Speaker 1: Hi, it's Ukshat. We are on the cusp of COP
Speaker 1: twenty nine and the US election, and so we wanted
Speaker 1: to bring you a favorite past episode that feels particularly
Speaker 1: timely right now, even though it's looking at events that
Speaker 1: happened nearly thirty years ago. We made the show in July.
Speaker 1: It's about a play that dramatizes the nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 1: climate summit in Kyoto. That meeting COP three was historic
Speaker 1: for reasons you'll hear. COP twenty nine, taking place in
Speaker 1: Azerbaijan the week after next is likely to be historic too.
Speaker 1: One thing we'll be watching for at COP twenty nine
Speaker 1: is what direction the US takes after its people have
Speaker 1: elected a new president. If that president is Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: it could have disastrous consequences for global climate diplomacy. You
Speaker 1: might remember what my colleague Gendiluhi told me about this
Speaker 1: last month.
Speaker 2: Trump could actually go further and abandoned the UNF Triple C,
Speaker 2: the Framework Convention on Climate Change that underpins it. And
Speaker 2: if leaving Paris is a potentially temporary blow to climate diplomacy,
Speaker 2: then leaving the UNF Triple C would be a figurative
Speaker 2: bomb and climate diplomacy with years of fallout and what's
Speaker 2: you know interesting about this is truly the potentially long
Speaker 2: repercussions for the US and for the world.
Speaker 1: You can find a link to that episode in the
Speaker 1: show notes. And by the way, next week we'll be
Speaker 1: putting out our episode on Friday instead of Thursday because
Speaker 1: there's a big election happening. For now, enjoy the episode
Speaker 1: about Kyoto. Welcome to Zero. I am actadrati. This week
Speaker 1: climate negotiations as entertainment. This sentence. Countries are urged to
Speaker 1: take immediate actions to control the risks of climate change.
Speaker 2: Surely we can all agree on this.
Speaker 3: No mean countries are urged. I'm sorry it is urgent.
Speaker 1: I feel urged.
Speaker 2: I don't feel urged.
Speaker 1: Do you feel urged?
Speaker 3: I don't feel urgent? Couraged?
Speaker 1: Second, urged is a red line for us. Courage invited,
Speaker 1: of course, No, we should all feel urged.
Speaker 3: Imediate got the media. Countries are urged to take actions
Speaker 3: to control the risk of climate What.
Speaker 1: Are these actions?
Speaker 4: An idealistic promise made today could close a factory in
Speaker 4: Detroit tomorrow.
Speaker 3: At this with ass on actions that would be economically
Speaker 3: beneficial as well.
Speaker 5: No regrets.
Speaker 1: We second that choice. The line or whatever is left
Speaker 1: of It is a great.
Speaker 6: A question for you, Actually, how many cops have you
Speaker 6: been to?
Speaker 1: Three? The last three?
Speaker 6: They sound like marathon events.
Speaker 3: Yeah they are.
Speaker 1: They are two weeks long and almost always overrun, and
Speaker 1: everything gets shut down by the last few days and
Speaker 1: you're out of coffee and energy and you're exhausted. It's
Speaker 1: sort of all cops, I think, not just the last three.
Speaker 6: It sounds a little drudgerous to be honest. I mean,
Speaker 6: I'm not a fan of a very long meeting, so
Speaker 6: I have to admit. When I heard that the Royal
Speaker 6: Shakespeare Company was putting on a new play about Cop three,
Speaker 6: which was held in Kyoto, I was very intrigued, but
Speaker 6: also felt a little bit of trepidation about what it
Speaker 6: is we would be sitting through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, me too. When I was told that there is
Speaker 1: a play about the Kyoto Protocol, I was surprised. You know,
Speaker 1: there is a lot of drama at these places. It's
Speaker 1: high stakes. All countries are involved, the fate of the
Speaker 1: planet is involved. But it is really boring in the
Speaker 1: fact that it's negotiations done over text and over words
Speaker 1: that most people don't understand, and it's all a bit chaotic,
Speaker 1: and so how do you make that entertaining? That was
Speaker 1: the question to me when I heard there was a
Speaker 1: play about it.
