On Money, Magic, and Magnificence
A COP29 Adventure
Sorry I missed you yesterday. It was supposedly the last day of the COP, but nothing happened — at least not out in the view of public observers like us. Presumably they were trying to hash out a deal behind closed doors, but the deal hasn’t happened yet. There was another draft of the text released about noon. This time it did have a number in it, but the number was laughably low. Remember in my previous post the estimates to save our world come in at about $1.3 Trillion per year. The number in the proposed text yesterday was $250 Billion by 2035. So it seems like that means the countries of the world will try to get up to contributing $250 B per year by 2035; what will they do in the mean time? And what will be the state of things by then? To continue the parable from that post, most of the world will be up to its eyeballs in toxic waste by then.
Whatever happened yesterday, they didn’t tell us much about it. So we (and thousands of other people) just kind of sat around waiting. Colin and I put the time to productive use, and recorded interviews with almost all of the CCOP team members from the floor of the COP — sadly, “from the floor” is meant entirely literally there. Most of the team are college students or shortly thereafter, but the only picture we thought to have taken was when I was interviewing Lowell Bliss, the co-founder and co-leader of CCOP.
Reading the news from our hotel room in Istanbul (about which more anon), there continues to be drama back in Baku. It appears as the though the president of the COP gave the official text to Saudi Arabia to edit as they saw fit before sending it out to everyone else. Normally it would be sent to everyone at the same time as a non-editable PDF, but someone got ahold of a Word doc with track changes on, showing the negotiator from Saudi Arabia deleting a section that encouraged all countries to live up to the outcomes of last year’s COP (which for the first time mentioned transitioning away from fossil fuels). That’s pretty late-breaking news, and could end up tainting the whole COP.
There was other financial news yesterday that was an adventure. For reasons I shouldn’t print publicly (but would be happy to share orally once home), we needed to come up with a sum of cash in the low four digits yesterday that we didn’t know we were going to have to do. The budget for the program is fine, but the money exists as 1s and 0s in computers somewhere, rather than in paper money (actually the “money” that has the purchasing power we’re concerned about doesn’t exist in the paper either, it is only a social reality… but explaining and justifying that claim would take me too far afield). And it turns out to be a bit of a challenge to convert those into Manat bills in Azerbaijan.
In the morning when the matter was brought to our attention, I blithely assumed I’d be able to perform this conjuring trick without too much difficulty. There is an ATM in the Blue Zone and I have good enough standing with my financial institutions that I was pretty confident I could just press a sequence of buttons on the machine in the right order and the cash would appear. Upon attempting this magic trick, however, nothing happened. I tried a different card that requires a slightly different sequence of button pushes and… nothing. I felt like I had talked up my ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and the rabbit was letting me down.
The back-up plan was go back into the city center and go into a bank, explain the situation to them, and have them press their sequence of buttons that would make the rabbit appear. There was nothing happening in the Blue Zone, so Colin and I took a different bus than normal and found ourselves among tall shiny buildings. We went into one and took a number — this one was a smudge of ink on a piece of paper that somehow has the power to put you into a queue to speak with one of the master financial magicians [more temptation to launch into a lecture on social realities]. We got up to him and explained the situation. He was not particularly cheery. I felt like he could have used an upgrade to his showmanship, considering the remarkable conjuring tricks he could perform. He dryly said, “Card and passport.” I said, “say the magic words”. No, I didn’t really say that. But maybe I should have, because after he punched the sequence of buttons on his machine, he looked up with the same dry countenance and said, “denied”.
I gave him a different card. Same result. Colin tried his cards. Same result. The teller seemed neither annoyed with nor amused (I wish he would have been one or the other rather than impassive). Hmmm… what to try next. I assured everyone that I’d come home with the cash. I started considering options. I first wondered whether the people in this bank might benefit from a professional development opportunity and allow me to lecture on the nature of social realities in exchange for a pile of their currency. Instead, I figured I’d try to call one of my financial institutions and sort things out with them.
