A Tiny Petrostate Is Running the World’s Climate Talks

When delegates of the world gather in Baku, Azerbaijan, next week for the most important yearly meeting on climate change, their meetings will overlook a reeking lake, polluted by the oil fields on the other side. This city’s first oil reservoir was built on the lake’s shores in the 19th century; now nearly half of Azerbaijan’s GDP and more than 90 percent of its export revenue come from oil and gas. It is, in no uncertain terms, a petrostate.

Last year, too, the UN Conference of Parties (COP) meeting was a parade of oil-state wealth and interests. Held in the United Arab Emirates, the conference included thousands of oil and gas lobbyists; its president was an executive of the UAE’s national oil company. Baku’s COP president, Azerbaijan’s ecology and natural-resources minister, is also an ex-executive of its oil company.

Optimistically, handing influence over this conference to the UAE, and now Azerbaijan—states whose interests are, in many ways, opposed to its aim—means that leaders who depend on fossil fuels must face the costs of burning them. As host this year, Azerbaijan’s job will be to broker an agreement that secures billions—possibly trillions—of dollars from wealthy countries to help along the green transition in poorer countries. Developing nations need these funds to set ambitious climate goals, the next round of which are due in February 2025. A failed COP could set off a chain reaction of failure. The world is gambling that a country that’s shown a bare minimum of commitment to this entire process can keep us all on a path to staving off catastrophic warming.

Baku came to host COP by process of elimination. Hosting duties rotate among regions of the world; this year is Eastern Europe’s turn. Russia nixed the possibility of any European Union country, leaving only Armenia and Azerbaijan standing. Armenia retracted its bid after Azerbaijan agreed to release 32 Armenian service members from prison. (Armenia freed two Azerbaijani soldiers in exchange.)

In many ways, Azerbaijan is an extremely unlikely candidate. Joanna Depledge, a fellow at the University of Cambridge and an expert on international climate negotiations, has followed all 29 years of COP so far, and told me that Azerbaijan has “been pretty much off the radar since the beginning.” The country has hardly ever spoken during previous negotiations, and is not part of any of COP’s major political coalitions, she said. The Paris Agreement requires that, every five years, each country must lay out how it will reduce emissions in a Nationally Determined Contribution plan; Azerbaijan is “one of the very few countries whose second NDC was weaker than the first,” Depledge said. To Steve Pye, an energy-systems professor at University College London, having a petrostate host a climate meeting presents an unambiguous conflict of interest. The country has been clear that it’s looking to ramp up gas exports and has made “no indication” that it wants to move away from fossil-fuel dependency, he told me. That’s an awkward, even bizarre, stance for the entity in charge of facilitating delicate climate diplomacy to hold.

Still, in some ways, Azerbaijan “could be seen as an honest broker” in the finance negotiations, because it is neither a traditional donor country nor a recipient of the funds under negotiation, Depledge said. Azerbaijan, for its part, says it intends to “enable action” to deliver “deep, rapid and sustained emission reductions … while leaving no one behind.”

The whole point of COP is to bring diverse countries together, Depledge said; global climate diplomacy cannot move forward without petrostates on board. Last year’s COP, in Dubai, resulted in the first global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, and was seen as a modest success. To run COP, Azerbaijan will be forced to reckon with global climate change directly; its team will have to listen to everyone, including the countries most ravaged by climate change today. That’s bound to have an impact, Depledge thinks. Ultimately, Azerbaijan will also need to adapt to a post-oil economy: The World Bank estimates that the country’s oil reserves will dwindle by mid-century. And, since being chosen to host, it has joined a major international pledge to limit methane emissions, as well as announced that its third NDC (unlike its previous one) will be aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goals—although it has yet to unveil the actual plan.  

COP also gives Azerbaijan a chance to burnish its image. After Armenia withdrew its hosting bid, Azerbaijan branded this a “peace COP,” proposing a worldwide cease-fire for the days before, during, and after the meeting. An army of bots have been deployed on X to praise Azerbaijan just ahead of the talks, The Washington Post reported. Ronald Grigor Suny, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Azerbaijan, told me that he views the country’s hosting exercise as an elaborate propaganda campaign to sanitize the image of a fundamentally authoritarian and oil-committed nation—a place that last year conducted what many legal and human-rights scholars considered an ethnic-cleansing campaign in one of its Armenian enclaves. “This is a staging of an event to impress people by the normality, the acceptability, the modernity of this little state,” he said. But hope for any peace-related initiatives, including a peace deal with Armenia, is already dwindling. Climate and geopolitical experts have called the whole thing a cynical PR stunt, and Amnesty International reports that the country, which Azerbaijani human-rights defenders estimate holds hundreds of academics and activists in prison, has jailed more of its critics since the COP presidency was announced.

Azerbaijan will still need to broker a real climate deal by the end of the event for it to be declared a success. Failure would be deeply embarrassing and, more pressingly, dangerous for the planet. The world is on track for up to 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, and total carbon-dioxide emissions in 2030 will be only 2.6 percent lower than in 2019 if countries’ current NDCs are followed, according to new analysis. Keeping to a 1.5 degree Celsius warming limit would require a lowering of 43 percent over the same time period, which many scientists now say is out of reach. Keeping warming below the far more catastrophic 2 degree limit now will take far faster and more decisive action than the slow COP process has historically produced.

Even if this COP ends in success, Pye, who has worked on the UN Environment Program’s Production Gap Report, notes that, without follow-through, what happens at the conference is merely lip service. Once the spotlight of COP was off it, the UAE, for instance, returned more or less to business as usual; this year, the state oil company increased its production capacity. Then again, the UAE is investing heavily in clean energy, too, following a maximalist approach of more of everything—much like the theory that President Joe Biden has followed in the United States, which recently became the world’s biggest oil producer and gas exporter even as Biden’s domestic policies, most notably the Inflation Reduction Act, have pushed the country toward key climate goals.

Perhaps more than Baku’s leadership, the outcomes of the U.S. election will set the tone for the upcoming COP. News of a second Trump presidency would likely neutralize any hope for a strong climate finance agreement in Baku. In 2016, news of Trump’s election arrived while that year’s COP was under way in Marrakech, to withering effect. America’s functional absence from climate negotiations marred proceedings for four years. Wherever COP is held, American willingness to negotiate in good faith has the power to make or break the climate deals. Put another way, it’s still possible to save the world, if we want to.