In fractured times, what does it take to reach agreement? That’s the question writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson set out to explore in a play about the drama of climate negotiations. Kyoto, which ran at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon this summer, tells the story of the 1997 Kyoto Summit as seen through the eyes of Don Pearlman, a notorious fossil fuel lobbyist and chain-smoking lawyer dubbed “the high priest of the Carbon Club” by der Speigel. Actor Stephen Kunken, who plays Pearlman, tells Akshat Rathi why he was drawn to the character, and what Kyoto can teach us about how agreement is achieved. This episode first ran in July 2024.
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Hi, it's Ukshat. We are on the cusp of COP twenty nine and the US election, and so we wanted to bring you a favorite past episode that feels particularly timely right now, even though it's looking at events that happened nearly thirty years ago. We made the show in July. It's about a play that dramatizes the nineteen ninety seven climate summit in Kyoto. That meeting COP three was historic for reasons you'll hear. COP twenty nine, taking place in Azerbaijan the week after next is likely to be historic too. One thing we'll be watching for at COP twenty nine is what direction the US takes after its people have elected a new president. If that president is Donald Trump, it could have disastrous consequences for global climate diplomacy. You might remember what my colleague Gendiluhi told me about this last month.
Trump could actually go further and abandoned the UNF Triple C, the Framework Convention on Climate Change that underpins it. And if leaving Paris is a potentially temporary blow to climate diplomacy, then leaving the UNF Triple C would be a figurative bomb and climate diplomacy with years of fallout and what's you know interesting about this is truly the potentially long repercussions for the US and for the world.
You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. And by the way, next week we'll be putting out our episode on Friday instead of Thursday because there's a big election happening. For now, enjoy the episode about Kyoto. Welcome to Zero. I am actadrati. This week climate negotiations as entertainment. This sentence. Countries are urged to take immediate actions to control the risks of climate change.
Surely we can all agree on this.
No mean countries are urged. I'm sorry it is urgent.
I feel urged.
I don't feel urged.
Do you feel urged?
I don't feel urgent? Couraged?
Second, urged is a red line for us. Courage invited, of course, No, we should all feel urged.
Imediate got the media. Countries are urged to take actions to control the risk of climate What.
Are these actions?
An idealistic promise made today could close a factory in Detroit tomorrow.
At this with ass on actions that would be economically beneficial as well.
No regrets.
We second that choice. The line or whatever is left of It is a great.
A question for you, Actually, how many cops have you been to?
Three? The last three?
They sound like marathon events.
Yeah they are.
They are two weeks long and almost always overrun, and everything gets shut down by the last few days and you're out of coffee and energy and you're exhausted. It's sort of all cops, I think, not just the last three.
It sounds a little drudgerous to be honest. I mean, I'm not a fan of a very long meeting, so I have to admit. When I heard that the Royal Shakespeare Company was putting on a new play about Cop three, which was held in Kyoto, I was very intrigued, but also felt a little bit of trepidation about what it is we would be sitting through.
Yeah, me too. When I was told that there is a play about the Kyoto Protocol, I was surprised. You know, there is a lot of drama at these places. It's high stakes. All countries are involved, the fate of the planet is involved. But it is really boring in the fact that it's negotiations done over text and over words that most people don't understand, and it's all a bit chaotic, and so how do you make that entertaining? That was the question to me when I heard there was a play about it.
Today's episode is all about the play. We'll be hearing from the director and one of the actors, and also from someone who attended those Kyoto negotiations in nineteen nine twenty seven. And yeah, it was long, but it didn't feel too long. I thought part of what made it compelling was the way it was staged. The stage is shaped like a conference table. Members of the audience sit around it, so they're kind of made to feel like they're part of the negotiations.
The playwrights had to figure out how to shrink tenures of history and two weeks of negotiations into a couple of hours, and they had to do it in a fixed setting. So the choice of the stage was important, and I asked one of the plays directors, Justin Martin, about why the stage was shaped that way.
It's a conference table in which a lot of the action happens around it, within the audience, but also yeah, on top of the conference table. But as soon as you put the audience in it, it has an inherent chaos to it because they're in and around everything, and there is a certain joy to the way in which the actors move in and out around an audience.
There is definitely a bit of joyful chaos to the whole thing, and it seemed to me, someone who's not been to a cop before, that it probably did give a reasonable approximation of what it's like when there's two hundred different countries present trying to all agree on very specific wording around how to take action on climate change. The play really builds up to the end of the Kyoto negotiation period where they reach an agreement in real life, what did they actually agree on and why was it remarkable?