Speaker 6: Today's episode is all about the play. We'll be hearing
Speaker 6: from the director and one of the actors, and also
Speaker 6: from someone who attended those Kyoto negotiations in nineteen nine
Speaker 6: twenty seven. And yeah, it was long, but it didn't
Speaker 6: feel too long. I thought part of what made it
Speaker 6: compelling was the way it was staged. The stage is
Speaker 6: shaped like a conference table. Members of the audience sit
Speaker 6: around it, so they're kind of made to feel like
Speaker 6: they're part of the negotiations.
Speaker 1: The playwrights had to figure out how to shrink tenures
Speaker 1: of history and two weeks of negotiations into a couple
Speaker 1: of hours, and they had to do it in a
Speaker 1: fixed setting. So the choice of the stage was important,
Speaker 1: and I asked one of the plays directors, Justin Martin,
Speaker 1: about why the stage was shaped that way.
Speaker 5: It's a conference table in which a lot of the
Speaker 5: action happens around it, within the audience, but also yeah,
Speaker 5: on top of the conference table. But as soon as
Speaker 5: you put the audience in it, it has an inherent chaos
Speaker 5: to it because they're in and around everything, and there
Speaker 5: is a certain joy to the way in which the
Speaker 5: actors move in and out around an audience.
Speaker 6: There is definitely a bit of joyful chaos to the
Speaker 6: whole thing, and it seemed to me, someone who's not
Speaker 6: been to a cop before, that it probably did give
Speaker 6: a reasonable approximation of what it's like when there's two
Speaker 6: hundred different countries present trying to all agree on very
Speaker 6: specific wording around how to take action on climate change.
Speaker 6: The play really builds up to the end of the
Speaker 6: Kyoto negotiation period where they reach an agreement in real life,
Speaker 6: what did they actually agree on and why was it remarkable?
Speaker 1: Well, by nineteen ninety seven, it was clear that climate
Speaker 1: change is the problem that all countries have to deal with,
Speaker 1: but rich, industrialized nations had contributed to the problem the most,
Speaker 1: and the Cute Protocol was an agreement for all countries,
Speaker 1: but developed countries signed up to legally binding targets to
Speaker 1: reduce emissions over the next couple of decades, whereas developing
Speaker 1: countries were exempt.
Speaker 6: One thing I noticed while working on this episode is
Speaker 6: that to this day, people still debate the significance of Kyoto,
Speaker 6: like how monumental it was because it was a big breakthrough,
Speaker 6: but it wasn't nearly as decisive or successful as it
Speaker 6: could have been. Back in the US Congress never ratified
Speaker 6: the Kyoto Protocol, the US never was fully on board, and.
Speaker 1: The countries that did sign up to those targets didn't
Speaker 1: have particularly ambitious targets. Japan, for example, had to reduce
Speaker 1: its emissions by six percent by twenty twelve relative to
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety levels. Today, all countries have to reduce emissions
Speaker 1: by forty three percent by twenty thirty, So the scales
Speaker 1: were completely different. And yet some countries like the UK
Speaker 1: and European Union were able to achieve those targets quite easily.
Speaker 1: Other countries like Japan still didn't meet them.
