through. He's hammering one clause after another.
The article remains.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
I say, it's agree. You can't just gavel through. I
just did article two talk about high wire chairmanship. I
see no objection. So agreed. We're already agreed on Article three,
thank god. So on to article four. The USA has
the floor. We object the missing preposition in the fourth line. Please,
(29:39):
the US will blow up the talks for a missing preposition.
I'm gatherling agree.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
By the end, he's gathering through, and you can hear that.
You can hear the delegates going agreed, agreed, and it
sort of rises into this crescendo of people through both
exhaustion but also realizing, oh my god, it's going to happen.
They're willing it in. They're willing this moment of agreement
into existence, and I think at about ten point fifteen
something like that, Raoul is able to bring down his
(30:07):
gavel using the sort of the fa lines. I recommend
the Kyoto Protocol for adoption by unanimity, and that's the
moment that the Kyoto Protocol is agreed.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
It's almost like a magic trick when you see it
on stage and they do agree. In the end, of course,
the US Senate doesn't ratify the protocol. On the one hand,
you have presented us with this kind of amazing moment,
and you've shown all attention and you've shown what it
took to each agreement. But given what then followed, how
(30:43):
enthusiastic should we be about about that moment of agreement.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There are big debates about this, and you know, especially now,
I think as global multilateralism is in doubt, and some
people say it's dead in a world of strong men
and in a world of sort of of a declining
international cooperation. But as you know, Kyoto is undoubtedly like
an amazing moment of the proof of what can happen
when countries do come together. Now, America didn't ratify, but
(31:11):
the fact that they didn't walk out allowed this moment
to exist on the international stage, for it to become
this line in the sand, and most of the developed
world ratify, with the exception of a couple. By and large,
all of them really met their targets and many exceeded
their targets. No one can say things are going well
in climate I think without Kyoto we'd be in a
(31:34):
much worse position, and on the continuum of multilateral negotiations
that leads to Copenhagen and then through to Paris, which
is when the developing world finally really does come on
board in this substantial way in twenty fifteen, we would
not be where we are today without that moment.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
On the other hand, just from the point of view
of climate change, and look at the UK's emissions for example,
so our emissions carbon DIYX had emissions per capita are
lower than they were in eighteen sixty because we stopped
burning coal and we switched a natural gas which is
cleaner and then we've reduced a lot of natural gas,
and now there's a lot of wind, and there's a
lot of solar, and also a lot of stuff is
(32:12):
more efficient. And there's a similar story to be told
about many developed countries. So although global emissions are still
near a peak, there's a lot of progress been made,
and a lot of that progress seems to be technology driven.
And I'm just wondering how much of this actually can
we credit Kyoto for, and how much of it is
(32:32):
just you know, well, actually it was German solar subsidies,
it was Chinese industrial policy, it was the UK's dash
for gas, and actually none of it really was about
this global agreement.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
I wouldn't be so bold as to say without Kyoto
that those things wouldn't have happened. But back in the eighties,
no one would have been able to tell you what
climate change was. But what this process did, and what
the human beings at the heart of this process did,
was to bring this into the public consciousness and into
the political policymaking consciousness in a way which became completely
impossible to ignore. And there is a before and an
(33:06):
after Kyoto, and we live in an after Kiot to
a world, where the threads run through all elements of
policy making all around the world, and some amazing, some
of the most amazing human beings I've ever met, but flawed,
working in systems which are human systems which are flawed,
trying to influence human behavior which is flawed. But they
are the best we have. They are the best structures
(33:28):
that we have, you know, the United Nations, and that
the idealism of the multilateral process is I think, you know,
this is where as an artist comes out. I think beautiful,
because I think the ambition of those structures is so noble.
And yes, you can criticize them, and they can be
criticized as talking shops and all the rest. But when
(33:49):
we meet the people involved who have devoted and dedicated
their whole lives to just nudging the dial a little
as much as they possibly can, that really inspires me
and leaves me with a huge amount of admiration.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Your play Kyoto begins with Don Perlman. It ends with
his widow looking back on what he did and reflecting
on his life. Do you think he ever regretted what
he did?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I think Don very very firmly believed that what he
was doing was right. You know, he's an old school Republican.
He owed everything to America. He's the son of immigrants
who gave him and his family everything. And I think
he saw in the negotiations an attempt to change a
world order that was to the detriment of the United
States of America, you know. And I think he thought
(34:33):
that the negotiations were less about the science and more
about America's place in the world. And he fought and
ultimately died on that hill, you know. And do I
think he would have changed as the science got clearer
and clearer. It was pretty clear in two thousand and
five when he died. But you know, maybe.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I mean, the interesting thing is, it's not just about
the science. Even if if you look at climate changes,
you go, burning fossil fuels definitely warms the atmosphere, it's
definitely going to cause trouble. It will cause extreme weather.