Well, by nineteen ninety seven, it was clear that climate change is the problem that all countries have to deal with, but rich, industrialized nations had contributed to the problem the most, and the Cute Protocol was an agreement for all countries, but developed countries signed up to legally binding targets to reduce emissions over the next couple of decades, whereas developing countries were exempt.
One thing I noticed while working on this episode is that to this day, people still debate the significance of Kyoto, like how monumental it was because it was a big breakthrough, but it wasn't nearly as decisive or successful as it could have been. Back in the US Congress never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the US never was fully on board, and.
The countries that did sign up to those targets didn't have particularly ambitious targets. Japan, for example, had to reduce its emissions by six percent by twenty twelve relative to nineteen ninety levels. Today, all countries have to reduce emissions by forty three percent by twenty thirty, So the scales were completely different. And yet some countries like the UK and European Union were able to achieve those targets quite easily. Other countries like Japan still didn't meet them.
Can you make the case, though, that what was agreed and Kyoto did lay the groundwork for the twenty fifteen Paris Agreement. Is that fair to say?
All COP meetings sort of build up on each other, But there are more significant COP meetings and Kyoto was one of them. It was the first time you saw the power of country blocks coming together in negotiations. So island nations formed an alliance, and that alliance has grown in size and was crucial at the Paris Agreement, where the target for one point five degrees celsius would not have happened had island nations not grouped together and argued for that target to exist. There were other technical things that came from Kyoto, such as carbon markets, which have remained in agreements. There is a carbon market framework inside the Paris Agreement. And then there were forsil fuel lobbyists all the way from the start of climate negotiations till now. You know, we were at COP twenty eight in Dubai, a country that built its wealth on oil and gas, and that created so much controversy going into those negotiations.
That's why you had mixed feelings about the choice of the two writers on the play, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy, to make the narrator Don Pearlman, who's famously a lobbyist working for fossil fuel companies, someone who Despiegel called the high Priest of the carbon Club. Let's hear a bit of his opening monologue.
Runaway inflation, culture wars, real wars, race riots, fake news, insane insurrections, global pandemics, and on top of all of that, a planet in literal meltdown. And if you're a guy like me looking at a time like now, the main thing you think is wow, Man, the nineteen nineties were freaking glorious. Now. I know what people like you think of lawyers like me. But I'm the only one who can tell this story because I'm the only one who was there.
Don Perlman died in two thousand and five, but the writers spoke to his family while researching the play, and I thought they made him a really compelling, three dimensional character, not just a cartoon villain. How familiar were you with Peerlman before you saw the play?
Not very much. It did come up in a conversation I had with the former US Vice President Al Gore at COP twenty eight last year, who remembered very clearly the kind of role that Don played.
There was a very famous in those days, very famous cole lobbyist from the United States named Don Pearlman. Never speak ill of the departed, but he was extremely influential, really legendary, working hand in glove with the Saudi Arabian delegation.
I feel like legendary is an understatement. There After we saw the play, I was still really curious about what Don was like in real life, and so I called up someone who had crossed paths with him at several climate negotiations, including that cop in Kyoto.
So I started actually on another the treaty, the treaty to protect the ol zone layer. It's called the Montreal Protocol. That's where I first bumped into Don Perlman.
Actually, David Donagher is now a strategist with the National Resource Defense Council.
And then I worked in the Clinton administration and I actually was part of the US negotiating team for the Kyoto protocol, and he was there, always standing in the corner smoking. You would see him wait for the Saudi delegate. Al Saban represented OPEK Saudi Arabia, same goals. They work together.
In the play, A lot of the drama is around these different representatives arguing about the exact wording that everyone can agree on.
Yeah, very much. So, I mean, going into every cop, we tell listeners and readers this is what US reporters are going to have to deal with when we get to cops. It's just going to be words and pages, usually in square brackets, which are for not yet agreed, and there will be a lot of back in fourth on those words. And the way agreements come about is fascinating because it's so many countries, even if it's country blocks, they have really different desires, and yet they have to agree on those same words. In all the cops I've seen, and I think it's true of all cops in general, agreement is partly reached through compromise, but also through exhaustion. You know, people run out of coffee and coke and food, and everything starts to shut down, and people's planes are leaving, and you have to agree on something because this is such an important problem and you cannot not do anything.
Yeah, that's what David remembered too.
We went all night and we finally achieved an agreement. And by the way, this is one they had run out of Coca cola, I mean areas on fumes and anyway, about five or six in the morning, we agreed on the Kyoto Protocol. I remember a Washington Post word called me my punchline. This is a good day to adopt a treaty, but a bad day to operate heavy machinery.
David hasn't seen the play at the moment. You can only see it in Stratford upon Avon until the thirteenth of July. But because he was there at the negotiations in Kyoto, I wanted to know what he thought about Don's presence and lasting impact on the whole agreement.
