What COP29 Was Really Like – Liberty Sentinel

BAKU, Azerbaijan — It was hard to find the COP29 climate summit through all the oil rigs in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

My colleague Alex Newman, a senior editor for The New American magazine, and I were on site reporting at the UN’s 29th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) climate summit from November 13-16, 2024.

The entire conference had a veneer of “saving the planet” from alleged “man-made climate change.” But once the curtain was pulled back, it became clear that the climate movement and COP29 have nothing to do with bettering the environment and everything to do with globalism. 

Going Off the Prepared Path 

A petrostate roughly the size of Maine, Azerbaijan borders the Caspian Sea and is sandwiched between Russia and Iran. Ninety percent of the nation’s exports are petroleum products, and as I looked out the airplane window while we descended upon the capital city of Baku, I saw countless offshore oil rigs. 

QR codes were posted all over the airport soliciting visitors to “Offset your travel carbon footprint.” For our journey, the UN suggested that we donate $115.42 to their “high impact climate initiatives” to make up for our CO₂ emissions. 

While preparing to leave the airport, Newman and I debated whether or not we should grab our reserved rental car. As we were in an Islamic-Marxist dictatorship known for its hostility toward journalists, the thought of wrestling with the country’s legal system over a violation of traffic laws or an unforeseen automotive accident led us to decide to not acquire the vehicle. 

We decided to hail a taxi or hop on a UN bus instead. Suddenly, though, a sweaty Azeri man named Usef rushed up to us, holding a sign saying “Alex Newman.” He was from the rental-car company and just happened to bump into us on our way out. Seeing this as quite a coincidence, we decided to go with it. Perhaps having the car would be to our benefit. 

Quickly, Newman and I discovered that private transportation in Azerbaijan is rather difficult. Nearly every journalist and attendee opted for UN buses and taxis for travel, which exclusively traversed pristinely manicured roads swept by poor-looking Azerbaijanis. The city of Baku prepared “COP29 lanes” on the highway where “green” buses would shuttle delegates, NGOs, observers, activists, and press from their hotels to the conference. 

Newly erected walls lined the roads, blocking any view of the outside world, alongside fresh greenery that looked as though it was just planted. 

Our transportation independence allowed us to see what was behind those walls and beyond the path prepared for COP29 attendees.

Drill, Baby, Drill 

We packed our gear, straightened out our ties, and headed to COP29 after getting some rest from two days of travel and enduring a nine-hour time change. Satellite navigation in Azerbaijan is weak at best, but we were able to find a few routes to make it to the Baku Olympic Stadium, where the summit was held. 

By accident, Newman and I took an alternative route to the convention center, driving through what can only be described as slums and extreme poverty. Packs of wild dogs roamed the streets and children set up wooden carts to sell fish caught from the Caspian Sea. On this route, there were no COP29 bus lanes, neatly manicured flowerbeds, or walls to hide communities. We were in the real, non-UN-approved Azerbaijan. 

As we drove down the road, we started to see steel on the horizon, moving slowly up and down for as far as the eye could see. Slowing down and pulling off to the side, we found ourselves surrounded by red- and blue-painted pumpjacks extracting liquid gold.

A randomly placed COP29 sign was planted among the pumpjacks. Seeing this as an incredible opportunity to take a photograph, I discreetly pulled out my camera and snapped a few shots, an action that could have landed us in serious trouble. The UN and the Azerbaijani government sent out an email to the press before the conference, instructing all attendees to keep their photography, videography, and journalism within the walls of the convention center. If you wanted to go beyond that, you had to register the activity with the Azerbaijani government. To further send home the point, large signs were posted in the oil fields depicting a crossed-out camera and demanding that no photos be taken. 

The UN worked hand-in-glove with the Azerbaijani government to conceal the nation’s oil industry and redirect all attendees to their “yellow brick road” route to COP29. If we did not get our rental car, we would have never seen what the UN was trying to hide from the world. 

It might appear hypocritical that the UN would host a summit dedicated to phasing out oil and gas in a nation that literally exists because of oil and gas. But when you consider that the agenda is not environmental action but political action to achieve a one-world government, a proposition the Azerbaijani regime approves of, the scam becomes apparent.  

Behold, the Whale 

“There is no parking,” a UN volunteer told us in broken English as we searched for a place to park our rental car at the Olympic Stadium. How could there be no parking for an event that welcomes more than 60,000 people from all over the world? According to Newman, who has been attending COP events for more than a decade, parking is typically available. At COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, parking space was plentiful and very close to the event center. 

This roadblock allowed us to go and see a spectacle that made international news: a sperm whale carcass found beached along the Caspian Sea just miles away from COP29. We didn’t know the exact location of the creature, but I was able to locate the scene using an image from social media that showed recognizable Baku skyscrapers in the background.  

The 52-foot sperm whale was lying near a sidewalk in the downtown area, gated off and surrounded mainly by confused Azeri people. Individuals wearing white jumpsuits bearing a seal that read “International Whale Association” (IWA) were taking samples of the mammal and fielding questions from anyone who showed curiosity. 

“We found him three days ago,” one of the scientists told us. “He was swimming here around in the Caspian Sea, which is an incredible fact because they don’t live here.”

When pressed about the whale’s cause of death, the scientist said, “It has something to do with climate change…. It is certainly a sign that we have problems climate-wise worldwide.” He said it was a “good coincidence that the whale is here during the COP29.”

The scientist refused to touch our microphone or shake our hands because he did not want to contaminate us with the bacteria from the whale. We asked him what his name was, and if IWA had a website; he became uncomfortable and invited us into their trailer nearby to talk in private. We climbed into the trailer; he shut the door, took off his gloves, and shook our hands. “I’m actually a jazz pianist,” the “scientist” told us. He explained that the whale is an art exhibit that travels around the world, attempting to incite fear among those who look upon the fake carcass. 

