Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, whose country is hosting the COP29 climate summit this week, lashed out at Western media and climate activists on Tuesday for criticizing his country’s oil and gas industries.
Aliyev said oil and gas were a “gift from God,” fossil fuels cannot be eliminated entirely, and climate extremists have subjected Azerbaijan to a “well-orchestrated campaign of slander and blackmail.”
Aliyev said all of these things during his keynote address to the COP29 conference, enraging many of the attendees, even though he said he was committed to a gradual transition away from carbon-emitting energy production.
“As a president of COP29 of course, we will be a strong advocate for green transition, and we are doing it. But at the same time, we must be realistic,” he said.
Aliyev was unapologetic about the importance of fossil fuels to his national economy. About 90 percent of Azerbaijan’s exports are oil and gas products, and the revenue from those industries supplies 60 percent of his government’s funding.
“Oil, gas, wind, sun, gold, silver, copper – all are natural resources, and countries should not be blamed for having them, and should not be blamed for bringing these resources to the market, because the market needs them,” he said.
“Quote me that I said that this is a gift of God, and I want to repeat it today here at this audience,” he declared.
Aliyev blamed “Western fake news” for creating a false impression of Azerbaijan’s carbon emissions.
“Fake news media of the country which is the number one oil and gas producer in the world and produces 30 times more oil than Azerbaijan, call us ‘petrostate.’ They better look at themselves,” he said. He was referring to the United States, which currently produces a little under 15 percent of the world’s crude oil, slightly edging out Saudi Arabia.
Aliyev also had strong words for “so-called independent NGOs (non-governmental organizations)” and “some politicians” who have been “competing in spreading disinformation and false information about our country.” He called out European politicians as hypocrites for buying Azeri gas even as they criticized its energy industry.
Aliyev’s combative keynote address was regarded as sheer heresy by the COP29 crowd, even though his basic point about making careful use of fossil fuels during a green energy “transition” was not outside the mainstream.
Soon after Aliyev spoke, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took the stage to denounce “doubling down on fossil fuels” as blasphemous.
“The sound you hear is the ticking clock. We are in the final countdown to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and time is not on our side,” he said.
This was typical climate alarmist rhetoric from Guterres, since not even the much-touted Paris Agreement actually says anything about ticking clocks or firm climate targets – the widely-touted 1.5C figure is a 20-year average, not a doomsday deadline that will be hit in a year or two.
The world’s worst polluter, China, has already admitted it will badly miss its Paris Agreement climate targets.
Aliyev’s charges of hypocrisy ring true because every nation outside the Western alliance has announced it has no intention of compromising its industrial agenda in the name of climate change. Aliyev is not really any more intransigent than other leaders in the developing world, such as the nations of the China-led BRICS alliance – he just had the bad form to speak bluntly in the keynote speech at a climate conference his country was hosting.
On Sunday, Azerbaijan said it would increase gas production to meet demand from the European Union and it refused to commit to a climate plan. Chief climate negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev argued that Azerbaijan’s plan to increase its domestic reliance upon clean energy from 1.5 percent to 30 percent should be good enough.
Even before Aliyev spoke, many climate activists were unhappy with the choice of Azerbaijan as a host country. Last week, the BBC reported on a “secret reporting” that appeared to show the chief executive of Azerbaijan’s team for COP29, Elnur Soltanov, discussing “investment opportunities” with a climate activist posing as a natural gas investor.
“We have a lot of gas fields that are to be developed,” Soltanov, who is Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and sits on the board of its national energy company SOCAR, said in the recording.
Rafiyev refused to comment on the Soltanov video on Sunday, saying only that his team would “continue our negotiation process in the same way.”