He was kind of an outsized personality because even though he was quiet, because he just stood there and smoked and glowered and muttered. So he became a symbol of the bad actor. But there are hundreds of them. You could say that the legacy of Don Perlman is the capture of the Republican Party by the fossil fuel industry.
Clearly, Don Pulman was a big character, and he was a big character not just in Kyoto, but in negotiations all the way through the nineties. But it was we had to me that the playwrights chose him not just to be a character but also the narrator. So you had this guy who was in his real life showing disagreement where you needed agreement, and then being the narrator telling you why his attempts to sew disagreement weren't quite working. And I felt that was a little disjointed. But you know, playwrights have a difficult job. I've never written a play it was entertaining.
I can see where you're coming from as someone who still had their climate reporter had on even while in the theater. To me, I thought, there are some really smart reasons why they had him as a main character, and it pulled me in a little more into the human drama.
I certainly enjoyed the actor who played Don Peerlman, and after the break we'll have a conversation with that actor, Stephen Kunkin. By the way, if you're enjoying this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Spotify or Apple. It helps other listeners find it.
The character of Don Pearlman, as you heard, was central to the drama leading up to the Kyoto Protocol, both in real life and in the play. In this production, he's larger than life, and a lot of that has to do with the way actor Stephen counkan inhabits the role. Auction caught up with Stephen the morning after Kyoto's opening night. They spoke in the offices of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford upon Avon.
You play the role of Don Perlman, the lawyer working for the Seven Sisters, the Big ol Companies, and later for Saudi Arabia. He's someone climate people are very critical of. When I spoke with Al Gore last year, he called him legendary and not in a nice way. Over the span of many years, his job was to impede, to slow down, to water down, or just really thwart any possible meaningful action from being taken on climate change. Had you heard of Don Pullman before you read Display? And what made you say yes?
I had not heard of Don Pulman before this play, and I think that's it's that's not an accident. I think Don very much lived in the shadows and was most comfortable doing his work there. You know, coming to the process of doing Don, it came out of a real desire to want to reconnect as an artist to doing things that felt important. That we're challenging ideas and concepts that I was struggling with in my own life, and you know, we're walking through such a fractured time right now, and I really wanted to try to do something that helped me move my own understanding of why it was impossible to connect with family members or friends who had different political ideas or different social valuations on things that I was very, very sure about. And you know, one of the responsibilities you have as an actor is to find empathy for the characters that you play. And I felt like when I read Don, that we weren't going to do a hit job on Don Perlman. I think that's an easy thing to do, is to shoot fish in a barrel. If you want to do that, I think you're just preaching, basically to the choir. And so I wanted to find out what about Don made sense to me, because that seems to me in this moment to be the way that we can move forward is to try to find commonality with the people that we don't see eye to eye with. And the most interesting thing I've sort of discovered about Don is the same thing that lawyers often do, which is they provide the best defense for often what from the outside world we find reprehensible. You're only ever as good as the strongest defense, and Don was providing a very strong defense for the Seven Sisters, and there is a lot of ideology in there. It's been very very interesting. I've I've ended up, you know, I've spoken a bit with his son, and he's become much more human in my mind and three dimensional.
Now the writers of the play made a choice to not just center the play around Don's character, your character. Terrible choice, terrible, terrible, But they also made Don the narrator. Why was that choice made? Because you flipped between these two roles, one who is dedicated to spoiling any agreement versus one who is observing an agreement form despite your attempts. And as a viewer, that was the only thing I was a little jarred about.
I mean, I personally think that this play is inert if you have ralestrata as as your narrator, if you have someone who not because he wasn't a markable human being and had agency and the right to tell the story. But what is compelling about this narrative is putting it in the hands of the person who didn't want this to go the way that it went. And for me, that's the kind of the brilliant moment they the eureka moment. Otherwise otherwise it in some ways, it kind of becomes a jingoistic and I don't I don't want it to be that I've always felt and I know that they feel that they want this to be an even handed look at what this time was and I think Don is vital in telling that story.
So do you think of Pullman as a bad actor in moral terms or just a consummate strategist, someone who's really good at the politics and game theory, just a very good lawyer.
I think it's a really gray area on how one splits that atom. He works in the gray area because you know, as we discussed in the play, it's all about language, you know. I think the big question was what did Don know? And when did Don know it? And then once you know that, what do you do that information? I still think that everybody deserves the strongest defense, and hopefully, you know, the policy that can be made against a strong defense will last time as opposed to just being watered down.