Even if you accept that, it doesn't necessarily mean you
have to act. You could still argue it's not not
worth the cost of abandoning fossil fuels, or you could
(35:13):
say it's worth abandoning the cost of fossil fuels. But
it's not our business. So I think even if you
accept the science, they're still room for disagreement.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Well, absolutely. I mean, we use a line that came
from Dr Shu kong Zong, who is the head of
the Chinese delegation for much of the nineties and in Kyoto,
and he says, China will not remain poor so that
the world can Breathe. You have in there the very problem.
And Don himself says, you know, someone says, you know,
is the science clear? And he says, well, what science,
political science, social science, economic science, It's not the right question.
(35:44):
Fossil fuels and our use of the natural resources of
this planet are a part of every single aspect of
our life, from transport to industry, to manufacturing to our
economies on every conceivable scale. It's so deep in every
aspect of our behavior on a personal level and on
a global level. So it's a complicated thing to solve it.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Indeed, so cautionly tales. We're all about true stories that
teach us lessons. And on the day that this conversation
is released should also be the last day of the
COP thirty conference in Brazil, I was curious what you
hope that delegates in blame might learn from the Kyoto
(36:29):
process and from all the previous cops.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Definitely have naps in the Prescott way, just keep walking
and talking. And I think that applies not just to
the cop, but to all of us in this really
difficult moment that the world is facing, when it feels
like multilateralism is at risk and it feels like conversation
between ourselves is at risk. What Kyoto shows me every
(36:54):
time I speak to the people involved and watch the
show is actually all we have is discussion, is conversation,
is the ability to talk and to work through our
problems and our issues, however intractable, however deeply felt, however entrenched.
Just keep walking and talking.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Joe Robertson, thank you so much for joining us on
Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Thank you so much, Tim. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
As many of you know, I am a huge fan
of tabletop games, and Christmas is the perfect time to
be playing them. With that in mind, we have invited
the inventor of games such as Magic, the Gathering and
King of Tokyo, Richard Garfield, to join me for a
special episode of Cautionary Questions. Richard knows everything worth knowing
(37:48):
about game design, and he also has some questions for me,
but if you want to ask him a question, be
sure to get it into tales at Pushkin dot fm
by the end of the month. Cautionary Tales is written
by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and
(38:09):
Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at
Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend A. Dafh Haffrey edited
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
(38:31):
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really does
make a difference to us. And if you want to
(38:53):
hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode,
video episode and members only newsletter every month. Why not
join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon
dot com slash Coorsetionary Club. That's Patreon p A t
R e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club,
Pushkin. They're exhausted. Many haven't slept properly for days, but
the fraud talks go round and round. Thirty people have
been hospitalized from overwork. The interpreters are about to leave.
World leaders are making each other cry. Others are threatening
(00:38):
to walk out. Welcome to the Kyoto International Conference Center.
It's December nineteen ninety seven, and for ten long days,
representatives from one hundred and fifty eight nations have been
in the ancient Japanese city trying to strike the world's
(00:59):
first legally binding climate agreement. This is the third conference
of the Parties. COP three, an alliance of small islands,
makes the case for swift action in the face of
rising sea levels. Oil producing countries demand compensation for potential
(01:21):
loss of income. Developed nations express concern about the economic
impact of moving away from fossil fuels, while delegates from
developing countries argue they shouldn't be held responsible for the
mess made by the industrialized West. There are breakout sessions,
huddles and corridors, walkouts, squabbles about wording and punctuation, and
(01:44):
ultimately stasis. Now it's three pm on the final day
of the conference. Delegates are dropping like flies. Raoul Estrada
o Uela, the Argentinian diplomat chairing COP three, has disappeared
(02:04):
and no targets have been agreed. Don Hurlman, lobbyists for
the oil companies, rubs his hands with glee. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to portionary tales right now. Delegates from
(02:42):
around the world are meeting in Belame, Brazil for COP thirty.
There they'll seek to reinforce global cooperation and seek to
speed up the implementation of existing UN climate agreements and commitments.
But audiences in New York are being invited to go
(03:03):
back in time.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
I think we're going to agree on one thing. The
times you live in are truly awful. There's food shortages,
runaway inflation, culture wars, real wars, brace riots, fake news,
consain insurrections, global pandemics, and on top of all of that,
a planet in a literal meltdown. And if you're a
(03:26):
guy like me looking at a time like now, the
main thing you think is wow, Man, the nineteen nineties
were freaking glorious.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
That was Don Perlman, as played by Stephen Counkan in
the play Kyoto about the historic Third COP After sellout
runs in Stratford upon Avon and London, the Royal Shakespeare
Company's production is currently on stage at the Lincoln Center
in New York. Kyoto was written by Joe Robertson and
(04:00):
Joe Murphy, and I am delighted to say that Joe
Robertson is with me now. Joe, welcome to Cause Retales.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Thank you so much him. It's an absolute pleasure. Huge
fan of the podcast and of all your work, So
thanks for having us.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
Oh, it's a pleasure. It's terrific to have you on
the show. So the inner machinations of an international climate conference.
