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.
The head of BP in 1990 made his first visit to Baku to lay the groundwork for being a huge part of the oil and gas development after the Soviet Union dissolution. It was like this gold rush. It was actually the cover story of The New York Times Magazine in 1998, called “Getting Crude in Baku.”
So there was also a narrative gold rush, because journalists were like, “Oh my God, look at this.” There’s so many Orientalist narrative opportunities, and so much money involved. So that was fascinating, and it also meant there were a lot of resources for research.
Your main character, Bunny, who does PR for oil companies during the first Trump administration, says, “I believe in global warming! I’m a liberal!” And one of her first big purchases is a Prius. There’s a lot to dig into there.
I started writing the book during the first Trump era, at a point when I was doing a process of unlearning, in my adulthood, of the reflexive patriotism, that if you grow up in a Foreign Service family, is central to the family’s existence. And part of that is being inculcated with this belief that the work is important, and the United States is a force for good in the world.
I was a teenager in the ’90s, in that moment of “the end of history,” where the idea was that everyone is going to have a democracy now, and it’s all going to be so great, and everyone’s going to get rich and have plumbing. And events have broken in a different way.
And my adulthood has been understanding the lies that are built into that. And so Bunny was a kind of vehicle for exorcising some of the anger I felt at the systems you understand yourself to be complicit in.
So it was interesting to learn about the oil and gas industry as part of this process. The reach and impact it has on the world. Also the stories that are central to its continuing relevance. We know these oil companies have known about climate change since the ’70s, and have engaged in decades-long efforts to lie and obfuscate the things that they knew, and all of that is a form of storytelling.
It is so easy to be bamboozled by those stories.
I initially really identified with Bunny, when she’s a Foreign Service brat in the ’90s. She’s a relatable 15-year-old: funny and observant, but also self-absorbed and easily influenced.
There are many details of women’s clothing brands and beauty products woven into the narrative, that are so specific to moments in time Why are those details important?
I think they are serving a dual purpose, where, on one hand, they’re artifacts of a patriarchal system. They’re about consumerism. Many of those products are made out of petroleum products, too.
So there’s that, but also a sense of needing to love Bunny a little. There is an experience of femininity, tied to time, class, race, positionality. But there is also, when I think about being a teenager, so many of my vivid, sensory memories, are about wanting something.
It’s perverse in a way, but it means you can continue to identify with Bunny, even after it’s uncomfortable.
Is there a turning point in the narrative, where Bunny’s work in the oil industry becomes irreconcilable with what she knows about climate change? Is she actively engaging in self-deception?
I don’t think it’s one moment. She goes from working for an engineering company, and she follows her boss to an oil and gas company, and she’s very young when she does that and I don’t necessarily think that makes her an evil person, but she stays and she tells herself a story about working from within.
We live in the United States, with a certain level of ease, and we are making those kinds of trade-offs all the time. Hers is much more obvious.
We just had an election. And there are a lot of liberals who were surprised at the results. And I think in order to be really surprised, you have to not be paying attention.
I think it’s very easy to tell yourself a certain story about the systems that we live with — that’s what Bunny is doing.
It’s funny, because in fact, it was BP, the largest foreign investor in Azerbaijan, that was one of the engineers of the “personal carbon footprint” idea.
But that individualism does not matter when BP is funneling $35 billion to double the amount of natural gas that Europe is receiving from Azerbaijan.
I’m glad you mentioned the idea of the carbon footprint, which gives people hope that their individual choices can solve climate change. But what it really requires is systemically changing global energy policy. The U.N. has been trying to do this for 30 years, including at this summit in Baku. What are your thoughts about the role of diplomacy in resolving climate change?
I mean, just … unbelievable cynicism.
Azerbaijan has been the subject of U.S. sanctions since the ’90s. There’s an act which prevents the United States from giving direct aid to Azerbaijan.
But there was also a deal where Azerbaijan promised to double its exports of natural gas to Europe by 2027, and U.S. diplomats have been quoted saying that “we’re so delighted” with this.
And so the U.S. is still, on paper, saying we don’t support Azerbaijan, at least militarily, because of its ethnic cleansing of Armenians. But more natural gas coming from Azerbaijan is good for circumventing Russia.
So yes, there’s the climate stuff, but make no mistake, the oil diplomacy is arguably closer to the forefront.
A major theme in your first novel, “The Golden State,” is motherhood. You have two daughters. Do you talk to them about climate change?
Recently, my 9-year-old, very matter-of-factly, said, we’re learning about water. And the world’s going to run out of water by, she named a year that was not too distant from now. And she said, the human species is probably not going to survive.
And I was like, well, I’m not really going to argue with you. Because, on one hand, I believe that might be true. And so many people have already died from climate change. So it would be stupid to be like, Pollyanna, about it, because it’s already real and already devastating.
So I said, that might be true, but it doesn’t mean there are not things we can do as a group and to not be like BP. It’s not on us to individually solve it, but I think in the sense of not ceding the story to oil and gas companies and people who are trying to enrich themselves from you. We can be fighting that every step of the way.
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