Now, Don died in two thousand and five. He was a chainsmoker. I'm going to go and do a few spoilers, but the last scenes are him on his deathbed and his wife talking about him as a person. Because as the writers the two Joe's figured this out, they figured it out through reading about him, but also through meeting his family, his wife and then son. But all through this, what do you think Dawn's character is? Is it a tragedy?
I think for Don, it's a bit of an adventure story. You know, here's a guy who was doing a very specific thing in the Department of Energy under the Reagan administration, and he comes out of that period of time looking for new purpose. And you know, when climate policy was first being written, it was, as Don says in the play, could be seen as a voluntary redistribution of wealth as countries who had a bigger claim to more immediate concerns suddenly we're, you know, tying up Western civilization again, to quote the play in a straight jacket. And I think he worked very, very hard to find a rugged way through. And I go back to this discussion I had with family a long time ago where I was sitting at a table. I wasn't long out of graduate school of Julliard, where I just spent four years studying Shakespeare, and I sat down with my family, sort of distant family, who were lawyers, all lawyers, who wanted to debate whether Shakespeare was of any value anymore. It bore no relevance to modern society. Most people couldn't understand it. They felt most people they didn't like it, and they pretended that they liked it, and most people would rather see a modern play, So what was the actual purpose of Shakespeare? And sitting amongst this these legal minds, I found myself sort of devoid of any good, any good defense for Shakespeare. But they took such an incredible joy in sort of breaking down you know what I think would be widely accepted as the great you know writer in the English language. And there's that mind that I don't know that I possessed, that kind of literal mind to sort of when everyone else says black, prove that it's white. And that to me has a lot about what Don does in this play. And it's very, very interesting. It's very heavy to step into that world where you know that you are the one person who sees something in one way and can manipulate people to walk in that direction.
So there is a universality to his character in some sense, which is to say, there are Don Pulman's in the past, there are Don Pulman's in the present, and there will be Don Pulman's in the future. Who would you characterize as the Don Pulmans of today?
Oh gosh, I mean, you know, it's funny. Just the other night I came home from the show, and it was really I had a lot of energy and stupidly was doom scrolling through Instagram and found some sort of friend who who has gotten in a very different political way than I have. And I don't know why. I don't usually answer people on Instagram. I don't usually engage in political discourse online. But for this whatever reason, is probably because Don Perlman was still strong in my in my engine. I got into a you know, one thirty am because of the time difference fight with this with this friend. And you know, Don Perlman's exist on both sides. You know, the people who are in our country who are watching Fox News think that the Don Perlman's were on CNN, and the people who were watching CNN think that the Don Perlman's are on Fox News. And in Bloomberg, I think is much more right down the middle. It's very very fair. So but yeah, I mean they're you know, punditry has become the place I think a lot of the Don Perlmans live because so much policy is now made in the public, in the social media, really in the social media realm, where people's opinions start to really shape and shift. And so if you can get to them early, even long before they get to a voting booth. You can get it just by putting up a fake viral video, or you can put out a factoid that shapes, you know, a movement. So I'm it's hard to put my finger on it. I wouldn't say that it's on one side or the other. I mean, I think it's just the it's the art of manipulation, and you know that's it's it's everywhere.
What do you hope the audience is left with at the end of the performance.
The biggest thing that I have found, and I discovered this in sort of like this aha moment that happened when we were still rehearsing in London and we got to the big scene in this play. And you know, it's not a spoiler because I think we can all read the history of what happened in Kyoto. Although that history is, you know, malleable if you look at it through the lens of time. But the process of agreement ultimately seems to me not to be intellectual. It's emotional and I've found that incredibly hopeful and inspiring. That you know, you take a brilliant mind like Don Perlman, who could dot every iron, cross every tee and make every cow dance on the head of a pin. But at the end of the day, if the emotional commitment to get something done outweighs that intellectual commitment, things can change. And we're in this moment where I think we feel powerless to make change because things don't make sense. The problems of climate change are so massive and seem like they're just there's there's nothing we can do. And all really takes is is the belief and the hope that we can do something and that can actually be the one thing that moves the ball across the line. So that's that's what I hope people take away, that there is there is power or in one's belief.
Thank you, Steven, Thank you for listening to zero and for those who stayed till the end. Here is the sound of the week.
Will recommend this by let me recommend it, will recommend the adoption of this protocol to the conference by unanimity.
That is the sound of the Kyoto Protocol being agreed on in nineteen ninety seven, recorded on AVHS tape using electrical energy converted into magnetic energy, then converted back to Electrical Energy as it was uploaded to YouTube by the United Nations. If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate or review the show on Apple, podcast and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who likes going to theater. You can get in touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Saigebauman and Head of Talk is Brendan newnham. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Alicia Clanton, Anamazarakis and the Royal Shakespeare Company. I am Akshatrati Back soon.