COP29 climate talks opened in Baku on Monday with heightened controversy over the host country’s plans to scale up fossil fuels, while signatory countries to the Paris Agreement are attempting to get stronger commitments to reduce carbon emissions, which mainly arise from oil, gas and coal.
It coincided with former president Mary Robinson backing a campaign demanding that “fossil fuel companies pay up for their role in causing climate breakdown”.
Azerbaijan’s state oil company potentially sealed deals worth $8bn this year, according to analysis released by the environmental NGO Global Witness.
The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (Socar) has signed 25 deals with foreign firms in the year while it is hosting talks aimed at slashing fossil fuel emissions to try to avert the worst consequences of climate breakdown, it said.
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The deal making was worth close to three times as much as the contracts signed with foreign firms in the previous 12 months, it added.
“The climate crisis gets worse each year, and it seems as if each year we have another fossil fuel company using climate talks to secure pursue ever more oil and gas deals,” said Patrick Galey, senior fossil fuels investigator at Global Witness.
Socar’s aims to produce vast quantities of oil and gas for decades is directly opposed to the stated aim of UN climate talks, he said. “This conflict of interest is undermining progress towards the one thing we know will prevent climate breakdown: a rapid and fair phase-out of fossil fuels. Big polluters should have no place in this discussion. We must kick them out of these talks before it’s too late.”
Global Witness took over the cop29.com website to demand that fossil fuel companies pay up for their role in causing climate breakdown.
Mrs Robinson said: “People need money to rebuild and adapt to our increasingly extreme climate. But right now the oil and gas companies fuelling climate collapse are getting away scot-free – making immense profits from products they have known for decades would harm the planet. It’s high time we made them pay up.”
Their campaign was backed by activists and campaigns groups including Hollywood director Adam McKay; Star Wars actress Rosario Dawson; musicians Brian Eno and Jon Hopkins; and prominent climate activists including Vanessa Nakate, Kumi Naidoo and Luisa Neubauer.
Profits that fossil fuel companies make eclipse what is needed to pay for the damage caused by extreme weather events linked to climate change, Global Witness said. In 2022 the oil and gas industry made $4 trillion in pretax profits.
This is 10 times the annual cost of climate damages in developing countries – estimated to be upwards of $400 billion per year. The UN Loss and Damage Fund, designed to help poorer nations hit hardest by climate disasters, currently contains less than 0.2 per cent of this $400 billion figure,” said Alice Harrison of Global Witness.
“Oil firms love to hype up their green credentials, but in reality they only invest a tiny fraction of their profits into green energy. In 2022, only 1.5 per cent of global investments in renewables came from oil and gas firms,” she added.
Global Witness were able to acquire the cop29.com thanks to the actions of its previous owners – an Indian couple who used the domain for their family business. Although they were offered a significant sum by Azerbaijan’s COP29 team for the site, these small business owners were worried about climate breakdown, and so decided to let Global Witness have it instead, the NGO said.
Meanwhile, Taoiseach Simon Harris and Tánaiste Mícheal Martin have been criticised by People Before Profit environment spokesman Paul Murphy for failing to attend the global leaders’ summit during the opening days of COP29, while “Eamon Ryan concentrates on climate finance for developing countries rather than phasing out fossil fuels”.
“Like Biden, Putin and Xi Jingping, Simon Harris will not be attending Cop this year. While Fine Gael do not have time for climate, they do have time for campaign launches with major fossil fuel emitting companies like Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary,” he said.
Mr O’Leary’s presence at Peter Burke’s campaign launch and support for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil underlined the reason why this Government has utterly failed on climate, he said. “It refuses to take on vested polluting interests.”
“The chair of this year’s COP has already been criticised for using the event to flog Azerbaijani fossil fuels. Harris and Martin’s no-show exposes the same hypocrisy at the heart of the Government’s approach on climate. It’s ‘do as we say not as we do’ as Eamon Ryan takes the high moral ground at COP while supporting LNG infrastructure here,” Mr Murphy said.
He said: “We need an end to fossil fuels if we are to avoid catastrophe. The support from the Greens for LNG infrastructure is an utter betrayal of the reason so many supported them in the past.”
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