It’s high time to end this ludicrous COP jamboree – but it just won’t die
Story by Matt Ridley • 15h
There is something poetic in the way that the delegates attending the 11-day COP29 climate conference in Baku were forced to listen to their moustachioed autocrat host, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, call his nation’s gas reserves a “gift of god”. The sound of spluttering into 67,000 soy macchiatos must have been audible all the way to Nagorno-Karabakh, the region that Mr Aliyev’s government has allegedly tried to ethnically cleanse.
Mr Aliyev’s remark has prompted a letter to the UN from a clutch of the great and the good demanding that the COPs be reformed and shrunk. That would be a pity. Corrupt and conflicted as central-Asian petrostates may be, it’s nothing compared with the gift of the gods that is the climate cornuCOPia.
The delegates are there, many at our expense, to try to extract trillions of pounds in climate reparations from poor people in rich countries to send to rich people in poor countries.
Assuming they did not travel by donkey, very few of the delegates – did I mention that there are 67,000 of them? – will have paid for their own air fares. Actually, slumming it by “flying scheduled” – as they say in Succession – is for mugs: the number of private jets landing in Baku last week more than doubled to 65, compared with 32 in the same week last year.
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