The irony is extreme: This year’s annual United Nations climate change summit is in Baku, Azerbaijan, the petrostate where the modern oil industry was born.
And it’s taking place in the weeks after the United States elected Donald J. Trump president on a platform of ramping up fossil fuel production and withdrawing from the global climate accord that the conference is meant to advance.
Perhaps the perfect book to capture the dissonance is Lydia Kiesling’s 2023 novel “Mobility.” It begins and ends in Baku, following its antiheroine, Bunny Glenn, through a darkly funny picaresque from her adolescence as a State Department brat in the 1990s, when Baku was at the frontier of a post-Soviet oil boom. Eventually, she takes on a Trump administration-era job as communications strategist for the oil giant BP, even as her journey is marked by some of the devastating impacts of climate change.
To glean some perspective on this strange moment in climate diplomacy, I spoke to Ms. Kiesling a few days after the presidential election.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
How did you decide on Baku as a setting?
My father was in the Foreign Service, and my family was posted to Yerevan [in Armenia] in 1997, and I knew I wanted to write about the Foreign Service experience for my second novel.
As I was reading about the Caucasus region in the late ’90s, I was struck by the different experiences that places were having depending on what their perceived utility and resources to the rest of the world were. Armenia, at the time we lived there, was incredibly poor, and there was a lot of outward migration. Meanwhile, in Baku, where there are huge natural gas and oil supplies, there was this flood of foreign mercenaries coming in.
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