For the second year in a row, the UNFCCC’s international climate talks will be led by a man with intimate ties to the fossil fuel industry. Mukhtar Babayev, ecology and national resource minister in Azerbaijan, will preside over COP29 this fall. Babayev’s career includes 24 years as an executive at Socar, the country’s state-controlled oil and gas company.
This announcement on X by the UAE presidency comes after Sultan bin Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), served as president of last year’s COP28 in Dubai.
COP28 concluded with an agreement to transition away from fossil fuels — representing the first time the words fossil fuels had even been mentioned in formal text. The Dubai declaration, however, contains huge loopholes that allow fossil fuel producers to continue expanding their production and exportation of fossil fuels.
US Climate Envoy John Kerry had called Al Jaber a “terrific choice” to lead the Dubai talks.
"It is time to demand a thorough overhaul of the entire COP process and leadership structure," said University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. "There is too much at stake to allow for the continuation of this pattern of corruption."
"There's a sense of déjà vu setting in - we now have a former oil executive from an authoritarian petrostate in charge of the world's response to the crisis that fossil fuel firms created," said Alice Harrison from Global Witness.
"We again call for the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] to urgently intervene and kick big polluters out of climate talks, to ensure the talks are held in good faith, and to remove those people who want to make a profit at the expense of the world's most vulnerable people." www.bbc.com/...
Since annual COPs began in the 1990s, the fossil fuel industry has been widely represented at the annual negotiations with hundreds of lobbyists in attendance annually. Last year, nearly 2,500 were in attendance in Dubai.