Speaker 6: Can you make the case, though, that what was agreed
Speaker 6: and Kyoto did lay the groundwork for the twenty fifteen
Speaker 6: Paris Agreement. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 1: All COP meetings sort of build up on each other,
Speaker 1: But there are more significant COP meetings and Kyoto was
Speaker 1: one of them. It was the first time you saw
Speaker 1: the power of country blocks coming together in negotiations. So
Speaker 1: island nations formed an alliance, and that alliance has grown
Speaker 1: in size and was crucial at the Paris Agreement, where
Speaker 1: the target for one point five degrees celsius would not
Speaker 1: have happened had island nations not grouped together and argued
Speaker 1: for that target to exist. There were other technical things
Speaker 1: that came from Kyoto, such as carbon markets, which have
Speaker 1: remained in agreements. There is a carbon market framework inside
Speaker 1: the Paris Agreement. And then there were forsil fuel lobbyists
Speaker 1: all the way from the start of climate negotiations till now.
Speaker 1: You know, we were at COP twenty eight in Dubai,
Speaker 1: a country that built its wealth on oil and gas,
Speaker 1: and that created so much controversy going into those negotiations.
Speaker 6: That's why you had mixed feelings about the choice of
Speaker 6: the two writers on the play, Joe Robertson and Joe Murphy,
Speaker 6: to make the narrator Don Pearlman, who's famously a lobbyist
Speaker 6: working for fossil fuel companies, someone who Despiegel called the
Speaker 6: high Priest of the carbon Club. Let's hear a bit
Speaker 6: of his opening monologue.
Speaker 3: Runaway inflation, culture wars, real wars, race riots, fake news,
Speaker 3: insane insurrections, global pandemics, and on top of all of that,
Speaker 3: a planet in literal meltdown. And if you're a guy
Speaker 3: like me looking at a time like now, the main
Speaker 3: thing you think is wow, Man, the nineteen nineties were
Speaker 3: freaking glorious. Now. I know what people like you think
Speaker 3: of lawyers like me. But I'm the only one who
Speaker 3: can tell this story because I'm the only one who
Speaker 3: was there.
Speaker 6: Don Perlman died in two thousand and five, but the
Speaker 6: writers spoke to his family while researching the play, and
Speaker 6: I thought they made him a really compelling, three dimensional character,
Speaker 6: not just a cartoon villain. How familiar were you with
Speaker 6: Peerlman before you saw the play?
Speaker 1: Not very much. It did come up in a conversation
Speaker 1: I had with the former US Vice President Al Gore
Speaker 1: at COP twenty eight last year, who remembered very clearly
Speaker 1: the kind of role that Don played.
Speaker 7: There was a very famous in those days, very famous
Speaker 7: cole lobbyist from the United States named Don Pearlman. Never
Speaker 7: speak ill of the departed, but he was extremely influential,
Speaker 7: really legendary, working hand in glove with the Saudi Arabian delegation.
Speaker 6: I feel like legendary is an understatement. There After we
Speaker 6: saw the play, I was still really curious about what
Speaker 6: Don was like in real life, and so I called
Speaker 6: up someone who had crossed paths with him at several
Speaker 6: climate negotiations, including that cop in Kyoto.
Speaker 4: So I started actually on another the treaty, the treaty
Speaker 4: to protect the ol zone layer. It's called the Montreal Protocol.
Speaker 4: That's where I first bumped into Don Perlman.
Speaker 6: Actually, David Donagher is now a strategist with the National
Speaker 6: Resource Defense Council.
Speaker 4: And then I worked in the Clinton administration and I
Speaker 4: actually was part of the US negotiating team for the
Speaker 4: Kyoto protocol, and he was there, always standing in the
Speaker 4: corner smoking. You would see him wait for the Saudi delegate.
Speaker 4: Al Saban represented OPEK Saudi Arabia, same goals. They work together.
Speaker 6: In the play, A lot of the drama is around
Speaker 6: these different representatives arguing about the exact wording that everyone
Speaker 6: can agree on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very much. So, I mean, going into every cop,
Speaker 1: we tell listeners and readers this is what US reporters
Speaker 1: are going to have to deal with when we get
Speaker 1: to cops. It's just going to be words and pages,
Speaker 1: usually in square brackets, which are for not yet agreed,
Speaker 1: and there will be a lot of back in fourth
Speaker 1: on those words. And the way agreements come about is
Speaker 1: fascinating because it's so many countries, even if it's country blocks,
Speaker 1: they have really different desires, and yet they have to
Speaker 1: agree on those same words. In all the cops I've seen,
Speaker 1: and I think it's true of all cops in general,
Speaker 1: agreement is partly reached through compromise, but also through exhaustion.
