I gave a TED talk on 'Kill Climate Deniers'
aka 'What I learned from this controversial play about the psychology of climate'
This April, I was invited to give a talk as part of the TED Conference in Vancouver. The curators asked me to speak about the way we process and understand climate change. I spoke about my 2016 play Kill Climate Deniers, and the unexpected conversations and discoveries that emerged out of that project.
It was a delight to get to share this story with this crowd, alongside a raft of really fascinating speakers. And I’m now very glad that TED have made the video public, so I can share it with you.
The text of the talk is included below. Enjoy!
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Hi, I'm David. I’m a playwright from Ngunnawal country - the unceded land of the Ngunnawal people in south-east Australia. I come from a family of climate scientists, and in 2014, I wrote a play entitled ‘Kill Climate Deniers’.
The play tells the story of a group of eco-terrorists. These eco-terrorists take over Australia’s Parliament House - during a Fleetwood Mac concert - and hold the entire government hostage, demanding an instant end to climate change.
The story is ridiculous. But I wanted the play to start a conversation about what happens when the unstoppable force of climate change meets the immoveable object of politics.
Okay so obviously the title 'Kill Climate Deniers' is provocative, but just to be clear: when I wrote it, I wasn’t targeting anyone real.
Thanks to the work of journalists and scientists like Naomi Oreskes, we know how climate denial began. Oil and gas companies recognised the issue of greenhouse gas emissions back in the 1950s and 60s. They set out to cast doubt on the science. They funded lobby groups, marketing firms, politicians. They astroturfed a climate denial movement into being.
Now there's a whole industry of journalists and pundits who make money by denying the reality of climate change. When I made the statement ‘kill climate deniers’, I expected outrage from these people. But I didn’t expect pushback from the public. I figured, there are no real climate deniers. If there are regular normal people who don’t believe in climate science, they can’t be that passionate.
I was very, very wrong.
To begin with, the play received exactly the attention I expected from exactly the people I expected. When the first production was announced in 2014, a conservative politician in my hometown of Canberra called for the play to be shut down. There were angry articles in the Murdoch press, Breitbart, Infowars. All the usual suspects in the right wing media machine.
Some of these commentators accused the play of being an incitement to terrorism, and they referred me to the police. They argued that people would see the show and be inspired to take an entire government hostage to end climate change.
The theatre company didn’t have money for lawyers or crisis communications teams. Out of concern for the actors’ safety, the production was cancelled.
But I didn’t like backing down. It didn’t feel good. I felt that giving up on the project was like agreeing with the people attacking it. And I didn’t agree with them. The play was not an incitement to terrorism.
But no theatre company was willing to take the risk of being referred to the police. I couldn’t get it up as a play. So instead, my musician friend Reuben Ingall turned it into an album. Reuben sampled dialogue from the play and wove it into a series of original electronic tracks.
We toured that record around Australia. We couldn’t get in theatres, so we went to nightclubs, we held dance parties. Then we launched an unauthorised covert walking tour of Parliament House. People downloaded a special version of the album on headphones and listened to the music and story while walking around the real life setting of Australia’s halls of power.
Like so.
Click for a taste of Reuben’s Kill Climate Deniers album, specifically the song Music To Shoot Climate Activists To.
All of this helped to build up an audience for the project - but even more importantly, there were no real life copycats. Not one government building was taken hostage by eco-terrorists during a Fleetwood Mac concert.
So four years after the first production was cancelled, the play finally made it to the stage in 2018 at the Griffin Theatre in Sydney, followed by productions in Prague, London and Los Angeles, and many others.
So obviously I was very happy. And so in one version of this story, that's where it ends - this project just joins a long list of things that right wing commentators have found to be outraged about, alongside Elvis, smartphones, twerking, Miley Cyrus, Fortnite, the Beat Generation, skateboarding, Woodstock, Woodstock 99, sugary cereal, Tiktok, gay marriage, NWA, feminism, the Twist, Dungeons and Dragons, Livejournal, shopping malls, and women reading novels.
But as the show got out into the world, something else started happening too. I started hearing from climate deniers. Not fossil fuel lobbyists or right wing journalists - real climate deniers. Regular normal people.
I couldn’t get my head around it. Why did they care so much? If you’re an Exxon-Mobil executive, you've got a financial incentive to downplay climate science. But if you’re a high school teacher from Queensland, or a massage therapist in Masachussetts, why would you spend your nights and weekends desperately trying to debunk earth science research?
It turns out, although climate denial started out as an astroturfed phenomenon created by fossil fuel companies, it caught on because it connects with a certain group of people in a very real way.
I got emails. I got physical letters. I got phone calls. They started showing up to performances of the play. And as the show got bigger, there were more and more of them. And they were passionate.
