COP29 was always going to be memorable, if for no other reason than Azerbaijan, the host country, is a petrostate and its rulers are indifferent to its carbon emissions and scientists’ warnings about the climate emergency.
Its natural gas supply grew between 2000 and 2021 by 128%. Between 2006–21, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%.
A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are oil and gas, but much of its wealth fails to trickle down.
The “West”, President Ilham Aliyev told the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was in no position to lecture him about cutting back on the use of fossil fuels. They were, he claimed, “a gift from God”.
His words should not come as a surprise: Aliyev declared in April that, as a leader of a country “which is rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and to continue production”.
A few days later, Aliyev played the other side of the climate change divide, suggesting at a meeting with island leaders that France and the Netherlands had been responsible for “brutally” suppressing the “voices” of communities concerned with climate change in territories such as Mayotte and Curaçao. (Aliyev is no stranger to suppressing voices of dissent within his own country.)
This proved too much for France’s Ecological Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher, who cancelled her attendance to the summit, and attacked Baku for “instrumentalising the fight against climate change for its undignified personal agenda”.
On the second day of the summit, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres tried to turn the delegates’ attention to the urgency of rising temperatures. “The sound you hear is the ticking clock: we are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and time is not on our side.”
The fossil fuel industry, however, heard the sound of money changing hands.
In the background lie assessments of gloomy inevitability. The Climate Change Tracker’s November briefing notes that this year was characterised by “minimal progress, with almost no new national climate change targets (NDCs) or net zero pledges even though government have agreed to (urgently) strengthen their 2030 targets and to align them with the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement”.
It is easy to rage against the opportunistic Aliyev, who blends “environmentalism” with ethnic cleansing, but few attending the summit come with clean hands. As with previous COP summits, Baku featured tens of thousands of officials, advisers and minders, although the 67,000 registrants was lower compared with the 83,000 at COP28 in Dubai.
FlightRadar24, a plane tracking website, noted that 65 private jets landed in Baku prior to the summit.
COP29 is an opportunity to strike deals that have little to do with reducing emissions and everything to do with advancing the interests of lobby groups and companies in the energy market, much of it of a fossil fuel nature.
COP29 is set to follow in the footsteps of the wily Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, who chaired COP28 in Dubai. Prior to the arrival of the climate change chatterati last year, the Sultan was shown to be an enthusiast for advancing the business of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) in leaked briefing documents to the BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR). It was hard to avoid the glaring fact that Al Jaber is also the CEO of Adnoc.
The leaked documents involved more than 150 pages of briefings, prepared by the COP28 team for meetings with Al Jaber and interested parties held between July and October.
They point to plans to raise matters of commercial interest with as many as 30 countries. The CCR confirmed “that on at least one occasion a nation followed up on commercial discussions brought up in a meeting with Al Jaber; a source with knowledge of discussions also told CCR that Adnoc’s business interests were allegedly raised during a meeting with another country”.
COP29 chairperson Samir Nuriyev had put out feelers as early as March that a “fair approach” was needed when approaching countries abundant with oil and natural gas, notably in light of their purported environmental policies.
He went so far as to argue that Azerbaijan was an ideal interlocutor between the Global South and Global North.
His colleague and chief executive of the COP29 team, Elnur Soltanov, showed exactly how that process would work in a secret recording, ahead of the conference, in which he discusses “investment opportunities” in the state oil and gas company with a person posing as a potential investor. (The person in question purported to be representing a fictitious Hong Kong investment firm with a sharp line in energy.)
“We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” Soltanov insisted. “We will have a certain amount of oil and gas being produced, perhaps forever.”
In many ways, the Baku meeting had all the hallmarks of a criminal syndicate gathering, held under more open conditions. Fair play, then, to the Azerbaijani hosts for taking a lead from Dubai and working out this year’s climate change racket.
Aliyev and company noted months in advance that this was less a case of being a theatre of the absurd than a forum for business.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]