The extraordinary tale of how an oil state ended up hosting the world’s most important climate talks

It was a scene straight out of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Last month, an audience of 300 or so were flown and then bussed from Azerbaijan’s ancient capital, Baku, to Shusha, a town high in the Karabakh mountains that was captured by Azeri special forces from Armenian troops in 2020, in a battle that has become a point of intense pride for the former Soviet republic. Combat in the region would not end until 2023.

The visitors to Shusha were ensconced in a glistening new five-star hotel. Among the audience, expecting to hear about preparation for coming United Nations climate talks and Azerbaijan’s views on media disinformation, were a handful of journalists from mainstream Western publications, along with dozens of “independent journalists” and representatives of obscure think tanks from across the world. Russia, the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf states were particularly well represented.

Oil fields near Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which will host the annual COP29 global climate summit in November.Credit: New York Times

I was there because I had been invited to see Azerbaijan’s preparations to host the UN’s annual climate change talks. Known as the COP, short for Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the annual gathering has become something like a diplomatic Olympics. More than 100,000 delegates attended last year’s meeting in Dubai. It is the supreme decision-making body of the convention, and as such the most potent tool the world has to help it survive the climate crisis.

Azerbaijan, best known for its oil and gas wealth and an authoritarian approach to debate or dissent, seems an odd choice of host at first blush. Given that Australia is hoping to win the right to host the talks in 2026, and that as a result Australian officials are already closely engaged with their counterparts in Baku, Azerbaijan’s path into climate diplomacy matters in Canberra.

On day one, the conference guests were herded from their rooms into the ballroom under the stern gaze of security guards. Those who lingered were ordered via hidden loudspeakers to join their peers. After an hour or so, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev appeared on stage to thunderous applause and began a press conference that would last three hours.

As some in the audience began to wilt, Aliyev asked if they would like him to stop. “No,” roared the overwhelming majority. “Yes,” moaned a solitary man sitting towards the back underneath a bank of cameras.

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev. Credit: AP

Aliyev succeeded his father as president in 2003 and has remained in office ever since, winning every election by staggering majorities. In 2012, he was the first “Person of the Year” named by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Speaking in English, Russian, Turkish and Azeri, he graciously acknowledged the effusive praise that preceded most of the questions from selected figures in the audience, often railing at the perfidy of Western critics, particularly The Washington Post, The New York Times and the French.

In Aliyev’s view, criticism of his regime by one of these outlets is evidence of “disinformation”, whereas from two, it amounts to “organised disinformation” and can be seen as evidence of the nefarious work of “the powerful Armenian diaspora”.

But on climate change and the upcoming talks, Aliyev’s answers were revealing in their pragmatism. Oil might be accelerating the growth of his nation’s economy but climate talks, in his view, have ancillary benefits.

The event will provide Azerbaijan with a “unique chance for us to step into a higher league”, he said at one point.

“By taking these steps, we are strengthening our country to a great extent, and our COP representatives and teams are here today. They are also working very hard. I said to them that you should work hard abroad, in foreign countries, you should travel around the world so that you can convey Azerbaijan’s position and agenda to all parties.

“All the steps and initiatives we take have the main goal – to strengthen our country, increase our economic strength, further strengthen our economic and political independence and enable Azerbaijan to access the top league.”

Azerbaijan won the right to host the talks in extraordinary circumstances. COP hosts are selected by groupings of nations within the UN. This year, it is Eastern Europe’s turn, but Russia, at war with Ukraine, blocked any nation with ties to the European Union. That left the old antagonists: Azerbaijan and Armenia.

A refinery run by the state oil company, SOCAR, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, which will host the annual COP29 global climate summit in November.Credit: New York Times

The two nations quietly forged a prisoner-of-war swap and then announced to the world that Azerbaijan would host.

Fossil fuels accounted for roughly 47.8 per cent of Azerbaijan’s GDP and more than 92.5 per cent of the nation’s export revenue in 2022.

Oil has shaped Azerbaijan and its capital Baku, which sits on a peninsula jutting into the Caspian Sea, a landlocked expanse of water pock-marked by drilling platforms and, when viewed from the air, stained with the telltale rainbow slicks of spilt hydrocarbons.

For thousands of years, oil seeped from the ground around the old walled city and temples were dedicated to the worship of the “eternal pillars of fire” it fuelled.

In the early years of the 19th century, after Russian annexation, it was clumsily mined from pits in a section of Baku that would become known as Black City. Decades later in the United States, it dawned on industrialist George Bissell that what he knew as “Pennsylvania rock oil” might become the lubricant of the industrial era, and suddenly the age of oil was born.

The first oil fields to challenge the dominance of the Americans were here in Baku, where the Swedish Nobel brothers began to drill and then created the world’s first bulk oil carrier, the Zoroaster, which sailed from Baku up the Volga River to deliver its cargo to Europe.

