COP29 Reveals Itself As the Great Fraud It Always Was

BRIAN MONTEITH

WHATEVER perceptions have been conjured up in the past by the annual mega-junket that is the UN’s Conference Of the Parties on climate change, there can be no doubt this year’s COP29 descended into farce and ridicule. The puzzle is why it has taken so long for the vested interests who attend to begin to admit what it is – a massive stunt designed to fool the public into policies they would never otherwise support.

The gathering of the world’s climate politicians, zealots, hustlers and grifters in Baku, capital of Azerbaijan – of all places – has finally tipped some, like Al Gore, over the edge because it sought to avoid discussing oil and gas production while secretly discussing sponsorship opportunities from oil and gas producers. The cult of Net Zero has its own Wizard of Oz resident in Azerbaijan, and the curtain has been pulled back to reveal the fraud being played on those believing the charade.

Prior to its opening, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of COP29, was filmed by the campaign group Global Witness agreeing at the climate summit to facilitate oil or gas deals. It had posed undercover as a non-existent Hong Kong-based energy investment company willing to sponsor the event if it helped facilitate investment opportunities with Azerbaijan’s state energy firm, Socar. Mr Soltanov said he was open to discussions, including deals on oil and gas, and a few weeks later he emailed the Hong Kong front offering to help bring together the parties to a potential deal.

The latest junket of cant and hypocrisy which generates its own vast emissions had already been off to a bad start when in its planning the Azerbaijan government of President Ilham Aliyev declared the event ‘The COP of Peace’. It was not so much a lack of self-awareness from the warmongering hosts as a laughable attempt at Orwellian newspeak, equivalent to framing North Korea as the land of feasting or Cuba as the destination of choice for a Pink Floyd light-show.

It had been only a year before, in September 2023, that Azerbaijan military forces invaded the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing 100,000 ethnic Armenians and making many others political prisoners, including several ministers of the former Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan is an autocratic petrostate ruled with an iron fist by Ilham Aliyev, who took over from his father as president in 2003, following which he appointed his wife as vice-president. For context, Azerbaijan scored only seven out of 100 in Freedom House’s 2024 human-rights index – by comparison North Korea scored 3, Cuba 12, Russia 13 and the UK 91. In contrast Armenia scored 54.

After Europe announced it was abandoning Russian gas because of Putin’s war in Ukraine, the European Parliament approved sanctions against President Aliyev and other Azeri government officials over their offensive against the Armenians – but the European Commission refused to implement them.

Instead, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen flew to Baku, hailing the country as ‘a crucial energy partner’. The reason became obvious when the Financial Times and Sunday Times reported Azerbaijan had increased imports of Russian gas specifically to meet commitments made to EU countries looking for ‘non-Russian’ sources of gas in the wake of the Ukraine invasion. For many the sanctions were a pretence all along.

All this bodes ill for mainly Christian Armenia, landlocked and of no strategic significance, sandwiched between Turkey to the west and Azerbaijan to the east – with Iran at the southern end of the Caspian Sea and Russia to the northern shore.

Since the end of the Cold War and its escape from Soviet rule Armenia has been on a journey, pivoting toward the West and looking for friends. Unfortunately, so long as politicians in the UK, Europe and the US are happy to cavort with despots throwing their petrodollars around, Armenia will find doors repeatedly closing.

If Western leaders had any interest in COP29 becoming a ‘COP of Peace’ they would have insisted President Aliyev sign a peace deal with Armenia in advance of the summit and release the remaining Armenian prisoners of war and political hostages held in Baku.

But our Western leaders would rather posture on peace while closing their own energy-intensive industries and exporting those jobs to China and India while importing competitors’ products dependent on new coal-powered power stations – currently opening in China at the rate of two a week.

The hour before dawn is always the darkest and coldest, the saying goes, so it is no surprise to find the UK, irrespective of the incumbent Government party, still charging ahead looking for a world leadership role at COP29. With Ed Miliband bringing a fresh dogmatic zeal to UK Net Zero initiatives, the consequent stupendous waste of public funds was highlighted by the Daily Mail revealing the UK had 470 expenses-paid delegates at the Baku beano, compared to 405 from the US, 437 from Italy, 325 from Germany and 115 from France.

With sweet irony, COP29 coincided with the stunning victory of the climate realist Donald Trump as 47th President of the United States, giving focus to a crisis of confidence among those in the West driving toward Net Zero. Even before this seismic electoral turning point the number of academics willing to challenge the settled science of anthropogenic global warning has been rising.

Hopefully COP29 will be recognised as different from the past summits because its curtain has been pulled back to reveal all the double dealing and empty rhetoric about ‘peace’ and the climate ‘crisis’. If that strengthens the resolve of Donald Trump to admonish Western democracies for killing their own industries to the benefit of autocratic powers we’ll have at least something to thank it for.

Whatever one thinks about the role of man in creating a climate catastrophe, the West’s pursuit of Net Zero economies will achieve no impact against Asia’s drive to accelerate its use of carbon-reliant energy and industrial output. COP29 is no festival of peace, but neither will it save the planet from a climate ‘crisis’ – what it may well do is help reveal what a self-serving circus the Conference of the Parties has always been.

Could the return of Trump and the hypocrisy of COP29 make 2024 the year the West finally wakes up to its climate self-delusion? Let us hope it is the beginning of a new dawn.

This article (COP29 reveals itself as the great fraud it always was) was created and published by The Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Brian Monteith