With the UN climate talks in full swing in Baku, new research by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) exposes the EU’s climate hyCOPrisy, using COP29 to greenwash Azerbaijan’s gas as more climate friendly so it can justify doubling imports and still claim to be a climate leader.

Documents obtained by CEO reveal a concerted lobbying campaign from the European Commission towards senior Azerbaijan officials and its national oil company SOCAR.

The EU successfully persuaded them to sign up to voluntary methane reductions through the widely-criticised voluntary Global Methane Pledge, and then to use COP29 to showcase the new commitment and present Azeri gas as “lower emissions”.

This would allow gas to keep flowing to the bloc while claiming to conform with EU climate targets.

Pascoe Sabido, researcher and campaigner, Corporate Europe Observatory: “While publicly proclaiming its own fossil fuel phase-out, the EU is hypocritically using COP29 to drive Azerbaijan’s gas expansion and whitewash its human rights abuses in the name of domestic energy security.”

Key findings include:

  • EU lobbying on the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary scheme based on industry self-reporting, ramped up after Azerbaijan was announced as COP29 hosts. Overcoming Azerbaijan’s initial scepticism, it has become key in the preparations and during the talks;
  • The EU sold the Global Methane Pledge to Azerbaijan as a financial opportunity, with members “rewarded by the market” thanks to EU ambitions “to establish a global market for lower-emission oil and gas”, with buyers choosing supplies “based on environmental impacts”;
  • The EU offered to support and co-organise prestigious high-level events on the Global Methane Pledge at COP29, telling Azerbaijan it had a “great energy story to tell”, ignoring the associated human rights abuses and ethnic cleansing;
  • The Task Force (TF3) organising many of the EU’s COP29 activities is the same one securing new gas supplies for the bloc after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including from Azerbaijan. This means meetings to discuss COP29 activities also discussed gas supplies, with SOCAR present on multiple occasions;
  • The EU’s rebranding of Azeri gas can also be seen in the recent undercover sting of COP29 chief executive, Elnur Soltanov, who discusses “sustainable oil and gas investments”;

The EU’s climate hyCOPrisy is all over the UN summit. EU negotiators have a mandate to support the “phase out of fossil fuel energy production and consumption globally”, and outside the negotiating rooms the EU is organising a Ministerial on the phase-out. Yet at the same time it is pushing Azerbaijan and other countries to increase production to meet EU needs, locking them into decades more fossil fuels and impeding their own clean energy transitions.