Secret Video Shows Top Climate Change Conference Official Promising to Facilitate Fossil Fuel Deals

“We have now quite a lot of gasoline fields which might be to be developed.”

Oiled Up

The United Nations Convention of the Events (COP), a yearly local weather change convention the place world leaders convene to debate simply how screwed we actually are, has long been revealed to be a sham.

The grip the fossil gas business has had over the organizers and host international locations turned painfully obvious final 12 months when convention chief and Emirati oil government Sultan Al Jaber claimed that there’s “no science” behind phasing out fossil fuels to maintain international temperatures from creeping above 1.5 levels Celsius, a preposterous and self-serving declare that flies within the face of a long time of scientific proof.

And this 12 months’s COP29 local weather change convention in Azerbaijan is seemingly no completely different. A secret recording obtained by the BBC exhibits Elnur Soltanov, the chief government of the COP29 group — who additionally occurs to be the Asian nation’s deputy vitality minister and senior government on the nationwide oil and gasoline firm Socar — discussing “funding alternatives.”

“We have now quite a lot of gasoline fields which might be to be developed,” he could be heard saying within the video.

Name the COPs

Soltanov was making an attempt to woo an undercover consultant from the human rights watch marketing campaign World Witness, who advised the oil exec he represented the pursuits of a fictitious Hong Kong-based oil and gasoline firm.

“I might be comfortable to create a contact between your group and their group [Socar] in order that they will begin discussions,” Soltanov advised the faux oil operative.

None of this could come as a lot of a shock. Azerbaijan’s economic system depends massively on oil, accounting for a whopping 90 percent of its experts.

Naturally, the UN physique reacted with outrage, telling the BBC that Soltanov’s bare curiosity in furthering oil and gasoline investments was “utterly unacceptable” and a “betrayal.”

Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the signing of the historic Paris Settlement in 2015, advised the BBC that Soltanov’s conduct was “opposite and egregious” to the aim of the yearly conferences, and a “treason.”

Final 12 months’s COP28 convention become a counterproductive circus, because the BBC revealed at the time, with the United Arab Emirates utilizing scheduled conferences for “non-public” oil and gasoline enterprise talks.

In different phrases, claiming these summits are designed to “measure progress and negotiate multilateral responses to local weather change” is in some ways deceptive and disingenuous.

The type of investments Soltanov is encouraging, in any case, straight contradict the promise nations made eventually 12 months’s local weather change convention after they agreed to transition away from fossil fuels.

Briefly, COP29 feels like little greater than a discussion board for oil and gasoline executives to strike new offers — and world leaders to make vacuous guarantees typically with out taking any significant motion.

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