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November 15th 2024
Feature story

Burning illusions in Baku

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.

The roundup

Canadian oil and gas lobbyists flock to Baku

At least 32 Canadian representatives linked to fossil fuels are in Azerbaijan for the COP29 summit. They include the usual suspects — companies like Enbridge and Suncor, along with lobby groups like the Pathways Alliance, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers and First Nations LNG Alliance, as well as gas utilities like ATCO.

“The Government of Canada is not paying the way for any companies to be here,” said a spokesperson for A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault. “I can assure you that, unlike Pierre Poilievre who is in the pocket of big oil companies, they haven’t prevented us from bringing forward ambitious regulations to cut pollution in the oil and gas sector.”

Canadian philanthropists pledge $405 Million for climate solutions

Nine families and foundations have pledged $405 million for climate solutions over the next decade, marking the largest philanthropic contribution to fight climate change in Canadian history, reports Darius Snieckus.

"The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time, and requires bold, collective action," said Sylvie Trottier, board member for the Trottier Family Foundation, which pledged $150 million to the initiative. "That's why my family is proud to step up with our multi-year commitment, our largest ever."

Canadian named among TIME's top climate leaders

Tzeporah Berman, founder of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, was named one of TIME magazine’s Top 100 most influential climate leaders worldwide.

The treaty’s network is growing and enjoys the backing of 14 nations, more than 100 cities or regional governments, thousands of civil and environmental groups, Indigenous communities and international bodies such as the World Health Organization and the Vatican — and nearly a million individual global citizens, including Nobel Peace Prize winners and most recently former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, reports Rochelle Baker.

Oil and gas emissions cap might be Trudeau's last chance

“There aren’t many issues left that look like winners for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. But their newly-released emissions cap on oil and gas producers, and the reflexive Conservative backlash against it, might just be one,” writes Max Fawcett.

“If Canadians still decide to throw them out of office, at least they’ll have gone down swinging on an issue they care about.”

A record year for fossil fuel pollution

Despite last year’s agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels, carbon pollution from oil, gas and coal will increase in 2024. This year will set another world record for emissions, according to the Global Carbon Budget project.

“The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked,” said Pierre Friedlingstein from the University of Exeter, who led the study.

Emissions are decreasing in the European Union and the U.S. and will basically flatline in China and Canada this year, according to the report. But they will increase in India and the rest of the world in aggregate.

Twenty two countries representing 23 per cent of global fossil CO2 did manage to cut emissions while their economies grew over the past decade, according to the report. But as Friedlingstein notes: “Until we reach net zero CO2 emissions globally, world temperatures will continue to rise and cause increasingly severe impacts.”

Greenhouse gas pollution across the European Union fell by more than eight per cent last year, driven by the rollout of renewable energy, according to the European Commission. “Emissions have fallen by 37 per cent since 1990, despite GDP growth during the same period of 68 per cent,” reports Bloomberg.

Carbon dioxide disinformation is not just an Alberta thing

The disinformation spreaders who designed the pro-CO2 slogans for the convention of Alberta’s ruling party were from a front group for a coalition of American coal producers. “It’s not only in Alberta,” writes Adrienne Tanner. “The United Conservative Party is just the latest one to jump on this bandwagon.”

Can’t explain it

“The earth has been exceptionally warm of late, with every month from June 2023 until this past September breaking records. It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected,” say two leading climate scientists, Gavin Schmidt and Zeke Hausfather, writing in the New York Times.

68 years down to 2

“It took 68 years for the world to reach one terawatt of solar PV capacity. It took just two years to double it,” reports Joshua Hill for Renew Economy.

“Putting the scale of this achievement in context, 2TW of solar is equivalent to the total installed electricity capacity of India, the United States, and United Kingdom combined and could power an estimated one billion homes.”

An all-seeing eye

If you’re up for a truly broad perspective on the annual climate summit taking place in Baku, I’ll leave you with George Monbiot’s latest — his attempt to inhabit “an all-seeing eye in the sky.”

“It watches, over the course of decades, ice caps shrinking, rainforests retreating, deserts expanding, ocean circulation slowing, freshwater dwindling and sea levels rising, and it thinks – for it has been there since the beginning — ‘this is familiar’”

“But this time, it knows, is different. Not only is one of the life forms causing the collapse, but it shares some of the eye’s supernatural abilities: it too can see what is happening. So, with heightened curiosity, the eye zooms in, to see what this well-informed being is doing to avert catastrophe….”