I wanted this play to start a conversation. And it did. It just wasn't the conversation I thought I was starting. I ended up speaking to hundreds of climate deniers over the course of this project.
Some of them wanted to insult or threaten me. Some of them wanted to tell me variations on the same gag: ‘What if I wrote a play called Kill Climate Scientists?’
But some of them were interesting. These deniers wanted to explain to me why climate science was wrong. They had a whole worldview. They said to me:
'The reality is, David, climate change is a made up excuse for a huge program of top down intervention. What climate activists really want is to stifle our freedoms - they want to control what we eat, they want to choke the life out of rural communities, and they want to throw open the doors to massive global migration.’
I wanted to respond to these people and say, sorry, you’re wrong. That’s not what it’s about. But the more I talked to them, the more I realised - they’re right. They’re completely correct.
I mean, they’re not right about climate change being a made up excuse - that, sadly, is not true.
But the consequences of climate change - what it means if scientists are correct - yes, global diets are going to change, yes, a lot of communities in exposed locations are going to be forced to leave - and yes, there will be massive migration within and between countries. They're right. And we don’t even realise how right they are.
I believe in the science of climate change. And so do my friends and colleagues, and probably most of the people in this room. But more often than not, we live our lives as if it’s not real.
We plan our careers, we build houses, we educate our children as if the future will look like the past. But the world we're educating them for is already gone. At one degree warming, we are already on a planet unlike anywhere that humans have ever lived in the past, and our systems are starting to buckle under the strain.
Maybe you believe that we’re sleepwalking into disaster, or maybe you think we can turn things around through high tech solutions or massive social movements - whatever climate future you imagine, our lives are going to radically change. Our future is not going to look like our past.
We accept the science, but we haven’t processed the consequences. We don’t explicitly deny climate change, but in our actions, we’re like soft deniers, stealth deniers.
I’m one of these people, maybe you are too. I keep my carbon footprint as low as possible, but I got on a plane to give this talk. I know I should think about which cities are going to be safe in future decades when it comes to climate shocks, but then I just want to buy a flat in my hometown.
If you believe something, but you act like you don’t believe it - do you really believe it?
Climate deniers understand the consequences of the science - so they don’t accept the science. They know what it means if it’s true - so they can’t allow it to be true.
I think we can learn from climate deniers. I want to be like that high school teacher in Queensland, that massage therapist in Masachusetts, because they live what they believe. You and I, who think we know better - we're the ones in denial. And I know deep down that the longer we deny reality, the harder the shock when it hits.
Thank you.
With thanks to Bryony Jackson and Tom Finnigan for the photos, and to Reuben Ingall (as always) for the music.
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
Deep History, New York
Next month, I’ll be travelling to New York to present my solo show Deep History. In 2019, I set out to write a survival guide for the climate era, drawing on the big shocks and turning points that humanity has already survived - from the Toba Volcano eruption 74,000 years ago, through the end of the ice age, all the way up to the present day. But as I set out to write it, my hometown of Canberra was hit by horrific bushfires, and my friends and family were caught on the front line.
I last presented this solo show in 2022, when it won a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe, followed by a season at the Barbican London.
‘It’s hard to imagine a fresh perspective on climate change, but Finnigan finds one.’
****, The Scotsman
‘Finnigan captures powerfully that climate change is not a future threat, it’s with us now’
****, The Guardian
If you’re in New York, please come along - I’m excited to get to share this!
The Public Theater, NYC
5 - 27 October
RECOMMENDATIONS
It’s been a great patch of time for new music, I’ve been enjoying so much good stuff - the new record of early 90s hardcore from Scuba’s Digital Underground alias, the new DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ album. There’s been a slew of great pop - I unashamedly love all three Sabrina Carpenter singles (including and especially Taste), I am all about Griff’s Vertigo and Maggie Rogers’ The Kill. But my record of the month is an old album I’ve found myself returning to.
Gang Gang Dance - God’s Money
This was my first encounter with Gang Gang, after stumbling on a positive review in a 2005 copy of The Wire. I couldn’t tell if it was loosely composed or brilliantly improvised, but I loved the component ingredients so much, I fell deep into it. The eerie euphoric riff in Before My Voice Fails, the beautiful dancing keyboard in Egowar, and whatever indecipherable wildness Lizzie Bougatsos is chanting in Nomad For Love (Cannibal) - ‘…he bathed in her lacquer… and it was scented by the sun… and there were waves crashing all around…’ This is rich, rich music, music to overwhelm you.
Cal Flyn - Islands of Abandonment
A beautiful meditation on abandoned sites (Chernobyl, Cyprus, Montserrat) and the ways that nature reclaims them. Deeply researched, strangely optimistic and beautifully written. The chapter on the abandoned botanical gardens in the cloud forests of Amani, Tanzania, is unexpectedly haunting. Highly recommended.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!