I don't scream theatrical thriller, but that is what you've created.
So how did you come across this story and what
convinced you of the dramatic potential.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
We had an interest in polarization. This was a good
few years ago now and looking around at a sort
of coarsening public discourse and an ever more divided society
where conversation felt, you know, more strained and more difficult
to have, and we wanted to write about that and
find a way of talking about that in a dramatic
(04:50):
and exciting way, and actually stumbled on the story of
Kyoto by accident, and we're immediately inspired by this parable
of agreement, and it felt to us like that spoke
quite amazingly to this very divided world that we live in.
You know, how do you get that many people to
agree on any let't alone something as difficult and contentious
(05:11):
as laws and climate laws, which have tentacles in every
part of our society. Now, at that point, we didn't
know it'd make an exciting play, but we've started talking
to people who were involved, to diplomats and delegates and
ministers and scientists from many countries and from all across
the divide, and in every one of those conversations were
struck by the drama and the emotion and the jeopardy
(05:33):
of these negotiations to often go on till early in
the morning, the intrigue, the back corridor deals, but above
all a real dedication and devotion and pride in what
they do. And that then inspired us to go, if
we can translate that and put it on a stage,
that might be a really great thing to do as writers.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
The conference is nineteen ninety seven, end of nineteen ninety seven,
but the play begins a little earlier. Than that. So
the end of the Reagan administration conversations happening around nineteen
ninety just paint us a picture of the climate conversation
in the early nineteen nineties.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
During the nineteen eighties it had started to really really
gather pace. There was a big summit in Villias in
the Austrian Alps with leading scientists coming together in the
late eighties, you know, with great concerns about what the
climate models and the meteorological models were showing about a
warming world, and there was a great deal of suspicion
that man made omissions were influencing those trends that they
(06:30):
were seeing and odd of that group then was formed
in nineteen eighty eight, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
which was a un body that was tasked with bringing
together all the available science at that time and producing
the sort of report that they could then share with
governments and ministers all around the world, you know, with
their summary of the best available evidence and their advice
(06:51):
about you know, how much of a problem this really
was to worry about. Although there was strong evidence there
wasn't a smoking gun, there was a lot of work
going on to try and understand it, you know, with
nascent computer models to try and to try and figure out.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Yeah, climate's complicated, you know, even.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
Today, there are trillions and trillions of inputs. It's a vast,
vast system, you know. Distilling the evidence into a clear
thing that not only they can understand, but that everyone
can understand is sort of one of the major problems
at the heart of this discussion.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
I think you've told the caution metale really and what
we do on caution detales is we try to find
some vivid character at the heart of the story that
will help us bring it out of the realms of
the abstract and to really introduce a figure that can
help our listeners understand the story and they can follow
the decisions of this person. The person you chose, I
(07:40):
think is quite interesting. You chose a man called Don Perlman,
who's a real person, but he wasn't an environmentalist, he
wasn't a politician. He was a lobbyist for the oil industry.
So might choose him as the person through whose eyes
you're viewing much of the story.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
You know, as we were researching and we spoke to
scores of people, read every book and sort of report
that we could find, learned the language and the lingo
of climate and of the un It's a lot of acronyms,
and we kept discover this name, Don Pulman, often in footnotes,
often as sort of vague references. There's not much about
him online or in the literature. And the more we
spoke to people, the more we understood that he wasn't
(08:20):
an American lobbyist. He'd worked in the Reagan administration and
the Department of Energy under Don Hodell as a sort
of chief of staff, and after George HW. Bush's election,
went into the private sector and started representing a wide array,
although basically unknown, group of oil companies and oil producing states.
And he was an absolutely brilliant strategist, a brilliant lawyer,
(08:43):
a brilliant mind. Because we wanted to write a story
about agreement and a story about climate, which is often
it can be earnest and it can be serious, and
it can be you know, lofty, the idea of writing
a story of agreement told through the lens of this
agent of disagreement at the heart of it felt like
quite an exciting dramatic device that could undermine some of
(09:04):
that earnestness but also show what he and other lobbyists
like him back then, but also to this day, how
they operate within the multilateral systems which decide everything from
climate to trade to you know, you name it. How
they operate within those systems to obfuscate and stall and
direct the outcome of those negotiations. And there are not
(09:26):
many people as effective as Don Palman doing that. He
really was a thorn in the side of those trying
to find a way to move the world forward. At
that time.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You can't look away from him on stage. It's it's
a fantastic performance. I come at this from a slightly
different angle, which is for my book The Data Detective,
It became very interested in misinformation and disinformation and the
fact that some of these tactics were first used by
the tobacco industry. Who I mean, it's not quite the
(09:59):
same problem, but it's a similar problem, which is like,
there's an emerging scientific and census that your products are
killing your customers, although you know, what is the science,
what is a consensus? All of this sort of stuff.
