COP29 Climate Summit Being Held in Petrostate Where People Bathe Their Nude Bodies in Crude Oil

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Fossil Fools

While attending the United Nations' COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, a New York Times reporter decided to engage in a time-honored local custom of bathing his entire nude body in crude oil.

As the newspaper reports, the same oil that fueled the Soviet victory over the Nazis had led the Eastern European country to petrostate status — though its reserves differ from those in the rest of the world, because it doesn't burn the skin and has alleged healing properties.

As NYT Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski notes in its account of his ordeal, local scientists and historical explorers have touted the benefits of oil from its Naftalan region for thousands of years, saying it can help heal wounds and ease aches and pains.

"Near the Georgian border there is a spring from which gushes a stream of oil in such abundance that a hundred ships may load here at once," Marco Polo wrote in the 13th century. "This oil is not good to eat, but it is good for burning and as a salve for men and camels affected with itch or scab."

Oil Wellness

To see about this salve-like nature, Troianovski traveled four hours away from Azerbaijan's capital city of Baku during the UN's COP29 summit to Naftalan, now a resort town with dozens of oil spas.

"[The oil] crept into every crevice of my submerged body and every fold of my skin," he wrote. "It smothered the hair on my limbs, making me look a little like an animal stuck in an oil spill."

When in the bath, Troianovski realized that instead of the heavy stickiness he expected, the oil was actually quite slippery. It was, he wrote, an "otherworldly" or even "netherworldly" sensation that the writer was given exactly 10 minutes to ponder before being instructed to stand up with the help of a wall handle.

"Then," Troianovski wrote, "came an attendant to scrape it all off."

Using a long shoehorn, the attendant scraped the substance off of Troianovski then patted him down with "oversized paper towels" before giving him a washcloth to handle his own nether regions.

To "process the experience" back at the UN climate conference, the NYT bureau chief decided to go to the site of the world's first-ever industrial oil well. Located today in the parking lot of a swimming pool in Baku, the rig continues to pump out the same harmful, finite, and uber-profitable substance Troianovski had just been bathing in on the other side of Azerbaijan.

"Take it out, sell it," an oil rig worker named Khalid told him. "It’s like God sent this to us."

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