{"id":49808,"date":"2024-01-04T17:19:37","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T17:19:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/?p=49808"},"modified":"2024-01-17T11:02:09","modified_gmt":"2024-01-17T11:02:09","slug":"azerbaijan-appoint-state-oil-company-veteran-as-cop29-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/2024\/01\/04\/azerbaijan-appoint-state-oil-company-veteran-as-cop29-president\/","title":{"rendered":"Azerbaijan appoint state oil company veteran as Cop29 president"},"content":{"rendered":"

The government of Azerbaijan has appointed its environment minister Mukhtar Babayev to be the president of the Cop29 climate talks in Baku in November.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Babayev will chair the talks, Azerbaijan’s deputy foreign minister Yalchin Rafiyev will be his lead negotiator, according to<\/a> the Cop28 presidency.<\/p>\n

Babayev spent 26 years at Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil and gas company Socar, where he tried to limit the company’s environmental damage, before becoming environment minister in 2018.<\/p>\n

One negotiator who met Babayev recently described him as “nice” and “soft” but added “you don’t feel the authority and status like from [Cop28 president] Sultan [Al-Jaber], I don’t feel he is an independent person able to push for phasing out fossil fuels globally”.<\/p>\n

Rafiyev is a newcomer to climate diplomacy. He did not attend the Cop26<\/a> or Cop27<\/a> climate talks and his active X (formerly known as Twitter) account<\/a> has only mentioned climate change once in over six years.<\/p>\n

Babayev will be the 24th man – and the fourth man in a row – to chair the Cop climate talks compared to only five women.<\/p>\n