Speaker 1: You know, people run out of coffee and coke and food,
Speaker 1: and everything starts to shut down, and people's planes are leaving,
Speaker 1: and you have to agree on something because this is
Speaker 1: such an important problem and you cannot not do anything.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's what David remembered too.
Speaker 4: We went all night and we finally achieved an agreement.
Speaker 4: And by the way, this is one they had run
Speaker 4: out of Coca cola, I mean areas on fumes and anyway,
Speaker 4: about five or six in the morning, we agreed on
Speaker 4: the Kyoto Protocol. I remember a Washington Post word called
Speaker 4: me my punchline. This is a good day to adopt
Speaker 4: a treaty, but a bad day to operate heavy machinery.
Speaker 6: David hasn't seen the play at the moment. You can
Speaker 6: only see it in Stratford upon Avon until the thirteenth
Speaker 6: of July. But because he was there at the negotiations
Speaker 6: in Kyoto, I wanted to know what he thought about
Speaker 6: Don's presence and lasting impact on the whole agreement.
Speaker 4: He was kind of an outsized personality because even though
Speaker 4: he was quiet, because he just stood there and smoked
Speaker 4: and glowered and muttered. So he became a symbol of
Speaker 4: the bad actor. But there are hundreds of them. You
Speaker 4: could say that the legacy of Don Perlman is the
Speaker 4: capture of the Republican Party by the fossil fuel industry.
Speaker 1: Clearly, Don Pulman was a big character, and he was
Speaker 1: a big character not just in Kyoto, but in negotiations
Speaker 1: all the way through the nineties. But it was we
Speaker 1: had to me that the playwrights chose him not just
Speaker 1: to be a character but also the narrator. So you
Speaker 1: had this guy who was in his real life showing
Speaker 1: disagreement where you needed agreement, and then being the narrator
Speaker 1: telling you why his attempts to sew disagreement weren't quite working.
Speaker 1: And I felt that was a little disjointed. But you know,
Speaker 1: playwrights have a difficult job. I've never written a play
Speaker 1: it was entertaining.
Speaker 6: I can see where you're coming from as someone who
Speaker 6: still had their climate reporter had on even while in
Speaker 6: the theater. To me, I thought, there are some really
Speaker 6: smart reasons why they had him as a main character,
Speaker 6: and it pulled me in a little more into the
Speaker 6: human drama.
Speaker 1: I certainly enjoyed the actor who played Don Peerlman, and
Speaker 1: after the break we'll have a conversation with that actor,
Speaker 1: Stephen Kunkin. By the way, if you're enjoying this episode,
Speaker 1: please take a moment to rate and review the show
Speaker 1: on Spotify or Apple. It helps other listeners find it.
Speaker 6: The character of Don Pearlman, as you heard, was central
Speaker 6: to the drama leading up to the Kyoto Protocol, both
Speaker 6: in real life and in the play. In this production,
Speaker 6: he's larger than life, and a lot of that has
Speaker 6: to do with the way actor Stephen counkan inhabits the role.
Speaker 6: Auction caught up with Stephen the morning after Kyoto's opening night.
Speaker 6: They spoke in the offices of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Speaker 6: in Stratford upon Avon.
Speaker 1: You play the role of Don Perlman, the lawyer working
Speaker 1: for the Seven Sisters, the Big ol Companies, and later
Speaker 1: for Saudi Arabia. He's someone climate people are very critical of.
