Oil for one, and oil for all
Another largely unmentionable subject at COP29 was that Azerbaijan is a petrostate.
At CDN we don’t necessarily mean it in a bad way because we don’t believe oil and gas are setting the Earth on fire. On the other hand, it’s not a way of funding government that seems especially conducive to democracy.
But it’s also worth pondering what the impact would be on the peoples of the Earth, especially the poor, including indeed the mostly poor people of Azerbaijan to pick one example, if the delegates really did breezily achieve their goal of “moving away from fossil fuels”. Especially since in that case they’d mostly be stuck here among people to whom, so far as we could tell, they gave no attention.
We might have advised them to look out the window to see the teeming masses they claimed to be so concerned with. Alas, in a fitting metaphorical twist the venue had no windows.
It was literally as well as figuratively a hermetically sealed “homo conferensis” event where an ideologically and sociologically homogenous if nationally diverse group went to a typical airport, took a taxi to a typical hotel.
Then another to a typical conference venue, met with people they resembled and often already knew, said things they’d already said, then did it all in reverse and waited to do it again.
The taxi portion was a bit different because normally conference-goers at least get harangued with some misrepresentation of the local situation on their way between pods.
But Azerbaijan is remarkable for the vanishingly small proportion of its population who are sufficiently “Westernized” to speak even a few fragmentary sentences in English.
And that situation in turn, though most delegates seem to have no more idea of it than they do how to pronounce the odd Latin-based but heavily modified phonetic alphabet, has to do with the ways in which Azerbaijan has not been blessed by history.
Certainly not like Canada, whatever mess we have made of our blessings. Azerbaijan is small, smaller than all but three of Canada’s provinces.
And it is way the heck and gone. You may think it’s an exotic locale like Samarkand or Timbuktu. But while the latter is technically in North Africa not central Asia, it was once on a key trade route as Samarkand was on the Silk Road.
Azerbaijan by contrast, on the west side of the Caspian Sea east of the Anatolian plateau, isn’t really on the way to or from anywhere. Despite which it has been stomped over repeatedly by invaders who were, arguably, themselves lost.
It was at one time under the iron heel, or something similar but shabbier, of “Caucasian Albania”, speaking of lost. And of what Wikipedia breezily, or for want of more precise information, called “Various Persian empires”.
It was briefly fought over by the Romans and Parthians though alas, the latter won. Which might explain the curiously common appearance of modern Styrofoam busts of Caesar in stores and elsewhere, though we don’t know because of the aforementioned issue of nobody speaking English.
Later it was part of the vast Muslim Arab conquests of the 7th century, got caught up in petty wars beyond counting, enjoyed a prolonged period of semi-independence under the Shirvanshah dynasties from the 9th into the 16th centuries despite them getting rumbled by the Mongols then Tamerlane and the Seljuks and Ottomans.
Then it was under Qajar Iran, whatever that even was, before being grabbed by Russia in chunks between 1804 and 1828.
In consequence it underwent some second-hand modernization including rudimentary schooling.
And (stay with us because we promise all this history relates to climate, COP29 and modernization) in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution it made a break for it, in 1918, but was seized back by the Russian Communists again just two years later.
And was stuck with them and their Five-Year Plans and obsession with cement as a substitute for genuinely spontaneous development beneficial to actual people for the next 71 years before again breaking free (after a momentous massacre of pro-independence Azeris still bitterly remembered on “20 Janvar”) and sort of ditching the Cyrillic alphabet for a sort of Latin one.
Now it is surely obvious, among other things, that there’s no way the place would have become the “Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic” of its own accord. But there’s a lot else of which the same could be said, and might in the proper place.
Here we want to note that prior to Russian conquest it was desperately poor, so poor that trade with pre-Emancipation Tsarist Russia brought dazzling advances in wealth.
But while a certain amount of money then flowed in with the discovery of massive, easily-accessed oil resources around Baku in the 1870s (they said in Baku it “rained oil” and one whiff makes you believe it), most of it flowed right back out again, albeit under the Soviets with cement flowing back in.
As Wikipedia delicately put it, “Modernisation – compared to the neighboring Armenians and Georgians – was slow to develop amongst the Tatars of the Russian Caucasus.”
Moreover in those days the cosmopolitans spoke Russian and the really lucky ones got Ladas, which are still here in large numbers looking as shabby as, well, Ladas, and smelling bad in traffic too.
As for Azerbaijan, now it’s genuinely independent and acts like a country, joining the UN and according to Wikipedia 37 other international organizations, having ministries and big pictures of a dead president and an Olympic Stadium (or Olimpiya Stadionu) despite never having hosted the Olympics and so on.
But the truth is, the place is still very poor, beset by one-party dynastic rule, very raggedly modernized, with virtually all its institutions Western imports and many of its words (often via Russian, as in “avto” and “restaran” though “servis” and “polis” and “ambulans” seem to have come in more directly) and its one big hope not just for prosperity but a successful transition to “modernity”, aka “Westernization” remains hydrocarbon energy, which provides a third of their economy and 90% of their exports.
(Its other big traditional export is salt, which won’t carry the export freight if they chuck the oil rigs into the Caspian Sea, already a desolate mess.) Should they refuse to sell it?
They certainly aren’t going to. At COP29 their president startled delegates, though surely they should have seen it coming, by calling fossil fuels “a gift of the God” that it is sensible to bring to market, adding “we must be realistic” before shaking hands with UN Secretary-General António Guterres who retorted from his perch by the public trough that “doubling down on fossil fuels is absurd”.
Well, no. Not if you’re Azerbaijan. And not just them. In some sense it’s just that Azeris, like everyone else, need oil and gas to power their lives, cook their food, heat or cool their homes and get around. But much more than most nations, even other energy giants like Canada, they need it to power their economy.
You can’t drink the tap water there. The roads are a mess, the one big city is afflicted with Soviet-era dinginess, and nearby shepherds and their ferocious dogs keep watch over flocks stalked by wolves (or “canavarlar” in Azerbaijani). The Caspian Sea is an ecological catastrophe.
The big tourist draw is the mud volcanoes, which are cool but honestly not spectacular. However even the normal ones often leak oil, and there are also specific oil volcanoes. The one thing this place has going for it is oil.
What in the God’s name does anyone expect the people to do here to make a living if homo conferensis blithely shuts it all down before catching the last plane to Rio for COP30? Perhaps there are answers, including we don’t care because the climate crisis is so bad. But not even to ponder it suggests that some people’s compassion strikingly resembles callousness.
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