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Yes, it’s another petrostate. But that’s just the beginning.
When the announcement came that COP29 will be held in Baku in 2024, the immediate reaction in the climate community was “again?!”
It wasn’t that Azerbaijan — a nation of about 10 million people, situated on the Caspian Sea at the southern tail of the Caucasus mountains — had hosted the global climate summit before. Actually, it almost didn’t get the 2024 hosting gig at all: COP29 was briefly homeless after Russia vowed to block Bulgaria’s bid (because Bulgaria is part of the European Union) and longtime enemies Azerbaijan and Armenia vowed to block each other’s bids (because of what many have characterized as an ethnic cleansing). Other nations in the region balked at the sheer size of what the COP event has become. At one point, even Australia and Bonn, Germany, were on the table as potential COP29 replacements if the Eastern European bloc couldn’t pull things together.
But, rather amazingly, it did. That means — as countless headlines have blared, and as you’re undoubtedly already aware — that the United Nations summit intended to assess and progress the goal of limiting climate change will be held in an oil and gas-producing state for the third consecutive year. Cue the groans.
That is reason enough for hand-wringing, especially after a record turn-out of fossil fuel lobbyists at the convention this year, not to mention the scandal over the head of ADNOC leading the whole shebang. But if you thought all that was absurd and disturbing, wait until you hear about Azerbaijan.
“It’s stunning to me that they would make Baku the next place for COP,” Ronald Suny, a distinguished professor emeritus of History at the University of Michigan and an expert on the South Caucasian nations who’s written extensively about Azerbaijan, told me.
Yes, Azerbaijan is a petrostate. But more alarmingly, it is also even more repressive and authoritarian than the United Arab Emirates based on the scale developed by Freedom House, a human rights watchdog group. “Azerbaijan is not even a one-party state,” Suny explained. “It’s a one-person or one-family state.”
To make a long and complicated history very short, former First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev came to power after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1993 and eventually passed his title of head of state onto his onlyson, Ilham Aliyev, in “irregular” elections in 2003. Ilham Aliyev is still president today, and will remain so indefinitely. “There’s no dissent allowed,” Suny said. “There’s absolute control of the media — much stricter than Russia. Anyone who criticizes [the government] is either in jail or in exile. And lots of people are in jail.”
On the one hand, having COP29 in Baku could be viewed as a small positive. “For years, climate change has been a factor…in wars and conflicts,” reads one effusive lead paragraph in The Associated Press. “Now for the first time, it’s part of a peace deal.” True, the attention from the UN helped to spur a prisoner exchange and peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia following renewed bloodshed over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region earlier this fall. It’s also likely that Azerbaijan will be on its best behavior ahead of the UN convention, given that it’s now under a higher-than-usual level of international scrutiny. Giving Baku the convention “is not necessarily a bad thing,” argues Rashmee Roshan Lall, an international affairs columnist, on her blog, “because it shows that COPs reflect the diversity of the world in which we live and seek to preserve.”
But allowing COP29 to happen inAzerbaijan also helps to legitimize and sanitize Ilham Aliyev’s rule. This is why other authoritarian regimes from Russia to Saudi Arabia to Qatar and Dubai have vied to host global events such as the soccer World Cup and the Olympics. Since 2012, Baku has played host to the Eurovision Song Contest, the First European Games, and the Formula 1 Grand Prix, according to Gubad Ibadoghlu, a senior policy analyst at Azerbaijan’s Economic Research Center, writing for the website Crude Accountability. The government in Baku explicitly “tries to whitewash its damaged image in the international arena by ‘paying attention to modernization’ and by creating connections with global leaders in the sphere of sports and culture,” Ibadoghlu said.
Suny sees the same thing happening now with COP. “It could be that Azerbaijan, which has tried and worked very hard to refurbish and beautify its image, will benefit from such an event and will be happy to put on a good face,” he said. And as Ibadoghlu pointed out, Azerbaijan has spent a huge amount of money on this program over the years. “It’s a very rich state and it can divert its resources — because it certainly doesn’t go into the people — to building extraordinary buildings,” Suny added. By allowing COP to be held in a country that viciously cracks down on dissent and free speech, then, the UN is not only turning a blind eye to but actively assisting what is basically a twisted form of greenwashing.
Curiously, estimates indicate that Azerbaijan might not be an oil state for much longer. The nation is expected to deplete its supply and sole source of wealth within the next 25 years — an involuntary phase-out by 2050, if you will. According to a World Bank report published two weeks ago, “urgent action on climate” — including investing in renewable energy, prioritizing energy efficiency, and climate-proofing its agricultural sector — “can help Azerbaijan minimize the risks emerging from the global low-carbon transition and protect the living standards of its people.”
In that sense, at the least, Baku needs COP. Now we have to wait to see what it does with its chance.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.