We pressed for more information. He said he was from Belgium and that the stunt was a project conducted by a group called Captain Boomer Collective. He grabbed a piece of sheet music and scribbled some websites on the back of it. “Don’t give out the website in the video,” the actor said, “otherwise, people will find out this is a hoax.” 

The “beached whale is a gigantic metaphor for the disruption of our ecological system,” Captain Boomer Collective’s website states. “People feel their bond with nature is disturbed. The game between fiction and reality reinforces this feeling of disturbance.”

As to why they do it, the group says that “it stirs and mobilizes a local community” to take climate action and that the deception creates “funny games.” We observed some of those “games” when the Azeri people walked away genuinely believing that a 52-foot, wretched-smelling sperm whale washed up on their beach because of climate change (ignoring the fact that there is no way a sperm whale, or any whale for that matter, could have gotten into the landlocked Caspian Sea, thousands of miles from their natural habitat). 

The “scientist” actors knew nothing about actual threats to whales, such as wind turbines. While in Baku, Newman and I caught up with Craig Rucker, the president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), whose organization filed a lawsuit in March 2024 against Dominion Energy to stop the construction of wind turbines in Virginia. 

“Since they’ve started the pile driving, where they need to pound the ocean and put these platforms in, there has been a 400-percent increase in whale deaths that have occurred, beachings, and everything else,” Rucker told Newman. If wind turbines are not stopped, he said, we might see the wiping out of entire species such as the endangered right whale. 

The Azerbaijani government worked with Captain Boomer Collective to make this hoax possible and incite fear in passersby while drumming up media attention. Rather than this stunt accomplishing what its conspirators wanted — creating fear that the world is collapsing under climate change — it serves to expose the UN’s agenda and its method of imposing it. 

The climate-change narrative is not about the environment, whales, or CO₂ — it is about control. The UN uses fake crises, such as this beached-whale hoax, to instill fear. They control the problem and the solution, and this gives them global power. 

Authentic Activism Dies at COP

The UN historically has allowed “observers” — activists fall under this category — to come into COP for the full duration of the conference. Lately, however, it has been severely restricting the number of observers, even discouraging them from attending at all.

“It has been more restrictive,” Philip McMaster, a climate activist, told me. McMaster, a Canadian college professor who lives in Hong Kong, has attended the last 10 COP climate events. Best known for dressing up as Santa Claus, McMaster has made a name for himself as “SustainaClaus,” riffing off the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

He carries around stuffed animals that are holding up three fingers — a symbol for “peace plus one trillion” — as he advocates for developed nations to give one trillion dollars to the Global South to combat “man-made global warming.”

If achieving climate action is the goal, SustainaClaus should be welcomed by the UN. He garners attention, he is personable and funny, and, most importantly, he believes wholeheartedly in the climate-change narrative and gets people talking. Yet, the UN is limiting even him from speaking out and attending COP events. “Even my badges, I used to get two weeks … [then] I got like one week … [then] I got like three days,” McMaster told me, summarizing his experience over the years. “When I first came here [to COP29], I got one day.”

SustainaClaus differs from the UN in this: He is not loyal to the notion that the UN’s agenda is the only solution. Communicating his frustration with the globalist bureaucracy, he told me that perhaps it is time to “decentralize, get out of this nation-state UN pecking order…. I do not think it is working anymore.” 

Marc Morano, the publisher of CFACT’s award-winning ClimateDepot.com, has been a longtime COP attendee, appearing at 21 out of the last 23 UN summits. At COP22 in Marrakech, Morocco, Morano ceremoniously shredded the UN’s Paris Agreement in light of Donald Trump’s first presidential victory and his decision to remove the United States from the treaty. The UN removed him and his colleagues from the premises and dropped them off at a remote location in the desert.

Newman and I caught up with Morano at COP29. “I am an official observer, but I cannot observe much. I only got one day to observe out of a twelve-day summit,” he told Newman, conveying frustration over his pass being limited from two weeks to one day. “We have been coming since 1992 … never had this experience. We are banned from attending [except for] one day a week per person at this summit.”

Manufactured Activism Flourishes at COP

While conducting interviews and doing research, Newman and I heard shrieking and wailing off in the distance: “Pay your climate debt!”; “Stop gas expansion!”; “Pay up!”; and other chants being screeched by “protesters.” All their signs, chants, and calls to action were perfectly aligned with UN messaging for COP29: Developed nations must hand over trillions of dollars to fund climate action. 

Walking up to one of the “protests,” I immediately noticed that the participants in the display all had UN credentials and were surrounded by UN security. There were even ropes separating the “protesters” from the press, as if it were a red-carpet event. 

“OK, the 15-minutes are up,” I heard a UN handler say as she moved the barrier to let the group out and usher in the next round of “demonstrators.” Newman and I approached an American who was part of the scam to see if we could interview him. He agreed, and asked what publication we were with. After looking up The New American on his smartphone, he said, “Sorry, I am not able to do interviews.” A few minutes later, he began telling his fellow “protesters” that we were “climate deniers.” 

Photographs and reports of these demonstrations at COP29 make the show appear genuine, but it is in fact a highly organized, planned, scripted, and approved activity to promote the big hoax. 

The Issue Is Never the Issue 

“In the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems,” opined community organizer and author of Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky. “He must search out controversy and issues rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy, people are not concerned enough to act.”

The UN uses climate change as a front for its real agenda of a one-world government and the abolition of sovereign nations. The handful of facades that Newman and I observed at COP29 barely scratch the surface, but they help to illustrate the point that the agenda has never been — and will never be — about stopping “global warming.” It is about centralizing power around the United Nations and acquiring mass funding for globalism. 

Continue reading at The New American.