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 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 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 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 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 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 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 back in time.

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 guy like me looking at a time like now, the main thing you think is wow, Man, the nineteen nineties were freaking glorious.

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 Joe Murphy, and I am delighted to say that Joe Robertson is with me now.

Joe, welcome to Cause Retales.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

Yeah, climate's complicated, you know, even.

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.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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, says that he thrives on uncertainty.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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.

Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing moment in the play.

It's really dramatic.

The conditional tense is no longer sufficient for us.

Sea level rise will threaten survival.

Western Samoa rises.

First they support Cua bar.

It will drown our crops.

Then the Republic of Nauru seconds this and wanted in the minute it will salinas our fresh water supplies.

Followed by tid and Tobago, the Bahamas, Barbadoes, Bangala that it.

Will bleach our coral reefs and kill our mangrove forests.

Tanzania spans with the island states that developing world will.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 about six months when the Kyoto talks happened.

Tell us about press and the role he played.

He has this sort of reputation, you know, as the one who connects with voters with his fist as it were, and.

Somebody threw an egg it in and he just punched the guy.

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 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 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 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 because of the power of his persuasion.

And when we spoke to Raul Strada, he said John was a warrior.

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 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, genuine deadlock for a long time.

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, we didn't cause this problem.

You did.

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.

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 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, 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.

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 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 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.

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.

The scenes are sort of fascical but kind of amazing.

We could separate the paragraph dash.

From the article on commitments comma to create an interim arrangement question mark, not without.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, the US will blow up the talks for a missing preposition.

I'm gatherling agree.

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 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.

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 enthusiastic should we be about about that moment of agreement.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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?

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 process and from all the previous cops.

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 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.

Joe Robertson, thank you so much for joining us on Cautionary Tales.

Thank you so much, Tim.

It's a pleasure.

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 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 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 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.

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And if you want to hear it, add free and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode and members only newsletter every month.

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