Sunday, December 22, 2024

Azerbaijan is the host of the UN’s climate conference, shining a spotlight on the petrostate

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The spotlight is on Azerbaijan as the small petrostate in the South Caucasus hosts the U.N.’s biggest climate conference.

Diplomats from across the world will descend on the capital Baku for the annual climate summit, known as COP29, to discuss how to avoid increasing threats from climate change in a place that was one of the birthplaces of the oil industry.

It was in Baku where the world’s first oil fields were developed in 1846 and where Azerbaijan led the world in oil production in 1899.

Sandwiched between Iran to the south and Russia to the north, Azerbaijan is on the Caspian Sea and was part of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991. Nearly all of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas, two of the world’s leading sources of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions. President Ilham Aliyev described them in April as a “gift of the gods.”

Aliyev is Azerbaijan’s authoritarian leader. He is the son of the former president and has been in power for more than two decades, overseeing a crackdown on freedom of speech and civil society. The Associated Press was not granted permission by Azerbaijan’s authorities to report in the country ahead of the conference.

Aliyev has said it is a “big honor” for Azerbaijan to host the conference. He has also said he wants his country to use more renewable energy at home is so that it can export more oil and gas abroad.

In Baku, the signs of fossil fuel addiction are everywhere

In metal cages next to Azerbaijan’s Aquatic Palace sporting venue are pumpjacks — a sign says they extract just over 2 tons of oil a day. Others pump away elsewhere, sucking up oil in view of one of Baku’s religious and tourist sites, the Bibi Heybat mosque that was rebuilt in the 1990s after it was destroyed by the Bolsheviks almost 80 years ago.

Aliyev said he considers it “a sign of respect” from the international community that Azerbaijan is hosting COP and a recognition of what Azerbaijan is doing around green energy.

Some of those plans involve developing hydropower, solar and wind projects in Karabakh, a region populated by ethnic Armenians who fled to Armenia after a lightning military offensive by Azerbaijan in September 2023.

Aliyev said in a speech in March that his country is in the “active phase of green transition” but added that “no one can ignore the fact that without fossil fuel, the world cannot develop, at least in the foreseeable future.”

Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan’s environment minister and former vice president at the state energy company Socar, will serve as conference president of the talks. Babayev said in April he wants to show how this “oil and gas country of the past” can show the world a green path with its efforts to ramp up renewable energy, especially wind power.

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