I got an inexpensive eSim card for my phone for this trip that gave me data through Azerbaijan’s mobile networks, but I couldn’t call home from that. In another sort of magic that I don’t understand, when I’m on WiFi, my phone acts like it is Indiana and I can make calls like regular. There weren’t any open WiFi networks available, so I had to sweet talk one of the clerks to give me the password for the bank employees. That worked OK, and the person back in the States assured me that I would be able to withdraw the amount of cash I needed from any ATM with their symbol on it. I reported that I don’t see any such symbols on the ATMs in Baku. She claimed there were many ATMs in their network in the city and she would send a link that showed them all. That was extraordinarily helpful and we located one a block away.
We got there. No symbol. Well, let’s give it a try anyway. I put the card into the machine, which is the first part of the incantation (and the one that makes me most nervous in a foreign city). I pressed the magic buttons. Denied.
But this time there was a message on the screen which read “Maximum of 200 Manat withdrawal.” OK, so maybe that was the problem. Should we try to find another machine with a higher withdrawal limit? Or see if we could make multiple withdrawals from this one? Without getting too specific about the amount of cash we needed (it seems indelicate to do so), let’s just say that we would need to be well into the double-digits of maximum allowable withdrawals to complete the magic trick.
In the end though, that is what we did. We stopped for a while to let the line of people behind us perform their magic tricks at the ATM, but once that line cleared, we were back at it. I got so familiar with punching the sequence of buttons that on the last attempt I decided to try it blindfolded. Actually, I didn’t do that. But now that I’m writing this story in the guise of magic, I really wish that I had. The magic trick has been performed (well, I suppose it will be completed after the 1s and 0s from the CCOP account are coaxed to levitate themselves into my account to replace the ones that disappeared from it).
To catch you up to the present, we got up at 5am to catch a Bolt to the airport in Baku. Colin had to talk his way onto the plane carrying two kilos too much of carry-on baggage. The clerk at first seemed to be a caricature of an ex-Soviet bureaucrat who cared only for making sure his column of figures were in order. But he eventually relented and waved Colin through. We flew past a spectacular mountain range between Georgia and Russia, then over the Black Sea and landed in Istanbul. We have an overnight layover here and wanted to see the city (or at least Hagia Sofia, so I can add it to my list of spectacular places of worship I’ve visited). It turns out the Turks build a shiny new airport a few years ago, and it’s a long way from the city. It was going to take us two hours to take a train downtown, and after our experience in Frankfurt, we were a little train-shy.
A couple of women were calling to us from a tour booth, and after ignoring them a bit, I wondered if this might be a good option. So we approached and tried not to look too desperate. After haggling a bit, we ended up with a driver, Hagia Sofia tickets, and six hours in the city for about what I could have withdrawn from a Baku ATM in only three maximum withdrawals. On the Asian side of the city it was snowing, but we spent our time in Europe where it was only cold and rainy. We walked through Hagia Sofia, which was magnificent in one sense, but built in the 500s and looking its age in another, then the Blue Mosque next door which is only 400 years old. We got some kebabs and Turkish delight and walked through a bazar. We were freezing and tired, and came back to the hotel.
This trip is coming to a close and I need to go to sleep before tomorrow’s 3am wake up call for the flights back home. A couple of our teammates are at the COP right now, because it appears as though there will be an announcement still tonight about some sort of conclusion there. So maybe I’ll write one more of these when we know the outcome, but maybe not. Just to be safe I’m going to say my goodbyes here.
Thanks for reading. I write because I want to know what I think about things! I suppose I could simply journal about these trips for myself, but writing for an audience forces me to try a little harder to process and think about my experience. It isn’t polished prose, for sure, when I crank out this much text every day. But the practice of doing so helps me think more systematically. I hope you get something out of it too.
Thanks for your reports and observations of COP29