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“We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed.”
Oiled Up
The United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), a yearly climate change conference where world leaders convene to discuss just how screwed we really are, has long been revealed to be a sham.
The grip the fossil fuel industry has had over the organizers and host countries became painfully apparent last year when conference leader and Emirati oil executive Sultan Al Jaber claimed that there’s “no science” behind phasing out fossil fuels to keep global temperatures from creeping above 1.5 degrees Celsius, a preposterous and self-serving claim that flies in the face of decades of scientific evidence.
And this year’s COP29 climate change conference in Azerbaijan is seemingly no different. A secret recording obtained by the BBC shows Elnur Soltanov, the chief executive of the COP29 team — who also happens to be the Asian nation’s deputy energy minister and senior executive at the national oil and gas company Socar — discussing “investment opportunities.”
“We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” he can be heard saying in the video.
Call the COPs
Soltanov was trying to woo an undercover representative from the human rights watch campaign Global Witness, who told the oil exec he represented the interests of a fictitious Hong Kong-based oil and gas company.
“I would be happy to create a contact between your team and their team [Socar] so that they can start discussions,” Soltanov told the fake oil operative.
None of this should come as much of a surprise. Azerbaijan’s economy relies massively on oil, accounting for a whopping 90 percent of its experts.
Naturally, the UN body reacted with outrage, telling the BBC that Soltanov’s naked interest in furthering oil and gas investments was “completely unacceptable” and a “betrayal.”
Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the signing of the historic Paris Agreement in 2015, told the BBC that Soltanov’s behavior was “contrary and egregious” to the purpose of the yearly conferences, and a “treason.”
Last year’s COP28 conference turned into a counterproductive circus, as the BBC revealed at the time, with the United Arab Emirates using scheduled meetings for “private” oil and gas business talks.
In other words, claiming these summits are designed to “measure progress and negotiate multilateral responses to climate change” is in many ways misleading and disingenuous.
The kind of investments Soltanov is encouraging, after all, directly contradict the promise nations made at last year’s climate change conference when they agreed to transition away from fossil fuels.
In short, COP29 sounds like little more than a forum for oil and gas executives to strike new deals — and world leaders to make vacuous promises often without taking any meaningful action.
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