The Illusion of Progress.

Published November 20th, 2024

ENVIRONMENT / COP29 AZERBAIJAN

Conference of Corruption: COP’s Oily Grip on our Future.

Staring out at a pōhutukawa tree from the window of my office, its swaying branches are decorated with fuzzy red flowers and glimmering in the warm Wellington sun. It’s hard to reckon with the fact that we are living through the most dire and consequential time in human history. Knowing that our planet is facing an extreme catastrophe that requires urgent action, contrasted with the banalities of life, it sometimes feels like my brain is short circuiting. We aren’t built to comprehend the fact that what humans do today will affect the next 10,000 generations on this planet. But we have to try, and it could not be more urgent. 

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The 29th Conference of the Parties (COP) is currently underway in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. These annual meetings were originally set up by the UN as a dedicated space to promote international cooperation around “solving climate change”, or in other words, averting the destruction of the living planet and the murder of hundreds of millions of the poorest people on Earth.

However, the COPs have now morphed into something perverse. These conferences have been captured by the machine of fossil capital, and now serve its interests through the facilitation of industry expansion and greenwashing. The fact that this is the 29th COP, and the world is experiencing the hottest temperatures in human history while seeing the highest use of fossil fuels ever, is enough to understand the complete and utter failure (or intentional plan) of world leaders and the economic elite. 

Last year's conference was when this deep corruption became truly evident; COP28 was held in the United Arab Emirates, which is a petrostate that pumps out 3.2 million barrels of petroleum per day and is among the world's ten largest oil producers. The President of COP28 was Sultan Al-Jaber, who is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Al-Jaber announced at COP that there is “no science” behind the call to phase-out fossil fuel use, and the amount of fossil fuel industry lobbyists quintupled from previous years, increasing from 636 at COP27 to enormous 2,456 at COP28 last year in Dubai. 

This year's conference confirms the firm and oily grip of capital. Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister (who spent 26 years as the CEO of their national oil company) and chief executive of COP29 was filmed agreeing to facilitate fossil fuel deals at the climate summit, speaking of a future that includes fossil fuels “perhaps for ever”. Furthermore, the president of Azerbaijan told the UN climate conference that fossil fuels are a “gift of god”. These facts should come as no surprise as Azerbaijan is a petro-dictatorship, with 90% of its exports being fossil fuels and a record of extreme violations of human rights and international law.

Azerbaijan has been ethnically cleansing Armenian communities in the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, using methods of violence, terror, blockades, cultural erasure, property destruction, and cutting access to food, water, and electricity. In September 2023, a military offensive caused 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee though the Lachin corridor into Armenia. A report from FreedomHouse and others concluded that Azerbaijan was guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This couldn’t be further from the progressive vision of climate justice. 

To make things worse, Azerbaijan has a thriving relationship with Israel; these two countries are intertwined in their economies of death, with Azerbaijan supplying almost 40% of Israel’s oil supply. This fuel is directly funding the Zionist war machine’s occupation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing of Palestine, as well as war crimes in Lebanon and the bombing of Iran, Yemen, and Syria. In return for this fossil energy, 69% of Azerbaijan's arms imports come from Israel, with advanced Israeli weaponry and spyware enabling the brutal repression of civilians and minorities. In the lead up to COP29, a spree of arrests took place which included journalists, activists, and political opponents, almost all of whom remain behind bars today. 

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The COP conferences have become a grotesque performance in greenwashing where rich and powerful elites engineer the coming holocaust that is climate catastrophe. A peer reviewed article published in the Energies scientific journal in 2023 states that:

“If warming reaches or exceeds 2 °C this century, mainly richer humans will be responsible for killing roughly 1 billion mainly poorer humans through anthropogenic global warming, which is comparable with involuntary or negligent manslaughter.”

Another 2023 peer reviewed article in the Bioscience journal claims that by the end of the century 

“An estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals [...] might find themselves confined beyond the liveable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change”

The Guardian published an article in which hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists were surveyed, and 77% of them expected the Earth to reach at least 2.5°C this century, with a significant number expecting 3°C or above. Furthermore, around 60% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been emitted in the last 30 years. 30 years where the devastating effects of climate collapse were well known to all, especially to the architects of neoliberal fossil capitalism.

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All of this is to say that our “world leaders” are not going to avert the climate crisis. They are actively collaborating with fossil fuel tycoons to continue economic growth and capital accumulation at the expense of our planet, and all the people on it for the foreseeable future. Let’s be clear, “climate change” is not a technological problem that can be “solved”, it is the final death project perpetrated by the ruling class, and it must be resisted at all costs. 

Yes, it’s a lot to take in. Sometimes I feel as if I should withhold talking about the apocalyptic reality of global warming, as it weighs heavy on the heart and mind. But the sooner that we come to terms with the truth, the sooner we can be activated into resistance, in whatever form that may take. I believe that the COP summits are now a distraction that only seek to stall local political organising. They are not worth our precious time and attention. 

We, the People, are the only ones who can achieve true collective liberation and systemic change. So don’t keep checking news articles about whatever is happening in Baku. Instead, talk to your friends, get involved in a community that is pushing for justice, stand in solidarity with indigenous peoples and all people suffering from oppression, make mistakes and learn from them, be creative, read, write, and don’t stop fighting for a just future. 

We have everything to lose, and a world to gain. 

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Hugh Acton