Meet the Writers Behind the Hot Climate Play "Kyoto"
We were joined by longtime climate scientist Ben Santer - a character in the real-life and onstage dramas.
Updated post-stream: This was a great discussion of real-life and onstage climate drama with Kyoto playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (with other special guests). Also watch and share on Facebook, Linkedin, X/Twitter or YouTube.
Here’s the post-show post with some highlights:
I was sad to miss the Off Broadway run of the play Kyoto, which conveys the epic tug of war over global climate science and policy largely from the vantage point of antihero Don Pearlman. Pearlman was an American lawyer and lobbyist who advised the Middle East’s oil kingdoms through the early deliberations building out of the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and supporting reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The play, which one New York reviewer called “an exhilarating race to extinction,” launched in the U.K. at Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2024 and had a successful run in London early this year. The playwrights, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, are co-creators of an arts ensemble called Good Chance that aims “to create surprising stories that spark new conversations and encourage action on complex urgent issues of our time; migration, climate crisis and polarisation.”
Their theatrical partnership crystallized in 2015 when they spent time as volunteers in a sprawling migrant encampment in Calais, France, nicknamed “the jungle” by residents. They built a performance dome, called Good Chance, and the effort resulted in a widely-praised play, “The Jungle,” about the highs and profound lows of displaced populations.
Their new play centers on the negotiations leading up to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was raified but became something of a dead-end effort (it was never signed by the United States). They also recount efforts by fossil fuel interests to blunt climate change conclusions from the I.P.C.C. that underpinned the Kyoto pact. On the science end, I encourage you to read climate scientist Ben Santer’s Scientific American commentary written after he saw the original Royal Shakespeare production of the play in Stratford. As Santer writes:
Kyoto describes some of the fingerprint evidence that was presented during a key meeting in Madrid in November 1995, ahead of the Kyoto face-off dramatized in the performance. The “discernible human influence on global climate” conclusion was finalized in Madrid….
Pearlman and I were on opposite sides of the Madrid chessboard. My efforts were directed toward synthesizing and assessing complex science and ensuring that the science was accurately represented in the IPCC report. His were directed toward delaying international efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Such reductions were bad for the business interests he represented and for the revenues of oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Pearlman, who died in 2005, understood the singular importance of the Madrid “discernible human influence” conclusion. He knew it was the scientific writing on the wall…. The Madrid conclusion meant the days of unfettered fossil-fuel use and carbon pollution were numbered….
His response was to attack the science and the scientists as part of a rearguard action to delay international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As Pearlman’s character explains in Kyoto, it was a deliberate “scorched-Earth” strategy: torch the science and the scientists.
In the end, Pearlman lost that battle, although, as Santer notes ruefully, another Donald has taken up his anti-science attacks on clean energy and climate policy.
I like Santer’s closing line, which well captures the challenge in pursuing climate progress:
I hope Kyoto reaches audiences I could never dream of reaching through all the scientific papers I’ve ever written. And I hope it provides us with what mathematicians call an existence principle—proof that something difficult is possible. The existence principle in Kyoto is that humanity can come together and solve a seemingly intractable problem.
Santer, who is a regular contributor to Climate Cafe here on Substack, joined us Tuesday.
Although I haven’t seen Kyoto, I have read the play and, given my 40 years on the climate beat, almost felt a bit of PTSD as I did so. There are several clips of the British production on YouTube that convey the vibe. This one, in particular, hit home:
Like any journalist reporting on this saga in its early years, I got to know Pearlman as both a central figure working to impede the process and a source eager to funnel tips - in his case in dark corners of conference halls in between cigarette breaks. (Pearlman died of lung cancer in 2005.)
For more on him, read the 1995 Der Spiegel Pearlman profile High Priest of the Carbon Club: “More successful than any other string-puller in international politics, he is setting the signals on the path to global climate protection—always at a standstill.” That piece is actually referenced in the play.
Also read Jean Chemnick’s 2018 E&E News investigative report laying out Pearlman’s work with Mohammad Al Sabban, who was Saudi Arabia’s lead negotiator for many years - and is still an active climate troll on X today. Al Sabban is a character in the play.
A 2001 George W. Bush-administration memo Chemnick cited explained that while Pearlman worked hand in hand on the floor of negotiation halls with the Saudis, he also represented a U.S.-based “Climate Council” that, “on behalf of its coal and other industry members, has actively worked against most U.S. government efforts to address climate change.”
“Pearlman appreciated from the start that the Saudi delegation, and not the United States government, could be relied on to stay true to the interests of fossil fuels,” Chemnick wrote. “‘He was using the Saudis as the doer on the floor of the plenary,’ recalled Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. ‘They were kind of willing puppets for a guy who knew how to screw things up…’”
In pursuing his goals, Pearlman liked to pull as many strings as possible, including mine. Here, revealed for the first time, is one of his confidential comments in one of my Times climate stories. (There were plenty of “greens” who offered background input as well.)
So I hope you’ll join me and “The Joes,” as the writers are called by colleagues. Also on board is Jenny Shalant, editorial director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who wrote an essay after seeing the New York production: In the Play Kyoto a Reminder that We Don’t All Need to Agree on Climate to Make Progress.
From Kyoto to COP30
Finally, of course, the play rings resonant right now given that the COP30 round of climate negotiations that just wrapped in Brazil saw the same tussles and same players - particularly Saudi Arabia - acting out their all-too-familiar roles.
Please read L. Delta Merner’s piece on the play and the enduring playbook of Pearlman, Al Sabban and industries deadset on delaying and weakening regulatory approaches to limiting global warming. She’s the lead scientist at the climate litigation project of the Union of Concerned Scientists. As she writes:
It’s important to understand that Pearlman doesn’t simply represent the past, but he helped write the playbook that still defines the present. Understanding his legacy is essential for understanding why fossil fuel disinformation remains one of the biggest barriers to meaningful climate action today….
Theatre can make people feel the real stakes. Kyoto does that with precision. It reminds us that the climate crisis is not an abstract policy debate. It is a human story, shaped by human choices, vulnerable to human failings, and lifted by human courage. It shows us that obstruction is not inevitable. It is engineered. And therefore, it can be dismantled. It shows us that progress, however small, however fragile, is built on the shoulders of people who choose to act despite fear, despite uncertainty, despite opposition.
If you like what I’m doing here on Sustain What, please share this post with friends and colleagues…
And, if you can afford it, consider chipping in $50 to help me justify the time it takes to organize and run the webcasts and write these posts.
If you got this far you deserve a bonbon. Here are “The Joes” pitching what they’ve done: