COP29:
OUR MAN IN BAKU
Bathing in Oil at a Climate Summit?
It Leaves a Stain.
Anton Troianovsky reports from Baku for The New York Times:
I bathed in oil during the U.N. climate summit.
It was crude oil from a half-mile underground, pumped into a bathtub at a hotel in Azerbaijan. It crept into every crevice of my submerged body and every fold of my skin. It smothered the hair on my limbs, making me look a little like an animal stuck in an oil spill.
Then came an attendant to scrape it all off.
Just a day earlier, I had been covering the United Nations’ annual climate conference, COP29, which is being held this month in Baku,… The chocolate-colored oil extracted there doesn’t burn. Instead, the locals and Azerbaijani scientists say, it heals. If you bathe in it.
But this oil, like all oil, is a finite resource.
“They tell us that we’ve got reserves for 60 years,” said Ayten Magerramova, the head doctor at a Naftalan resort called Garabag. “After that, I don’t know.”
Once you bathe in crude oil, it’s hard to get rid of it. For that reason, the Garabag’s towels, bathrobes and bedsheets are all brown.
“The resin itself is a bit toxic,” Dr. Magerramova said. “But for skin problems, the resin really helps.”
… Marco Polo, who traveled through present-day Azerbaijan, described its oil as a “salve for men and camels affected with itch or scab.” The Soviets said the unusual molecular makeup of some of the hydrocarbons in Naftalan’s oil made it suitable for treating arthritis, infertility, eczema and... in 2020 in an Azerbaijani science journal reported that the oil has been found to work as an antiseptic and to have a “peculiar hormone-like effect on the function of sex hormones.”
Aydin Mustafayev, 62, a Naftalan native, remembers people digging wells by hand when he was a child. They filled their own jars with the oil and brought it home to treat the wounds of turkeys, dogs and sheep...
Rita Dadasheva, 64, a schoolteacher, had previously sought out Naftalan oil treatments in Baku for her arthritis. But you could tell by the color, she said, that the oil was fresher closer to the source.
“The Naftalan here is the color of melted milk chocolate,” she said. “It’s just what you need.”