And I was quite struck by the fact that John
Perlman in the play, his wife in her closing monologue,
(10:20):
says that he thrives on uncertainty.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
I mean, you know, you spoke about punctuation earlier. It's
all about the question mark. You know, He and his
associates didn't need to present a sort of a coherent
idea of the science that conflicted with the ones that
the UN scientists and scientists around the world were trying
to formulate. It just needed to be a question mark.
And that was enough to sew doubt in a subject
as dense and as opaic as climate, where it's hard
(10:44):
enough to you know, for climate scientists to understand what's
going on, it's very easy to sew that down and
sew that discord. You know, uncertainty is very fertile soil
for someone as smart and as brilliant as Don Perlman
to operate in.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, the people who are hearing the message smoking will
give you countcer, smoking will give you heart disease. All
these fossil fuels they're warming the planet that will lead
to extreme weather. You listen to that and and you
think to yourself, do I have to believe that? Or
is there some room for doubt? And who wants to
believe it? Who wants to believe the cigarettes are killing them?
Who wants to believe that they can't fly on holiday
(11:23):
or drive their car anymore. You don't want to believe that.
So very often people are just desperate to find a
reason to delay, not even necessarily to do nothing, but
to do nothing.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Yet absolutely, and that applies in our personal lives in
terms of our behavior, but also on a global multilateral level.
I was talking to Tim Latimer, who's a US climate negotiator.
He came to see the show the other day and
now teachers negotiation, and he was saying, imagine getting one
hundred and seventy people in a room and asking them
to agree on where to go for dinner. Yeah, with
(11:54):
all their dietary requirements and their intolerances and analogies and
preferences and cuisines. How impossible it would be to choose
a restaurant Now times out by a million. When each
person is representing millions, potentially hundreds of millions of people,
and these vast complicated, inter connected economies and societies which
are hard to change at the best of times. Then
what you're phasing is this impossible task of bringing about agreement.
(12:18):
And so you throw someone like Don Perlman or these
other lobbyists into those scenarios. It becomes very easy in
a way for those negotiations to be deraled because of
the impossibility of the outcome that is desired.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Well, Don Perlman and lobbyists like him didn't get things
all their own way. After the break, we will talk
about some of the tactics that they used, but we
will also be talking about how the small island nations
found their voice to fight back. Stay with us. We're
(12:57):
back and I'm talking to Joe Robertson, the co writer
of the hit play Kyoto. Joe, one of the challenges
both for people seeking consensus on climate, but also for
you and the other Joe, while you were writing the
play is that so many people involved. The cast of
(13:18):
characters is enormous. We had one hundred and fifty eight
nations represented at Kyoto. So how did you decide who
you were going to focus on and who was going
to fade into the background.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
My co writer Joe and I went through a whole
process of Okay, how do you tell this story in
the most effective way possible. It was really important to
represent this growing, ever strengthening body of developing countries, which
is represented by the block, the G seventy seven in
the UN, you know, and they become an ever more
important voice in these negotiations. So we compressed, you know,
(13:51):
about one hundred and twenty countries down into into three
or four. Tanzania who led the G seventy seven, China,
which obviously remains one of the most important countries involved
in these negotiations. And then as you say that, the
small island States, which played a crucial role in this
whole history and still due to this day because the
problem with climate is it's you know, a little less
(14:14):
so now, but it was then a sort of a
future thing, you know, this is something down the line
we have to be worried about. And for the island
states that wasn't true. It was an immediate threat to
their states, to the health, to the continuing life of
their islands. And in nineteen ninety two they come together
and form a block, a new block, the Alliance of
Small Island States, which is like a firework set off
(14:34):
in the middle of the UN. Coming together and forming
this huge alliance is they become much more difficult to ignore,
and they become the moral compass of the negotiations.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing moment in the play.
It's really dramatic.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
The conditional tense is no longer sufficient for us. Sea
level rise will threaten survival. Western Samoa rises.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
First they support Cua bar.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
It will drown our crops. Then the Republic of Nauru
seconds this and wanted in the minute it will salinas
our fresh water supplies.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Followed by tid and Tobago, the Bahamas, Barbadoes, Bangala that it.
Speaker 4 (15:12):
Will bleach our coral reefs and kill our mangrove forests.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
Tanzania spans with the island states that developing world will.
Speaker 4 (15:22):
No longer be brushed aside. It will erode our coast lines.
It will destroy our homes, Mauritious, Saint Lucian. It will
displace us from our lands, the Cook Islands, the Malty.