Today, the port the Nobels used lies hundreds of metres inland, as the Caspian itself has retreated, its water level shrinking due to climate change.

The sheer size of the COP – and the greenhouse gases emitted in moving that many people – attracted criticism last year, as did the fact that not only was it hosted in a petro-state, the United Arab Emirates, but that 2456 of the accredited delegates were fossil-fuel lobbyists.

Drilling platforms in the Caspian Sea off Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.Credit: NYT

Azerbaijan’s habit of imprisoning critics has also caused concern, with Amnesty International calling for an agreement protecting human rights to be signed with the UN and published.

Back in Shusha, Aliyev dismissed the critics. His central argument is that for every nation exporting fossil fuels, there is another importing them, and that blaming one and not the other for global warming is unreasonable.

‘It is not our fault that we have oil and gas. You should not judge us by that.’

Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan President

“There’s no difference between a buyer and seller,” he said at one point. “It is not our fault that we have oil and gas. You should not judge us by that. You should judge us by how we use the revenues, how we diversify our economy, how we tackle unemployment and poverty.”

He is particularly incensed by the European Union, which is calling on Azerbaijan to produce more gas due to the shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but refusing to finance pipelines to move the gas because the EU expects demand to fall off due to the global transition from fossil fuels.

“They want us to put in additional billions, while at the same time they in the EU say that in 10 years or maybe less they will no longer need gas. So, we must be crazy to invest billions for something which they will not need, and then they look into our eyes and say, ‘Where is our gas?’ So my message is, stop this game, you know, without fossil fuels, it’s not possible to live. This is first.”

Why host a COP?

Hosting the climate Olympics is neither easy nor without risk. It is a large stage upon which any nation can fail.

The 2015 meeting that gave the world what we now know as the Paris Agreement was, in the words of Australia’s former chief climate diplomat, Professor Howard Bamsey, “a brilliant feat of diplomacy”, one which has given the world its most potent weapon to fight humankind’s “most serious common issue”.

The Atashgah, one of the ancient fire temples on the outskirts of Baku. Credit: Getty Images

But the meeting held a handful of years earlier in Copenhagen is remembered as a disaster, while veterans of the meeting in Egypt in 2022 likely recall the lack of food, water and effective plumbing inside its sprawling, baking campus as much as they do its later achievements.

Though it does not have a history of deep diplomatic engagement with the wider world since its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan under Aliyev has sought to demonstrate its capacity to hold major international events, such as the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, UEFA football matches and even the Eurovision Song Contest.

Speaking to a small group of journalists after Aliyev’s marathon press conference, the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, explained the effort.

With the end of the war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh region, Azerbaijan “would like to be part of the global agenda and to make our humble and modest contribution to address global issues and global challenges”.

This might be of little comfort to the 100,000 ethnic Armenians who had fled Nagorno-Karabakh by the end of 2023, but aligning national interest with international diplomacy is hardly new.

Next year’s COP is to be hosted by Brazil in the tiny city of Belem, in the heart of the Amazon. It is an awkward place to host a major conference, but its setting reflects the crucial importance of preserving a region known as the Earth’s lungs from land-clearing.

The city of Belem, Brazil, will host the climate talks next year. Credit: Bloomberg

Australia’s pursuit of the right to co-host the 2026 climate talks with Pacific island nations reflects the Albanese government’s view that climate change presents a dire long-term threat, but also its efforts to shore up its relationships in the Pacific as China seeks to expand its influence.

Should it succeed in securing the COP, Australia will also face criticism for its fossil-fuel exports. The Labor government might be determined to foster the transition from fossil fuels, but it is not acting to directly rein in the industry, as its Pacific neighbours would like.

Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels after Russia and the United States, but as a new analysis by Climate Analytics Australia revealed this week, comes in second in emissions due to the large proportion of coal exports.

Bamsey sees no contradiction in either Australia or Azerbaijan hosting climate talks. After all, he says, the risk of the talks failing tends to drive deeper action by those nations that host them. Besides, he says, the problem of climate change demands universal action, as does the UN treaty crafted to address it. He believes it is likely that Australia will be announced as host for 2026 at some stage during the Azerbaijan talks, and that Australian climate officials will already be working closely with their Azeri counterparts.

Meanwhile, a brave group of Azerbaijan’s civil society organisations has formed what it calls the Climate Justice Initiative, calling for the release of journalists and activists, greater emissions cuts and the passage of anti-corruption and civil liberties reforms.

Arzu Geybullayeva, an Azeri journalist now living in exile in Turkiye due to fears for her safety, agrees that her nation should not be excluded from climate talks.

“They like the attention, and they know they will get it, and they don’t really care about the criticism,” she said. “For them, it is a matter of prestige.”

She just wants the rest of the world to insist on discussing human rights, too.

Nick O’Malley’s travel was supported by Azerbaijan’s COP29 presidency.

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