Inside Azerbaijan, Host of COP29

In a few short months, diplomats from nearly all the world’s countries will descend on Azerbaijan, a small petrostate on the Caspian Sea, nestled between Russia and Iran, to wrangle over how best to avoid the ever-growing dangers of climate change.

It’s an unlikely place for such talk: It is out of the way, under authoritarian rule and, crucially, hyper-dependent on fossil fuels. Azerbaijan is hosting the annual climate summit, called COP29, only by dint of a quirky United Nations selection process that left it as the last option on the table.

Mukhtar Babayev, an amiable midlevel bureaucrat put in charge of the talks, scarcely anticipated filling such a high-stakes role. “We are not famous as a green transition ideas developer,” he said last week in a wide-ranging interview in the Azerbaijani countryside. “Yes, for us it is new.”

Mr. Babayev, 56, and his team are tasked with balancing nearly impossibly divergent interests, from dominant petrostates like Saudi Arabia to sinking island​ states like Vanuatu. It’s a seemingly vertical learning curve for officials who acknowledge their inexperience in global climate politics.

They also acknowledge that they are under pressure from some people in their own country, who fear the global energy transition away from fossil fuels. Nearly all of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas. Mr. Babayev himself spent most of his career rising through the middle ranks of the state oil company.

And despite broad agreement that the world must stop burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible, Mr. Babayev offered a defense of those who produce them, particularly natural gas, which has transformed his country into a bigger player on the geopolitical stage in recent years as Europe scrambled to find replacements for Russian supplies.

Compared to oil and coal, he said, “Gas is a less-harm-to-nature energy resource.” He also noted, “If the European countries are against gas, then why do they request more from Azerbaijan? Why does Commissioner Simson come to Baku three, four times in a year?” he said, referring to Kadri Simson, the European Union energy commissioner.

In a way, Azerbaijan, despite lacking climate bona fides, provides one of the starkest backdrops imaginable for a climate conference. Within its borders the causes and effects of climate change are on vivid display and the painful trade-offs needed to fight it are acutely felt.

As alarm over global warming soars amid record-breaking heat and increasingly erratic weather, Azerbaijan has barely begun the process of replacing oil and gas. It has argued, as many less developed nations have, that rich nations must cough up billions of dollars to help them transition their economies, given that the world’s wealthier countries are responsible, in historical terms, for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions.

The environmental damage wrought by fossil fuel extraction will be in plain view from the stadium in the capital, Baku, where the talks will be held.

Across a lake reeking of sulfur, creaking rigs excrete pools of stagnant oil. Day and night, a refinery next door burns off methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

And just a few miles offshore in the Caspian Sea, scores of drilling platforms form archipelagos of rust.

The often-contradictory policies of climate-conscious Western countries are palpable, too. Even as Europe in recent years barred its banks from financing fossil fuels, it gobbled up Azerbaijani gas and now hopes others will fund the expansion of the pipelines.

Similarly, the United States has called on the world to move more quickly to fight climate change, even as it produces and exports more oil and gas than ever.

“It’s easy for Azerbaijan today to stay a fossil-fuel-producing country,” Mr. Babayev said. He said other Azerbaijani officials, with a hint of worry, ask him, “‘Why do you need to involve this pressure from all sides?’”

The country of 10 million people landed COP29 practically by coincidence. According to the United Nations agency that sponsors the annual climate summit, host countries are chosen on a rotating cycle, and this time it was the turn for a nation in Eastern Europe or the Caucasus. But because the location must be agreed upon by consensus, Russia was able to veto most candidates, seeing them as hostile to its invasion of Ukraine.

Azerbaijan, eventually, was the only country left.

The fact that Azerbaijan is hosting COP29 has caused jitters for some in the climate activism community. First off, Russia’s obstructionism left Azerbaijan with little time to prepare. But more worryingly, it is the second year in a row that a petrostate has hosted the talks.

Last year’s summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, was presided over by Sultan al Jaber, who heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Mr. al Jaber was able to push through a final document from the meeting that saw all countries pledge to move away from fossil fuel use by midcentury.

But it also alluded to the role of gas as a “transitional fuel” even as climate scientists warned that the world can’t afford to invest in new gas production if it is serious about limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. That target, researchers say, is necessary to avoid a cascade of catastrophic changes to Earth’s natural systems.

Gas, which burns cleaner than coal or oil but consists largely of methane, which can leak and cause short-term spikes in the greenhouse effect, has been promoted by many countries as a stopgap energy source as economies adapt to running on renewables and petrostates find other exports to rely on.

While speaking, Mr. Babayev often deferred to the wisdom of Azerbaijan’s strongman president, Ilham Aliyev, who has run the country since taking over from his father, Heydar Aliyev, in 2003. Since Azerbaijan gained independence with the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the Aliyev family has consolidated power, wealth and support, buoyed by fossil fuel revenue. Baku now gleams with glassy skyscrapers owned by his family and its associates.

Across the region, Mr. Babayev said, you now see “roads, electricity provided to 100 percent of the population; gas and water to almost every home.”

“Now the government can think, ‘OK, oil and gas is good, but let’s look to the future,’” he said.

The future, Mr. Aliyev’s government has said, is investment in renewable energy at home coupled with increased gas exports.

Much of the renewable energy development will take place in territories Azerbaijan wrested from neighboring Armenia in a war that flared off and on for 30 years and came to a sudden and bloody conclusion last September. Mr. Aliyev has stated his desire to build “green liberated zones” in those precincts.

Like other petrostates, Azerbaijan’s pledges to reduce its greenhouse gas footprint rely not just on renewables, but also on capturing and storing emissions from fossil fuel production. The technology to do that is nascent and largely unproven.

Azerbaijan’s state oil company, SOCAR, along with companies that make up just under half of global oil production, signed a charter at last year’s climate summit in Dubai to invest in the technology.

“No matter who says what, natural gas will remain a strategic energy source for decades to come. And with the ability to capture and store their carbon emissions, that becomes even more the case,” said Afgan Isayev, one of SOCAR’s vice presidents, in an interview. “These improvements, they are a license to operate.”

Mr. Babayev and his team will be up against huge expectations at the summit meeting in November. The world is still on course for well over 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

And this year, COP29 will take place right after the United States election. Former President Donald J. Trump has promised to roll back laws that promote clean energy and to ramp up fossil fuel drilling.

The possibility of his victory looms over the summit’s preparations. When Mr. Trump was president from 2016 to 2020, he pulled the United States out of the main United Nations sponsored pact to fight climate change.

For Azerbaijan and Mr. Babayev, COP29 also presents a chance to cement a transformation decades in the making, one that cost his country thousands of lives in war and years of underdevelopment. He’s still just a bit in shock that this role is his.

“If you ask me, Mukhtar Babayev, minister of ecology, was I ready to move this agenda, to be so popular? No. I don’t like it,” he said. “But I understand that we have to do it.”