It is displacing us the Federated States of Micromedia. We
will not drown in silence.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
A tidal wave of resentments old and new for the
conference hall. Another dramatic moment is the confrontation between your
anti hero Don and a scientist Dr Ben Santa is
a real character who's represented in the play. What does
Santa tell the conference and how does Don deal with him.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
With climate, what you would expect is as a missions rise,
sociould the temperature. That's the theory, right, that's the hypothesis,
and that's what's been happening basically since the start of
the industry revolution. But because correlation is not causation, you
have to find something really unique that is causing that.
Until then it could be you could write it down
to solar flares or other things. And what they discover
in nineteen ninety five Ben Santa and his colleagues discover
(16:28):
while the lower atmosphere is warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling.
They really figure out that man made emissions sort of
sit between the lower and the upper atmosphere, trapping heat,
causing the lower atmosphere to warm and the upper atmosphere
to cool. And that is what they call a fingerprint.
And it becomes the moment when the scientists feel it
is clear enough to say we can now confidently say
(16:51):
that man made emissions are influencing the global climate. And
this finds expression in chapter eight of the second IPCC assessment.
In nineteen ninety five, Ben is asked to write chapter
eight to bring together the evidence what is causing these changes?
In the climate, and so he sums it up in
twelve words, which go down in the history of all
of these negotiations and of climate law. The balance of
(17:13):
evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. And
it's all hinges on that one word, discernible. And there's
this very famous moment. It's actually in Madrid. They're arguing
over the adjective, and Don is there. He's right in
the room, and as are lots of other stakeholders, and
they debate what this word could be. And I think
they go through twenty eight possible adjectives, starting with appreciable,
(17:37):
then through observable, moderate, applausible, detectable, visible, identifiable, noticeable, until
they land on this word discernible. The balance of evidence
suggests a discernable human influence on global climate. And that's
the moment. That's the moment when they can say it's true.
And what Don and his associates do is essentially commit
a character assassination on Ben Center. This is before climate Gate,
(18:00):
before the big cases of misinformation we've seen. They accuse
Ben of changing details within the chapter that were agreed
in the room for publication. Now, what he was doing
actually was just sort of fulfilling IPCC formatting regulations so
that all the chapters of the book areligned. But they
used those little referencing changes, punctuation changes, word changes to
(18:21):
argue that actually he was committing fraud against the population
of the world. It kind of destroys Ben's life. That
the stories are horrible. The Nazi Party of Germany publishes
an address on the Internet. It's one of the first
dock things we can actually find in the history of
the Internet. They tried to get him tried at the
Hague for crimes against humanity, alongside congressional investigations and threats
(18:42):
to his job, and his son sleeps with a wooden
sword next to his bed because he's so scared of
people putting dead rats on his doorstep. And in that moment,
that's when I think the battle between the sort of
the climate deniers and those who believe in all this
gets really toxic, and it's the beginning of a new
chapter in these culture wars.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
I was curious about the power that Don had in reality,
so in the play, he's really pulling a lot of
the strings. As this one really memorable scene where there's
a Japanese proposal and he basically goes to the Chinese
delegate and says, he realized this is really an American proposal.
These guys are playing with you. And then he goes
to the Americans to go he realized this is really
(19:23):
a Chinese proposal. He torpedoes everything because everybody believes him.
I was curious to what extent you know, exaggerated that
for dramatic effect, and to what extent you really think,
actually know it? What's this one guy? And if it
hadn't been for this one guy, everything would have been smooth.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Yeah, there is an element of dramatization. Everything is as
much as possible based on the research. We got a
lot of information from brilliant book Merchants of Doubt. The
sequence you describe is early in the play when we're
sort of showing that the toolbox of tactics that people
liked Don, and it wasn't just Don, but Don was
very much at the forefront, and you know, probably the
(20:00):
most effective of all of these kinds of lobbyists. So
that's called double diplomacy, sort of playing countries off against
each other. They challenged the science, they emphasize the costs
of action, and for Don, most importantly being present in
every single second. Almost no one else in that entire
period of time was every second of the talks more
than him, and that includes some of the heads of
(20:21):
delegations and that level, that sort of total immertion in
every detail, every word, every meeting. He was so ahead
of everybody else that he knew the rules of procedure,
you know, back to front, you could quote it. He
knew how to play the system. He had these alliances
with states as well as with individual delegates. I mean,
a good example is in Berlin. He realizes that in
(20:43):
the rules of procedure there's a problem. How do you
adopt a protocol is a big question. And in the
convention that was agreed in nineteen ninety two, it only
said that each country has one vote. And so through
his proxies in the Saudi Arabian delegation, they bring it
up and they say, well, you know what majority is required?
Is it two thirds? Is you know, three quarter majority
or whatever? And when it's clear that there is no clarity,
(21:04):
they bracket the rule. It's rule twenty two. I believe
they bracket the rule. It means it's no longer sort
of enshrined, it's up for debate and without voting rule.
