Burning comforting illusions in the land of fire

The president of Azerbaijan opened this year’s UN climate summit declaring that oil and gas are a “gift from God.” 

Far from a reckoning with double edged gifts, the president was winding up to lambaste opposition to fossil fuel expansion as a “well-orchestrated campaign of slander and blackmail” by “some politicians, state-controlled NGOs and fake news media in some western countries.”

It was an unconventional way to open a summit on climate change. These confabs typically begin with a gush of green platitudes. And despite the gulf between rhetoric and results, at least at last year’s gathering, the world’s negotiators agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels. After decades of meetings, countries had finally acknowledged the need to restrict the main cause of the problem.

This year’s meeting in Baku is meant to focus on finance to address the gross inequities between those countries that have done most to blanket the planet with fossil fuel pollution and those mainly poorer ones who suffer most. A high-minded aspiration cruelly out-of-sync with a Trumpian age. Financial solidarity among the peoples of the Earth is not exactly a tenet of the MAGA movement, nor its international counterparts.

Even the roll call at COP29 shows the divide. One developing country had already bailed on this year’s climate summit, even before Trump’s election. Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister said the country would not bother engaging high-level talks at COP29, describing them as “a total waste of time.”

“We will no longer tolerate empty promises and inaction, while our people suffer the devastating consequences of climate change,” foreign affairs minister Justin Tckatchenko said. “Nothing concrete has come out of such major multilateral meetings.”

This week, just three days into COP29, Argentina ordered its delegates to withdraw and go home. But Argentina’s decision comes from a very different motivation: Argentina’s far-right leader, Javier Milei, is a climate science denier who has called climate change a “socialist lie.” 

During his election campaign one year ago, Milei threatened to withdraw from the Paris Agreement just as Donald Trump did during his first term. Milei did ultimately agree to send a delegation to Baku this year. But he spoke with Trump on Tuesday and his spokesperson claims Trump described Milei as “his favourite president.” By Wednesday, Milei’s government had ordered its negotiating team to pull out of the talks and head home.  

Almost none of the world’s most powerful leaders will be showing up in Baku. The U.S. is otherwise occupied. China’s president took a pass, as did the president of the European Union and the president of Brazil, who will host next year’s talks. Justin Trudeau, likewise, won’t be making an appearance this year.

By contrast, more than 1700 fossil fuel lobbyists are mobbing the conference halls, official passes dangling from their necks. They outnumber the combined delegations of the most climate-vulnerable nations. “Industry presence is dwarfing that of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” according to a head count by the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition.

The tally includes at least 32 Canadian representatives linked to fossil fuels and selected by provincial governments, according to an analysis by my colleagues John Woodside and Natasha Bulowski. “We need the Canadian provinces who have provided accreditation to oil and gas lobbyists to recognize that the industry is only here to protect its profits, at the expense of people and the planet,” said Caroline Brouillette, executive director of Climate Action Network Canada. Brouillette says the lobbyists have a “chokehold” on international climate diplomacy.

At least 132 oil and gas company executives were invited as official guests by the Azerbaijani government and given host country badges. They include the CEOs of Exxonmobil, BP and Saudi oil giant Aramco.

Azerbaijan is the second petrostate in a row to host the annual climate negotiations, after Dubai last year. The COP29 negotiations are physically framed by a skyline of flames — three flame-shaped skyscrapers symbolizing the fire element. 

Azerbaijan is known as the “land of fire” and Baku, the “city of fire.” The monikers go back to antiquity and travellers like Marco Polo who reported: “There is a spring from which gushes a stream of oil in such abundance that a hundred ships may load there at once.”

“This oil is not good to eat,” Marco Polo warned. But it found its purpose. Azerbaijan became home to some of the first drilled wells and the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, plying the Caspian Sea. Today, oil and gas account for over 90 per cent of the country’s export revenues and the majority of the government budget. 

Even as it prepared to host COP29, Azerbaijan was planning a major expansion in fossil gas production and is one of the “tiny group of countries that has weakened its climate target,” say the analysts at Climate Action Tracker who rate its plans “critically insufficient.” Just days before the climate summit, the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s COP team was busted on video using his role to promote fossil fuel deals.

There must be a strand in the multiverse where the nations of the world are gathering for a genuine reckoning back where it all began. Back to Baku where the age of oil emerged along the shores of the Caspian Sea. That reckoning hasn’t appeared in the timeline we’re inhabiting.

Even some of the staunchest advocates for climate diplomacy are dismayed. The “global climate process has been captured and is no longer fit for purpose,” declared a group including former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon and Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. 

The group called for an overhaul of the COP process and stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying, and said countries shouldn’t be hosting the summits if they don’t support the phase-out of fossil fuels. “We need strict eligibility criteria to exclude countries who do not support the phase-out/transition away from fossil energy,” says the joint statement.

It’s a sensible proposal even if it would leave a limited list of options. And new ideas for international cooperation among willing partners, like the initiative for a Fossil Fuel Treaty are clearly needed to galvanize the side pushing for enhanced action and international solidarity. 

There will be no reckoning in Baku but there is at least a strange consonance that some old illusions are being burned away in the land of fire.