Speaker 1: When I spoke with Al Gore last year, he called
Speaker 1: him legendary and not in a nice way. Over the
Speaker 1: span of many years, his job was to impede, to
Speaker 1: slow down, to water down, or just really thwart any
Speaker 1: possible meaningful action from being taken on climate change. Had
Speaker 1: you heard of Don Pullman before you read Display? And
Speaker 1: what made you say yes?
Speaker 3: I had not heard of Don Pulman before this play,
Speaker 3: and I think that's it's that's not an accident. I
Speaker 3: think Don very much lived in the shadows and was
Speaker 3: most comfortable doing his work there. You know, coming to
Speaker 3: the process of doing Don, it came out of a
Speaker 3: real desire to want to reconnect as an artist to
Speaker 3: doing things that felt important. That we're challenging ideas and
Speaker 3: concepts that I was struggling with in my own life,
Speaker 3: and you know, we're walking through such a fractured time
Speaker 3: right now, and I really wanted to try to do
Speaker 3: something that helped me move my own understanding of why
Speaker 3: it was impossible to connect with family members or friends
Speaker 3: who had different political ideas or different social valuations on
Speaker 3: things that I was very, very sure about. And you know,
Speaker 3: one of the responsibilities you have as an actor is
Speaker 3: to find empathy for the characters that you play. And
Speaker 3: I felt like when I read Don, that we weren't
Speaker 3: going to do a hit job on Don Perlman. I
Speaker 3: think that's an easy thing to do, is to shoot
Speaker 3: fish in a barrel. If you want to do that,
Speaker 3: I think you're just preaching, basically to the choir. And
Speaker 3: so I wanted to find out what about Don made
Speaker 3: sense to me, because that seems to me in this
Speaker 3: moment to be the way that we can move forward
Speaker 3: is to try to find commonality with the people that
Speaker 3: we don't see eye to eye with. And the most
Speaker 3: interesting thing I've sort of discovered about Don is the
Speaker 3: same thing that lawyers often do, which is they provide
Speaker 3: the best defense for often what from the outside world
Speaker 3: we find reprehensible. You're only ever as good as the
Speaker 3: strongest defense, and Don was providing a very strong defense
Speaker 3: for the Seven Sisters, and there is a lot of
Speaker 3: ideology in there. It's been very very interesting. I've I've
Speaker 3: ended up, you know, I've spoken a bit with his son,
Speaker 3: and he's become much more human in my mind and
Speaker 3: three dimensional.
Speaker 1: Now the writers of the play made a choice to
Speaker 1: not just center the play around Don's character, your character.
Speaker 1: Terrible choice, terrible, terrible, But they also made Don the narrator.
Speaker 1: Why was that choice made? Because you flipped between these
Speaker 1: two roles, one who is dedicated to spoiling any agreement
Speaker 1: versus one who is observing an agreement form despite your attempts.
Speaker 1: And as a viewer, that was the only thing I
Speaker 1: was a little jarred about.
Speaker 3: I mean, I personally think that this play is inert
Speaker 3: if you have ralestrata as as your narrator, if you
Speaker 3: have someone who not because he wasn't a markable human
Speaker 3: being and had agency and the right to tell the story.
Speaker 3: But what is compelling about this narrative is putting it
Speaker 3: in the hands of the person who didn't want this
Speaker 3: to go the way that it went. And for me,
Speaker 3: that's the kind of the brilliant moment they the eureka moment.
Speaker 3: Otherwise otherwise it in some ways, it kind of becomes
Speaker 3: a jingoistic and I don't I don't want it to
Speaker 3: be that I've always felt and I know that they
Speaker 3: feel that they want this to be an even handed
Speaker 3: look at what this time was and I think Don
Speaker 3: is vital in telling that story.
Speaker 1: So do you think of Pullman as a bad actor
Speaker 1: in moral terms or just a consummate strategist, someone who's
Speaker 1: really good at the politics and game theory, just a
Speaker 1: very good lawyer.
