You could see them if you tried: on paintings hung on cafe walls, tucked among arrays of souvenir ornaments and plastic knick knacks, blinking on the horizon of the Caspian. There they were: behind and beside and below the signs reading “Solidarity for a Greener World.” They were there in Elnur Soltanov’s excitement about the promise of “investment opportunities” to come out of COP. Soltanov: the Azeri deputy energy minister, board member of Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, and head of Azerbaijan’s COP29 team. Soltanov the oil man.
There they were: holding up those curving glass skyscrapers, the fin de siècle facades along the boulevards that once gave Baku a reputation as the Paris of the East. They were in the six-story waterfront mall. The smog in our lungs. The delays. The promises. The handshakes. In the Baku Olympic Stadium where all those hands were shaken, sticking out of the smog like a gargantuan championship ring: an ostentatious, gaudy, glittering thing.
At the start of the 20th century, over half the world’s oil flowed through Baku. While the Soviet era muted economic and cultural expansion, the post-collapse market brought about a new boom that has resulted in gross wealth inequality and massive corruption. Transparency International reports that in 2023 one in seven Azeris were forced to pay brides to access public services. Specific statistics on wealth inequality are hard to find—and evidence of this inequality, at least in my experience at COP29, was harder to see than I had expected. The Azeri government forcibly displaced the thousands of unhoused folks, itinerant workers, and street vendors who typically gather in central Baku in search of meager wages. We did, however, see plenty of Gucci and Prada and lip filler.
The oil rigs pumping money into Azeri banks did a wonderful job obscuring the lived violences of petrocapitalism — as did, I can imagine, police bludgeons.
And yet, here I am: in a position of privilege, a vantage from which I have gotten a good glimpse at the rig itself. I have seen the false “freedom” it engenders: the right to ask questions but not to critique. The right to protest but only at this time and in this place. Be sure to keep your voices down (the rich need their beauty rest). The right to roam freely but not to get in the way of those important, briefcase carrying men in suit and ties, charging through the crowd at COP29, hollering at us to move, move, move out of the way.
And again: here I am: inside the institution, in the shadow of the rig. Doing so was like being washed in the umbra of the moon. It’s an eerie feeling. It made the hair on my neck stand up and my senses go fully alert. With this electric consciousness, I am fully realizing the opportunity afforded to me, which is the opportunity to study the mechanisms and language that gets those slick gears grinding. I am in the shadow but not beholden to it. In fact, I am, more than ever, animated against it.
Nick is a Climate Generation Window Into COP delegate for COP29. To learn more, we encourage you to meet the full delegation, support our delegates, and subscribe to the Window Into COP digest.
Nick Kleese is an Iowa farm kid turned literacy educator. Nick serves as the Associate Director of Community Engagement at the Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota, Managing Editor for Climate Literacy in Education, and Editor at Climate Lit. He is also Co-Founder of KidLitLab! He has taught middle school and high school English, undergraduate children’s literature courses, and outdoor immersion experiences for kindergarteners. His current research explores the role young people’s literature and media could play in advancing an interspecies democracy.