Grass skirts, keffiyehs and the polis – Baku’s Cop29 has it all

Reuters

I wasted a good deal of time at Cop29 in Baku searching for traces of the “slave market” that Bloomberg reported had been closed down for the duration of the UN’s climate change conference.

Not a sign of it, and nobody I talked to – locals or knowledgeable expats – had any idea where it might have been.

It has obviously been very cunningly hidden, because in my many visits to the Azerbaijan capital over the past 17 years I’ve never seen anything like a “slave market”, nor heard the sound of jangling manacles in the night.

Failing to find evidence of human bondage was a disappointment, but in the end Baku’s Cop29 made up for it with an efficient and well organised event.

It was my fourth Cop in succession, and compared well with the previous three. Less anarchic than Glasgow and Sharm El Sheikh, and more manageable than Dubai’s Cop28.

Between 50,000 and 60,000 people attended each day, according to official figures, which makes Baku the second biggest Cop in history, after the UAE’s.

In Dubai my daily walking distance was up to 15km per day in hot sunshine. In Baku I averaged 8km in brisk autumnal temperatures.

And virtually all of that was under cover. The Azerbaijan authorities basically built a small town on the pitch of the Olympic Stadium (capacity 70,000) and kitted it out with plenary halls, delegate offices, meeting rooms and cavernous media facilities, all connected by miles of covered walkway.

The media corps at a Cop is a strange beast. At least half of them are “passionate about the planet”, and virtually indistinguishable from the NGOs and Pacific Island delegations, apart from the lack of grass skirts and keffiyehs (much in evidence).

The rest are mostly serious reporters chasing the biggest story of our time – the battle against climate change that everybody, apart from the most ignorant denier (and the President-elect of the USA), agrees is humankind’s top and toughest priority.

These hard-nosed hacks spend their days in Baku frantically rushing around trying to find some power to tell truth to, and somebody in authority to hold to account.

Light relief is supplied by the NGOs and activists, who have been given a pretty free hand by their Azeri hosts while in the UN jurisdiction of the Blue Zone.

Their daily gatherings outside the delegate pavilions were a case study in rabble-rousing: a wannabe “orator” with a megaphone inciting a ragtag crowd against fossil fuels, carbon markets, anybody to do with the oil and financial industries, men in general and even their Azeri hosts.

With one day of the Cop to go, nerves were taut

I didn’t see any of the activist heroes try anything like that outside the Blue Zone, where Baku’s finest, the heavily armed polis, would definitely give them short shrift. There was not a hint of a “Just Stop Oil” slow march down Neftchilar Avenue, the tree-lined boulevard that runs beside the Caspian to the Old City.

It was there, at a fantastic Azeri restaurant in Baku called Mugam Klub, that I had dinner on Thursday night with a couple of people in the thick of the Cop29 process: an official from one of the big oil-producing states that bear the brunt of the activists’ anger, and a spin-doctor on behalf of the Cop29 presidency.

With one day of the Cop to go, nerves were taut. The oil countries were getting extremely fed up of being misquoted, misattributed and generally mistreated by the international media. Poor things.

The Cop man acknowledged that the whole event was on a knife edge. A draft document circulated by the Presidency had not gone down well, lacking as it did any specific detail on the vast sums – measured in the trillions of dollars – needed to fund the energy transition, as well as any specific reference to moving away from fossil fuels, as was agreed in Dubai at Cop28.

Despite many interruptions from mobile calls and texts, the mood gradually lightened, helped by delicious Azeri food and wine. My djiz-biz – lamb’s entrails sautéed with coriander and potatoes – was excellent, washed down with some good, honest Savalan merlot.

The tension evaporated as the three of us took a stroll through the cobbled streets of Ichari Sheher.

So what if the Western media doesn’t like oil-producing countries? There was still time for Baku to pull a win out of the hat at Cop29, even if it took another couple of days of hard talk beyond the scheduled close, wasn’t there?

In the still night, I heard something – a metallic clang in the cold night air. Was that the sound of a restless slave stirring?

No, it was a security man pulling a chain across a posh driveway.

Frank Kane is Editor-at-Large of AGBI and an award-winning business journalist. He acts as a consultant to the Ministry of Energy of Saudi Arabia.