Speaker 3: I think it's a really gray area on how one
Speaker 3: splits that atom. He works in the gray area because
Speaker 3: you know, as we discussed in the play, it's all
Speaker 3: about language, you know. I think the big question was
Speaker 3: what did Don know? And when did Don know it?
Speaker 3: And then once you know that, what do you do
Speaker 3: that information? I still think that everybody deserves the strongest defense,
Speaker 3: and hopefully, you know, the policy that can be made
Speaker 3: against a strong defense will last time as opposed to
Speaker 3: just being watered down.
Speaker 1: Now, Don died in two thousand and five. He was
Speaker 1: a chainsmoker. I'm going to go and do a few spoilers,
Speaker 1: but the last scenes are him on his deathbed and
Speaker 1: his wife talking about him as a person. Because as
Speaker 1: the writers the two Joe's figured this out, they figured
Speaker 1: it out through reading about him, but also through meeting
Speaker 1: his family, his wife and then son. But all through this,
Speaker 1: what do you think Dawn's character is? Is it a tragedy?
Speaker 3: I think for Don, it's a bit of an adventure story.
Speaker 3: You know, here's a guy who was doing a very
Speaker 3: specific thing in the Department of Energy under the Reagan administration,
Speaker 3: and he comes out of that period of time looking
Speaker 3: for new purpose. And you know, when climate policy was
Speaker 3: first being written, it was, as Don says in the play,
Speaker 3: could be seen as a voluntary redistribution of wealth as
Speaker 3: countries who had a bigger claim to more immediate concerns
Speaker 3: suddenly we're, you know, tying up Western civilization again, to
Speaker 3: quote the play in a straight jacket. And I think
Speaker 3: he worked very, very hard to find a rugged way through.
Speaker 3: And I go back to this discussion I had with
Speaker 3: family a long time ago where I was sitting at
Speaker 3: a table. I wasn't long out of graduate school of Julliard,
Speaker 3: where I just spent four years studying Shakespeare, and I
Speaker 3: sat down with my family, sort of distant family, who
Speaker 3: were lawyers, all lawyers, who wanted to debate whether Shakespeare
Speaker 3: was of any value anymore. It bore no relevance to
Speaker 3: modern society. Most people couldn't understand it. They felt most
Speaker 3: people they didn't like it, and they pretended that they
Speaker 3: liked it, and most people would rather see a modern play,
Speaker 3: So what was the actual purpose of Shakespeare? And sitting
Speaker 3: amongst this these legal minds, I found myself sort of
Speaker 3: devoid of any good, any good defense for Shakespeare. But
Speaker 3: they took such an incredible joy in sort of breaking
Speaker 3: down you know what I think would be widely accepted
Speaker 3: as the great you know writer in the English language.
Speaker 3: And there's that mind that I don't know that I possessed,
Speaker 3: that kind of literal mind to sort of when everyone
Speaker 3: else says black, prove that it's white. And that to
Speaker 3: me has a lot about what Don does in this play.
Speaker 3: And it's very, very interesting. It's very heavy to step
Speaker 3: into that world where you know that you are the
Speaker 3: one person who sees something in one way and can
Speaker 3: manipulate people to walk in that direction.
Speaker 1: So there is a universality to his character in some sense,
Speaker 1: which is to say, there are Don Pulman's in the past,
Speaker 1: there are Don Pulman's in the present, and there will
Speaker 1: be Don Pulman's in the future. Who would you characterize
Speaker 1: as the Don Pulmans of today?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I mean, you know, it's funny. Just the
Speaker 3: other night I came home from the show, and it
Speaker 3: was really I had a lot of energy and stupidly
Speaker 3: was doom scrolling through Instagram and found some sort of
Speaker 3: friend who who has gotten in a very different political
Speaker 3: way than I have. And I don't know why. I
Speaker 3: don't usually answer people on Instagram. I don't usually engage
Speaker 3: in political discourse online. But for this whatever reason, is
Speaker 3: probably because Don Perlman was still strong in my in
Speaker 3: my engine. I got into a you know, one thirty
Speaker 3: am because of the time difference fight with this with
Speaker 3: this friend. And you know, Don Perlman's exist on both sides.