It meant that every decision, every sort of adoption of
a protocol could essentially be vetoed by an individual country.
One country could stand up at the end object and
(21:24):
you know, to go back to our analogy, that would
mean that one hundred and sixty nine people didn't get
dinner if one person objected to the restaurant. That rule
still applies to this day. Even at COP thirty this
year in Blem and Brazil, they will be operating under
a consensus model of agreement that began, you know, as
a result of Don and the OPEC states back in
nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
So we've been talking about the anti hero. Let us
talk about a surprising hero, a man who I think
will be known to British listeners, certainly British listeners of
my age. John Prescott President, who was the deputy Prime
Minister of the UK elected with Tony Blair in nineteen
ninety seven, so he'd only been deputy Prime Minister for
(22:05):
about six months when the Kyoto talks happened. Tell us
about press and the role he played.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
He has this sort of reputation, you know, as the
one who connects with voters with his fist as it were, and.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Somebody threw an egg it in and he just punched
the guy.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
On the election trail. Yeah, he's a bit, you know,
a little bit of a joke sometimes, but in researching
the play, what we realized he was absolutely integral to
the success of Kyoto. His history of negotiation went all
the way back to his youth when he was working
in the Merchant Navy in the Union and his job
would be to to mediate between sailors and the companies
(22:40):
and between sort of raw in factions within the union
and put down riots of thousands of sailors who were
drunk and refusing to go back aboard. And so he
comes with this amazing ability to sort of cajole and
with a huge amount of resilience, but also intellect understanding
how to listen, how to find out people's bottom lines,
how to keep them talking, how to find roots through
(23:02):
when things seemingly are intractable. And you know, he did
the same in the Labour Party in the nineteen nineties,
from sort of an old labor to it new labor.
He was this sort of mediator in the center of that,
and he was central in Kyoto. So he arrives. I
think it's the Netherlands is supposed to be representing the
EU in the negotiations, and the EU negotiates as a
block of fifteen countries at that time, and the Netherlands
(23:23):
just doesn't turn up. So he is unexpectedly becomes the
lead negotiator for the European Union. And his big slogan,
his big sort of creed occur was We've just got
to keep walking and talking, and that's what he does.
He manages to get Japan up to six percent, he
manages to get America on board. He's in all the
backrooms and corridors. He famously makes the Japanese delegate cry
(23:45):
because of the power of his persuasion. And when we
spoke to Raul Strada, he said John was a warrior.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
But despite his best efforts, there were still a huge disagreements.
And I think this is not just about disinformation or
trouble making. Was a fundamental clash of interests between China
and America. China this huge developing nation now by far
the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but at the
(24:11):
time they were not. But everyone could see it was
on the way, and they felt that it was unfair
that they should have to curtail their ambitions when the
world had basically been polluted by the Americans and the Europeans,
not by them. Meanwhile, the Americans are looking over their
shoulder at the Chinese and saying, well, why do we
have to curtail our emissions if these guys China and
India don't do anything? And it led to I think,
(24:34):
genuine deadlock for a long time.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
It seems to me this is the central tension at
the heart of the climate movement since the very beginning
and to this day. You know, it's about whose responsibility
is this problem to solve? And you know China and
India and lots of developing nations who you know, at
that moment were developing at pace doing what the West
had done one hundred years before. Their central argument was,
(24:59):
we didn't cause this problem.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
You did.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
You have enjoyed the status of economic superpower built on
the limitless use of fossil fuels. Why should we be
denied the same You have caused the problem, it must
be yours to solve. And at the same time we
should be allowed to develops as fast and as quickly
as you did using the same resources that you did,
and how you've squared that circle is the fundamental problem
of solving climate change.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
So on the final day of the conference, the Chinese
are threatening to walk out, the Americans are threatening to
walk out, the Europeans are dancing around numbers, the island
nations are reminding everybody that they're very survival depends on
radical emission cuts, and the Saudi Arabians are demanding compensation
for potential loss of earnings. It's utter chaos and to
(25:46):
capital the chairman of COP three has disappeared. So where
is a strata canon agreement be reached and do we
need global unanimity to cut emissions? Find out? After the
break we are back and I am talking to Joe Robertson,
(26:09):
who is one of the writers of the play Kyoto.
So it is the final day of the Kyoto Conference.
It is hurtling towards disaster. And Joe, you've had the
privilege of interviewing many of the people who were there
on that day. What did they tell you about the atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
It's a mixture of sort of PTSD and sort of
utter excitement. So Estrada, the chairman, he disappears and he
he actually goes for a naw wise man. The wise
man absolutely and has an app goes back to his hotel,
has dinner with his wife, Letitia, and then comes back
to a conference center, which is a bit like Dawn
of the Dead. You know, you've got delegates literally sprawled
(26:51):
out a sleep Coffee is run out, food has run out.
