More than 67,000 delegates are in Baku, Azerbaijan, to attend the United Nations’ annual climate summit. Brazil alone sent nearly 2,000 people, and Turkey more than 1,800. Both China and the United Arab Emirates credentialed close to 1,000 delegates. The United Nations itself sent hundreds of “observers” on behalf of both U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and specialized agencies. While off the peak attendance of last year’s Dubai summit, this year’s Conference of the Parties is still more than 300% larger than the Madrid iteration four years ago and more than four times higher than the pre-COVID-19 conferences.
There is normal hypocrisy, and then there is John “[private jets are] the only choice for somebody like me,” Kerry hypocrisy — but all pale in comparison to U.N. hypocrisy. The private and jumbo jets ferrying delegates to Baku, the idling sedans and limousines, the steak dinners and caviar mock any pretense that their climate concern is real.
In reality, the annual environmental conference is glorified tourism under the guise of activism. Nothing occurs in Baku that the U.N. could not conduct online and in video breakout sessions at a tiny fraction of the cost and carbon footprint.
The same is true for almost every other U.N. conference. U.N. employees often fly first or business class. If the U.N. went online, it could slash not only its travel expenses but administrative ones as well. Guterres and his top deputies could spend less time on the road and more time focused on reform and efficient operations. After all, seldom do they say anything beyond predictable pabulum they could deliver remotely.
The U.N. penchant for conferences also has human rights ramifications. According to Freedom House, Azerbaijan is today one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, with freedom on par with the Taliban’s Afghanistan. It has not yet become North Korea, but every year it grows closer.
Azerbaijan bid to host COP29 for cynical reasons. Partly, the Aliyev regime that owns many hotels directly profits from filling them. Part of Azerbaijan’s bid had to do with deflection. Azerbaijan is a highly polluting petro-state that lags behind neighboring Armenia and Georgia in environmental protection. President Ilham Aliyev also hoped to use the conference to reinvent Azerbaijan and change the conversation from its ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh, its imprisonment and torture of that region’s elected leadership, and its persecution of Christians.
Opening the COP29 summit on Nov. 12, Aliyev declared that the international choice of Azerbaijan to host was “a sign of respect for our country and means an appreciation of our active role in the international arena.” This, of course, is wishful thinking and a demonstration of how dictators cynically use the U.N. to whitewash their human rights records. If Guterres wished to wrap himself in a mantle of human rights stewardship, he would demand all candidates to host U.N. confabs first empty their political prisons.
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On Nov. 22, COP29 delegates will issue their final statement. They will pat themselves on the back. Many will board private jets home. Within days, all but a few will forget the document. Aliyev will be tens of millions of dollars richer, and both environmental and human rights abuses will increase as Aliyev believes the false patina of environmental stewardship gives him space to further abuses without consequence.
Moving environmental conferences online would end U.N. climate hypocrisy and could serve as a test to curtail U.N. jet-setting and shrink the administrative bureaucracy that supports that lifestyle. The best legacy for COP29 would be not its final declaration, but rather an announcement that it would be the U.N.’s last mass conference.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.