Cheers! Delegates at COP29 able to drown their sorrows with £1,500-a-bottle wine at ‘local and affordable’ climate summit
Delegates at COP29 can drown their sorrows with £1,500-a-bottle wine.
The menu at the food hall in Baku is open to all and says it aims to be ‘local’ and affordable.
But very few will find a £700 bottle of Dom Perignon champagne or £1,538 bottle of Marchesi Antinori Solaia 2016 red wine affordable. The latter is from the Tignanello estate near Florence, Italy, which gave Meghan Markle the title ‘The Tig’ for her blog before she married Prince Harry.
More than 60,000 people are registered to attend the conference which has seen hotel prices rocket 500 per cent.
A standard room at the Baku Holiday Inn is costing £700 a night for the duration of the conference- compared to £90 when the conference is over.
Analysis of data from FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, revealed that 65 private jets landed in Baku in the week to Monday. Of those, 45 arrived on Sunday and Monday as the conference got under way. It is twice as many compared with the same week last year, when 32 private jets landed at the airport.
The menu at the food hall in Baku is open to all and says it aims to be ‘local’ and affordable
More than 60,000 people are registered to attend the conference which has seen hotel prices rocket 500 per cent. Pictured: Keir Starmer attends the Presidency roundtable on day two
Attendees at the climate summit can be seen enjoying caviar
Very few will find a £700 bottle of Dom Perignon champagne (pictured) or £1,538 bottle of Marchesi Antinori Solaia 2016 red wine affordable
The latter is from the Tignanello estate near Florence, Italy , which gave Meghan Markle the title ‘The Tig’ for her blog before she married Prince Harry
While having its aim as combating climate change, the Cop29 summit has already come in for criticism after undercover investigators revealed the summit’s chief executive encouraged them to strike oil and gas deals during the UN summit.
The findings come as host country Azerbaijan is accused of greenwashing its human rights record.
Ali Karimli, leader of the Popular Front Party, said the government had never taken environmental issues ‘seriously’, adding: ‘For many years they have destroyed the forests of Azerbaijan and they have polluted the Caspian Sea.
‘They have not even provided drinking water to [all of] Azerbaijan.
‘Cop29 is very much to Aliyev’s advantage. The regime wants to greenwash its image and for all the political arrests and corruption to recede.’
…and the BBC sends 28 staff to Baku too!
The BBC has sent a staggering 28 journalists and camera operators to cover the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan – the majority of whom have travelled from the UK.
With the Corporation having long been accused of ‘hypocrisy’ for warning about climate change while its employees rack up thousands of air miles, figures uncovered by the Mail on Sunday show that at least
19 BBC staff appear to have made the 5,000-mile round trip from London to Baku. At least nine journalists from other countries attended.
Among the UK delegation was the Corporation’s Political Editor Chris Mason and Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, who together with the rest of their counterparts will have racked up nearly 14 tons of CO2 emissions.