There's rumors that toilet roll is running out as well.
The conference staff are clearing away furniture because they've got
an event the next morning. Some people say there was
a wedding next morning with a bride and groom waiting.
So when you enter this final negotiation with Estrada, who's refreshed,
he just absolutely powers through. They don't start the final
(27:12):
SESSI until about eleven fifteen at night. The interpreters leave
after midnight, so suddenly people have got to sort of
translate between themselves. Then the president of the conference, the
Japanese president of the host, hiroshi Oki, suddenly resigns in
the middle of the final session. He just takes off
his badge and says, I've got to go back to
Tokyo because my prime minister is facing a confidence vote.
(27:33):
So he heads off to the Bullet train. They spend
about four or five hours arguing over emissions trading, which
is just one paragraph in one article of twenty eight,
and then when that is finally a compromises agreed at
about four am or something, they then start an article
one through twenty eight and spend another sort of six
hours going line by line through every sentence of the protocol.
(27:55):
The scenes are sort of fascical but kind of amazing.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
We could separate the paragraph dash.
Speaker 1 (28:00):
From the article on commitments comma to create an interim
arrangement question mark, not without.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
Bracing the ellipses with an apostrophic comma, so we can
properly parenthesize the quotation mark exclamation mark. Point well made,
mister Chairman Comma. We object to italicizing the close rackets
to colon the question mar.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
They are arguing over commas, but they're not only arguing
over commas because you know, whether developing countries participate or not.
It's like that's not a side issue.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Absolutely, And just prior to the actual conference itself, the
US Senate had voted unanimously not to ratify any protocolic
greeding Kyoto that didn't include developing countries. So you have
from the get go, the sort of damocles hanging over
the conference, because without that, America won't ratify. And you know,
if America doesn't ratify, what's the point in having a protocol.
(28:48):
And the commas, you know, commas are really important in
this process. As a writer, commas are about punctuation, is
about creating clarity in climate negotiations, They're actually about creating ambiguity.
A comma allows for a slight ambiguity in a sense
that allows two different delegations to go home and claim victory.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
And there's this dramatic moment where Raoul Strada is just
gaveling his way through. He's hammering one clause after another.
The article remains.
Speaker 4 (29:16):
I say, it's agree. You can't just gavel through. I
just did article two talk about high wire chairmanship. I
see no objection. So agreed. We're already agreed on Article three,
thank god. So on to article four. The USA has
the floor. We object the missing preposition in the fourth line. Please,
(29:39):
the US will blow up the talks for a missing preposition.
I'm gatherling agree.
Speaker 3 (29:45):
By the end, he's gathering through, and you can hear that.
You can hear the delegates going agreed, agreed, and it
sort of rises into this crescendo of people through both
exhaustion but also realizing, oh my god, it's going to happen.
They're willing it in. They're willing this moment of agreement
into existence, and I think at about ten point fifteen
something like that, Raoul is able to bring down his
(30:07):
gavel using the sort of the fa lines. I recommend
the Kyoto Protocol for adoption by unanimity, and that's the
moment that the Kyoto Protocol is agreed.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
It's almost like a magic trick when you see it
on stage and they do agree. In the end, of course,
the US Senate doesn't ratify the protocol. On the one hand,
you have presented us with this kind of amazing moment,
and you've shown all attention and you've shown what it
took to each agreement. But given what then followed, how
(30:43):
enthusiastic should we be about about that moment of agreement.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
There are big debates about this, and you know, especially now,
I think as global multilateralism is in doubt, and some
people say it's dead in a world of strong men
and in a world of sort of of a declining
international cooperation. But as you know, Kyoto is undoubtedly like
an amazing moment of the proof of what can happen
when countries do come together. Now, America didn't ratify, but
(31:11):
the fact that they didn't walk out allowed this moment
to exist on the international stage, for it to become
this line in the sand, and most of the developed
world ratify, with the exception of a couple. By and large,
all of them really met their targets and many exceeded
their targets. No one can say things are going well
in climate I think without Kyoto we'd be in a
(31:34):
much worse position, and on the continuum of multilateral negotiations
that leads to Copenhagen and then through to Paris, which
is when the developing world finally really does come on
board in this substantial way in twenty fifteen, we would
not be where we are today without that moment.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
On the other hand, just from the point of view
of climate change, and look at the UK's emissions for example,
so our emissions carbon DIYX had emissions per capita are
lower than they were in eighteen sixty because we stopped
burning coal and we switched a natural gas which is
cleaner and then we've reduced a lot of natural gas,
and now there's a lot of wind, and there's a
lot of solar, and also a lot of stuff is
(32:12):
more efficient. And there's a similar story to be told
about many developed countries. So although global emissions are still
near a peak, there's a lot of progress been made,
and a lot of that progress seems to be technology driven.