Speaker 3: You know, the people who are in our country who
Speaker 3: are watching Fox News think that the Don Perlman's were
Speaker 3: on CNN, and the people who were watching CNN think
Speaker 3: that the Don Perlman's are on Fox News. And in Bloomberg,
Speaker 3: I think is much more right down the middle. It's
Speaker 3: very very fair. So but yeah, I mean they're you know,
Speaker 3: punditry has become the place I think a lot of
Speaker 3: the Don Perlmans live because so much policy is now
Speaker 3: made in the public, in the social media, really in
Speaker 3: the social media realm, where people's opinions start to really
Speaker 3: shape and shift. And so if you can get to
Speaker 3: them early, even long before they get to a voting booth.
Speaker 3: You can get it just by putting up a fake
Speaker 3: viral video, or you can put out a factoid that shapes,
Speaker 3: you know, a movement. So I'm it's hard to put
Speaker 3: my finger on it. I wouldn't say that it's on
Speaker 3: one side or the other. I mean, I think it's
Speaker 3: just the it's the art of manipulation, and you know
Speaker 3: that's it's it's everywhere.
Speaker 1: What do you hope the audience is left with at
Speaker 1: the end of the performance.
Speaker 3: The biggest thing that I have found, and I discovered
Speaker 3: this in sort of like this aha moment that happened
Speaker 3: when we were still rehearsing in London and we got
Speaker 3: to the big scene in this play. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's not a spoiler because I think we can all
Speaker 3: read the history of what happened in Kyoto. Although that
Speaker 3: history is, you know, malleable if you look at it
Speaker 3: through the lens of time. But the process of agreement
Speaker 3: ultimately seems to me not to be intellectual. It's emotional
Speaker 3: and I've found that incredibly hopeful and inspiring. That you know,
Speaker 3: you take a brilliant mind like Don Perlman, who could
Speaker 3: dot every iron, cross every tee and make every cow
Speaker 3: dance on the head of a pin. But at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, if the emotional commitment to get
Speaker 3: something done outweighs that intellectual commitment, things can change. And
Speaker 3: we're in this moment where I think we feel powerless
Speaker 3: to make change because things don't make sense. The problems
Speaker 3: of climate change are so massive and seem like they're
Speaker 3: just there's there's nothing we can do. And all really
Speaker 3: takes is is the belief and the hope that we
Speaker 3: can do something and that can actually be the one
Speaker 3: thing that moves the ball across the line. So that's
Speaker 3: that's what I hope people take away, that there is
Speaker 3: there is power or in one's belief.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Steven, Thank you for listening to zero and
Speaker 1: for those who stayed till the end. Here is the
Speaker 1: sound of the week.
Speaker 8: Will recommend this by let me recommend it, will recommend
Speaker 8: the adoption of this protocol to the conference by unanimity.
Speaker 1: That is the sound of the Kyoto Protocol being agreed
Speaker 1: on in nineteen ninety seven, recorded on AVHS tape using
Speaker 1: electrical energy converted into magnetic energy, then converted back to
Speaker 1: Electrical Energy as it was uploaded to YouTube by the
Speaker 1: United Nations. If you liked this episode, please take a
Speaker 1: moment to rate or review the show on Apple, podcast
Speaker 1: and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with
Speaker 1: someone who likes going to theater. You can get in
Speaker 1: touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot net. Zero's producer
Speaker 1: is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's Head of podcast is Saigebauman
Speaker 1: and Head of Talk is Brendan newnham. Our theme music
Speaker 1: is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Kira Bindrim, Alicia Clanton,
Speaker 1: Anamazarakis and the Royal Shakespeare Company. I am Akshatrati Back soon.