COP29 | Azerbaijan defends oil

(Baku) Host of the annual UN climate conference, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, defended countries’ right to exploit their oil and gas resources on Tuesday, opening a summit of world leaders in Baku .

The leaders of developing countries, well represented at COP29, are pleading Tuesday for a historic financial agreement on aid from rich countries, but most of the G20 heads of state are absent, at the start of one of the most important climate negotiations. more difficult since the Paris agreement in 2015.

Developing countries cannot leave “empty-handed,” said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

These countries are calling for a tenfold increase or more in the annual financial aid paid by developed countries to countries in the South, currently around $116 billion per year (in 2022). Amounts considered unrealistic by Westerners who are more inclined to reduce their public spending at the moment.

A week after the earthquake of Donald Trump’s re-election in the United States, some 75 leaders are expected in Azerbaijan, with the unofficial agenda of charting the route to climate diplomacy without the world’s leading power.

This COP29, organized one year after the Dubai COP, opened on Monday with vibrant calls for international cooperation. Everyone expects Donald Trump’s United States to become, next year, the only country to leave the Paris agreement twice.

“Our process is solid. It is robust and will last,” says Simon Stiell, head of the UN climate, which is co-organizing the conference with Azerbaijan.

Tuesday, Ilham Aliev, the president of the country, the historic cradle of oil, assumed his expression “gift from God”, to designate the hydrocarbons which have made Azerbaijan rich. He recalled that the European Union had asked him to supply more gas, after the energy crisis of 2022.

“Any natural resource, oil, gas, wind, solar, gold, silver, copper: these are natural resources and countries should not be blamed for having them and providing them to the markets, because the markets need them” , said Ilham Aliyev. The “fake news media” of the United States, “the world’s leading producer” of fossil fuels, “had better look in the mirror”.

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The emissary of Democratic President Joe Biden, John Podesta, is present to reassure his partners. But the early exit of the world’s second largest polluter weakens the words of its negotiators on the permanence of American commitments.

The Europeans have certainly made it possible to persevere, but they are not rushing to Baku.

Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and the president of the European Commission are absent from the summit on Tuesday and Wednesday. The EU will notably be represented by the Hungarian Viktor Orban, who holds the rotating presidency of the Council, Andrzej Duda (Poland), Pedro Sanchez (Spain) and Giorgia Meloni (Italy).

Only a few G20 countries will be represented by a head of state or government, including the United Kingdom with its Labor Prime Minister Keir Starmer, expected to make a new commitment to reduce greenhouse gases.

“It is very important that the United Kingdom shows leadership,” he told reporters in Baku on Tuesday morning. Mr Starmer said he was “glad to work with President Trump, of course, as we do with all international leaders”.

Some 52,000 participants are expected over the two weeks of COP29, in the Olympic stadium in Baku, on the shores of the Caspian, a sea in which Azerbaijan plans a strong expansion of its natural gas production.

Certainly, between Trump’s re-election, the first day delay and the absence of several major leaders, “it’s not an ideal situation.” […] But in 30 years of COP, this is not the first time that we have faced obstacles” and “everything is still entirely possible”, the Canadian Minister of the Environment told AFP on Tuesday, Steven Guilbeault.

On Tuesday, developing countries rejected a first draft of a financial agreement.

“We cannot accept it,” Ugandan negotiator Adonia Ayebare, who chairs the G77+China group, representing more than a hundred countries, told AFP.