And I'm just wondering how much of this actually can
we credit Kyoto for, and how much of it is
(32:32):
just you know, well, actually it was German solar subsidies,
it was Chinese industrial policy, it was the UK's dash
for gas, and actually none of it really was about
this global agreement.
Speaker 3 (32:44):
I wouldn't be so bold as to say without Kyoto
that those things wouldn't have happened. But back in the eighties,
no one would have been able to tell you what
climate change was. But what this process did, and what
the human beings at the heart of this process did,
was to bring this into the public consciousness and into
the political policymaking consciousness in a way which became completely
impossible to ignore. And there is a before and an
(33:06):
after Kyoto, and we live in an after Kiot to
a world, where the threads run through all elements of
policy making all around the world, and some amazing, some
of the most amazing human beings I've ever met, but flawed,
working in systems which are human systems which are flawed,
trying to influence human behavior which is flawed. But they
are the best we have. They are the best structures
(33:28):
that we have, you know, the United Nations, and that
the idealism of the multilateral process is I think, you know,
this is where as an artist comes out. I think beautiful,
because I think the ambition of those structures is so noble.
And yes, you can criticize them, and they can be
criticized as talking shops and all the rest. But when
(33:49):
we meet the people involved who have devoted and dedicated
their whole lives to just nudging the dial a little
as much as they possibly can, that really inspires me
and leaves me with a huge amount of admiration.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Your play Kyoto begins with Don Perlman. It ends with
his widow looking back on what he did and reflecting
on his life. Do you think he ever regretted what
he did?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I think Don very very firmly believed that what he
was doing was right. You know, he's an old school Republican.
He owed everything to America. He's the son of immigrants
who gave him and his family everything. And I think
he saw in the negotiations an attempt to change a
world order that was to the detriment of the United
States of America, you know. And I think he thought
(34:33):
that the negotiations were less about the science and more
about America's place in the world. And he fought and
ultimately died on that hill, you know. And do I
think he would have changed as the science got clearer
and clearer. It was pretty clear in two thousand and
five when he died. But you know, maybe.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
I mean, the interesting thing is, it's not just about
the science. Even if if you look at climate changes,
you go, burning fossil fuels definitely warms the atmosphere, it's
definitely going to cause trouble. It will cause extreme weather.
Even if you accept that, it doesn't necessarily mean you
have to act. You could still argue it's not not
worth the cost of abandoning fossil fuels, or you could
(35:13):
say it's worth abandoning the cost of fossil fuels. But
it's not our business. So I think even if you
accept the science, they're still room for disagreement.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Well, absolutely. I mean, we use a line that came
from Dr Shu kong Zong, who is the head of
the Chinese delegation for much of the nineties and in Kyoto,
and he says, China will not remain poor so that
the world can Breathe. You have in there the very problem.
And Don himself says, you know, someone says, you know,
is the science clear? And he says, well, what science,
political science, social science, economic science, It's not the right question.
(35:44):
Fossil fuels and our use of the natural resources of
this planet are a part of every single aspect of
our life, from transport to industry, to manufacturing to our
economies on every conceivable scale. It's so deep in every
aspect of our behavior on a personal level and on
a global level. So it's a complicated thing to solve it.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Indeed, so cautionly tales. We're all about true stories that
teach us lessons. And on the day that this conversation
is released should also be the last day of the
COP thirty conference in Brazil, I was curious what you
hope that delegates in blame might learn from the Kyoto
(36:29):
process and from all the previous cops.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
Definitely have naps in the Prescott way, just keep walking
and talking. And I think that applies not just to
the cop, but to all of us in this really
difficult moment that the world is facing, when it feels
like multilateralism is at risk and it feels like conversation
between ourselves is at risk. What Kyoto shows me every
(36:54):
time I speak to the people involved and watch the
show is actually all we have is discussion, is conversation,
is the ability to talk and to work through our
problems and our issues, however intractable, however deeply felt, however entrenched.
Just keep walking and talking.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
Joe Robertson, thank you so much for joining us on
Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
Thank you so much, Tim. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
As many of you know, I am a huge fan
of tabletop games, and Christmas is the perfect time to
be playing them. With that in mind, we have invited
the inventor of games such as Magic, the Gathering and
King of Tokyo, Richard Garfield, to join me for a
special episode of Cautionary Questions. Richard knows everything worth knowing
(37:48):
about game design, and he also has some questions for me,
but if you want to ask him a question, be
sure to get it into tales at Pushkin dot fm
by the end of the month. Cautionary Tales is written
by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and
(38:09):
Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at
Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Bend A. Dafh Haffrey edited
the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
(38:31):
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really does
make a difference to us. And if you want to
(38:53):
hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode,
video episode and members only newsletter every month. Why not
join the Cautionary Club. To sign up, head to patreon
dot com slash Coorsetionary Club. That's Patreon p A t
R e o N dot com Slash Cautionary Club,
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.