By Brian Monteith – 4 minute read
WHATEVER perceptions have been conjured up in the past by the annual mega junket that is the UN’s Conference Of the Parties on climate change there can be no doubt this year’s COP29 descended into farce and ridicule.
The puzzle is why it has taken so long for the vested interests, who attend these expensive jaunts, to actually admit what these annual gilded junkets are really about – massive stunts designed to fool the public into policies they would never otherwise support.
The gathering of the world’s climate politicians, zealots, hustlers and grifters in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan – of all places – has finally tipped some, like Al Gore, over the edge because it sought to avoid discussing oil and gas production while secretly discussing sponsorship opportunities from oil and gas producers.
The cult of Net Zero has its own Wizard of Oz resident in Azerbaijan and the curtain has been pulled back to reveal the fraud being played on those believing the charade.
Prior to its opening, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of COP29, was filmed agreeing to facilitate oil or gas deals at the climate summit by the campaign group Global Witness. It had posed undercover as a non-existent Hong Kong-based energy investment company willing to sponsor the event if it helped facilitate investment opportunities with Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, Socar.
Mr Soltanov said he was open to discussions, including deals on oil and gas, and a few weeks later he emailed the Hong Kong business front offering to help bring the parties to a deal together.
The latest junket of cant and hypocrisy, which generates its own enormous emissions, had already gotten off to a bad start when, after paying an enormous amount of money for the privilege of staging gas-guzzling Formula One races, the Azerbaijan government of President Ilham Aliyev declared the event as “The COP of Peace”.
The reason for this cringe-inducing moniker was because, a year earlier in September 2023, Azerbaijanmilitary forces invaded a disputed territory called Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing 100,000 ethnic Armenians and imprisoning many others as political prisoners, including several ministers of the former Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh, now unlawfully held hostage.
Prior to giving away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, an ally of communist China, UK foreign secretary David Lammy suggested Azerbaijan had “liberated” the disputed Caucasus territory. Unsurprisingly, Lammy was accused of misreading the situation and reinforcing “the talking points of an autocratic regime,” according to Laurence Broers, an associate fellow at the international affairs think-tank Chatham House. Other critics, like Roger Boyes, accused Lammy of tipping his hat to the Azeri dictatorship and effectively endorsing its ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians.
Azerbaijan is an autocratic petrostate ruled with an iron fist by Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father as the president of Azerbaijan in 2003, following which he appointed his wife as vice-president. For context, Azerbaijan scored only 7 out of 100 in Freedom House’s 2024 human rights index – by comparison North Korea scored 3, Cuba 12, Russia 13 and the UK 91. In contrast Armenia scored 54.
You might think that sort of comparison would set of warning sirens with the EU commission in Brussels. Think again. After Europe announced it was abandoning Russian gas due to Putin’s war in Ukraine, the European Parliament approved sanctions against President Aliyev and other Azeri government officials over their offensive against the Armenians – but the European Commission refused to implement them.
Instead, Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, flew to Baku, hailing the country as “a crucial energy partner”. The reason became obvious when the FT and Sunday Times reported Azerbaijan had increased imports of Russian gas specifically to meet obligations made to EU countries looking for “non-Russian” sources of gas in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. For many the sanctions were a pretence all along.
Aliyev is not subtle, diplomatic or given to peace-loving euphemisms, rather, he has described ethnic Armenians as “barbarians and vandals” infected by a “virus” for which they “need to be treated”. As an example a commemorative stamp issued by his government, portrayed a man in a biohazard suit fumigating the area of Nagorno-Karabakh.
All this bodes ill for Armenia, the first nation to become officially Christian long before the Roman empire, landlocked and of no strategic significance, sandwiched between Turkey in the west and Azerbaijan in the east – with Iran at the southern end of the Caspian Sea and Russia to the northern shore.
Since the end of the Cold War and its escape from Soviet rule, Armenia has been on a journey looking for allies, as it has suffered a genocide at the hands of Muslim neighbours before. Now it is pivoting towards the West and looking for friends. Unfortunately, so long as politicians in the UK, Europe and the US are happy to cavort with despots throwing their petrodollars around, Armenia will find doors repeatedly closing.
If Western leaders had any interest in COP29 becoming a “COP of Peace” they would have insisted President Aliyev should sign a peace deal with Armenia in advance of the summit and release the remaining Armenian prisoners of war and political hostages being held in Baku.
But our Western leaders would rather posture on peace while closing their own energy-intensive industries and exporting those jobs to China and India. No surprise then that the COP of Peace became a COP of deception and will have only hardened Azerbaijan’s reputation as a country beyond the pale.
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Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European Parliaments and has worked on many development projects across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Photo of COP29, Baku, by Sophie Animes from Adobe Stock