Oil and gas are “gifts from God” and the countries that possess them should not be blamed, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev claimed this Tuesday when receiving some 75 leaders at the COP29 climate summit.
Poor countries, which make up the majority at the 29th climate conference, should not leave it empty-handed, declared UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The two speeches, which followed one another on the COP29 rostrum, reflected the great contrast in the attitude towards natural resources that divides the international community.
“Oil, gas, wind, sun, gold, silver, copper, all… are natural resources and countries should not be blamed for having them or for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them “Aliev said.
“You can quote me when I say it is a gift from God. I want to repeat it here today, before this audience,” he declared.
Although climatologists and environmentalists insist that hydrocarbons are incompatible with the fight against climate change, Aliev recalled that the European Union itself asked him two years ago to double Azerbaijani gas exports.
“They asked us for help and we said yes, we would help Europe with its energy security,” he recalled.
Guterres spoke after the host president, to allude to the essential objective of this COP29, which brings together nearly 53,000 participants: achieving new financing for the climate fight.
Currently, industrialized countries, which developed thanks to fossil fuels, provide in the form of loans and aid, bilaterally or through international institutions, just over 100 billion dollars annually to developing countries.
This money is used to mitigate climate change and adapt to its consequences.
Now it is about increasing the figure at least ten times more, say vulnerable countries and experts.
“Developing countries must not leave Baku empty-handed. An agreement is essential,” Guterres said.
The Baku climate summit, which will also continue on Wednesday, only includes a handful of leaders from the G20, the club of the world’s main economies.
COP29 started on Monday with difficulties: the approval of the agenda required a whole day of deliberations, although in the end the climate diplomats managed to approve rules to organize the carbon market, an issue that had been pending for almost a decade.
The Baku meeting almost coincides with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which will take place in Lima from November 14 to 16, and which will be attended by the American Joe Biden and the Chinese Xi Jinping.
Missing from the Baku meeting will be Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, among others.
In the United States, the president-elect, Donald Trump, is a declared skeptic of climate change, a defender of fossil energies as part of his country’s sources of supply, without disparaging clean ones.
That discourse is maintained by other oil-producing countries, including Brazil.
Azerbaijan is the second hydrocarbon-rich country to host a COP, after the United Arab Emirates last year.
But as the leader of the world’s leading power, Trump goes further and is hostile to the great 2015 Paris Agreement that laid the foundations for the current climate negotiations.
The United States already briefly abandoned that agreement during Trump’s first presidency.
The world is on track to break its average temperature record in 2024, as happened last year.
The head of the UN Climate organization, Simon Stiell, in his speech at COP29 in Baku on November 11, 2024
Alexander NEMENOV
One of the pillars of the Paris Agreement is to ensure that this increase in the average temperature of the planet does not exceed +1.5 ºC, something that will happen for the first time this year, according to the European climate observatory Copernicus.
And at the same time, the world does not stop its consumption of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), which guarantee greater stability and speed of combustion, at the expense of pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases. .
