COP29 leader urges US to keep climate pledges even if Trump elected

The incoming host of the next COP summit has called on the U.S. and other nations to maintain their climate commitments, even if Donald Trump is elected as president in November.

In his third media interview since being named president-elect of the COP29 summit—due to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, the week after the U.S. election—Mukhtar Babayev told Newsweek: “We hope that all the countries, including the United States, will demonstrate their readiness to fulfil their obligations, to fulfil their readiness” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Trump has premised his 2024 presidential campaign’s energy policy on increasing domestic fossil fuel production, telling supporters at a rally in January that: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill” in order to keep gas prices low.

Those close to the former president have also intimated his intention to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act—a landmark piece of Biden administration legislation that provides $500 billion in investment for the infrastructure necessary for the transition to a green economy—if re-elected.

Asked about how he might convince an incoming President Trump to maintain America’s pledges to curb emissions, Babayev responded: “I think it is [a] very critical time for the world.

“We hope that all countries will fulfil their obligations and intentions to provide [for that] 1.5 [Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] limit. That’s why I think, and I hope, that all the countries will demonstrate their readiness and—by action—their activities to provide this target.”

Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources added that his team would continue to work with the current White House administration in the lead up to COP29 on maintaining the climate agenda it had already adopted.

He also laid out his intentions for the climate conference—to secure continued cooperation on curbing global warming and broker a financing agreement for poorer countries—and urged nations to consider “all possibilities” on reducing carbon emissions amid the ongoing and environmentally costly Russian invasion of Ukraine.

From Oil and Gas to Green Growth

Critics may question why one of the world’s major fossil fuels producers is hosting a climate summit, in which its overriding purpose will be to urge other nations to cut their carbon emissions—especially a year after it was hosted by the United Arab Emirates, another oil-dependent country. Oil and gas exports accounted for 92 percent of Azerbaijan’s exports in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of State.

Climate scientists have argued that placing the spotlight on fossil fuel producers rather than ostracizing them is the only way to achieve net zero targets. But Babayev says his nation has already shown its commitment by transitioning to renewables.

“We [are] already on the way for the green growth and Azerbaijan [has] turned our economy from oil and gas, from hydrocarbons,” he said, noting the nation’s plan for 30 percent of its energy mix to be supplied by renewables by 2027.

Babayev also touted Azerbaijan’s “very strong policy” on energy efficiency programs, and said it was using revenues from its oil and gas production to invest in its burgeoning green economy—a method he suggested could be adopted by other fossil fuel-rich nations.

“For Azerbaijan, it is [a] very good opportunity to demonstrate to the world how the oil and gas country in the past can turn to the green growth direction,” the COP president-elect said.

“One of the aspects of our program [is] to invite oil and gas producing countries to see how we will use all the chances to reduce the emission, to find the investment potential for the green growth,” he added. “And again, the target for all of us is 1.5 degrees; That’s why we need to mobilize all the possible stakeholders, all the countries, to follow this limit.”

As a nation in the Caucasus, which bridges north and south and sits between Europe and Central Asia, Babayev sees Azerbaijan as having the opportunity to “be the interconnector between the developing and developed world.”

It also has not escaped notice, though, that before his government role, Babayev spent many years as an executive at the State Oil Company of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOCAR).

Asked if he was worried about the perception of a conflict of interest in his own appointment, he said: “Today, I am the minister of environment and the COP president-designate, and we have a new team, a very strong team, to develop our task. Our task today is to invite all the countries to mobilize all their efforts to provide the 1.5 limit.”

He added that SOCAR has its own program of decarbonization and had “already declared to [go] net zero for 2050.”

“Azerbaijan is [a] climate-vulnerable country and we face… climate change impacts,” Babayev noted, adding that COP29 was a “big opportunity for the country to demonstrate how we are trying to manage all these challenges.”

Conservative Conference Goals

Previous COP summits have arguably faltered in achieving their aims. COP26 in Glasgow, in the U.K., intended to “consign coal power to history,” but only managed to broker an agreement on a “phase-down” of coal use; while COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, brought no new climate targets and—even though it established a compensatory fund for developing nations—left the question of who should pay for it to the next hosts.

Babayev’s hopes for the outcome of this year’s summit are more conservative. Rather than some groundbreaking accord, he hopes merely to get nations to recommit to their prior pledges, including the Paris Agreement, which set the limit of 1.5 degrees warming.

He sees this as a necessary step for the so-called “troika” system adopted for COPs 28, 29 and 30—the last of which will be held in Brazil—in which host nations coordinate their agendas for negotiations. Babayev touts the possibility of laying the groundwork for nations to tighten their climate change performance targets in 2025.

To do this, the environment minister also hopes COP29 can make headway on how to finance the international climate fund, but admits it is “not so easy [a] task to find a conclusion on climate finance issues.”

Any climate-financing deal could face resistance from the U.S.—likely its wealthiest contributor—where many voters do not want to pay for other nations’ mitigation efforts. A 2022 Pew Research Center poll of 10,237 Americans found that 59 percent felt the U.S. doesn’t have a responsibility to provide financial assistance to developing countries to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Babayev mentioned the possibility of developing a “transparency mechanism” through which contributors will be able to track how their funding is being spent in developing nations, and said he would be travelling to Washington, D.C., at the end of April to meet with private entities and development banks about providing financing—something investors are increasingly already doing—to take some of the burden away from governments.

Limiting the Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War

As a former member of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan has had historically close relations with Russia—though these have faltered over Moscow’s occasional support for neighboring Armenia, which Azerbaijan has fought with over the past century.

At the same time, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine hasn’t only been costly in terms of human lives, but also to the environment.

Research conducted by the European Union estimated that as of July 2023, the war had caused more than $50 billion in environmental damage, leaving Ukraine facing “a compounded, multi-dimensional environmental crisis that has either exacerbated existing issues or added new ones.”

The invasion has created masses of waste, polluted the air, soil and water, and—due to the heavy machinery and munitions being used—caused an estimated 150 million tons in excess carbon emissions during the first 18 months of the war alone, according to Ukrainian figures.

So given Azerbaijan’s unique position in the world, might its greatest contribution to curbing climate change be lobbying Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring the invasion to an end?

“The main agenda for Azerbaijan [is] to invite all the countries to consider any possibilities to reduce [their] emissions,” Babayev offered diplomatically. “We need to consolidate our activities in this sphere.”

He said that not only was Azerbaijan helping “provide the energy security of Europe” through natural gas exports, after Russian exports stopped in the wake of the invasion, but “we try to use these revenues to invest more [into] green, alternative energy” to reduce the emissions impact of those exports.