Bathing in Oil at a Climate Summit? It Leaves a Stain.

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, Azerbaijan, a place that helped give rise to the modern oil industry more than a century ago, enabling and endangering our civilization.

Much has been made of the incongruity of those fighting to reduce fossil-fuel emissions gathering in a petrostate, but Azerbaijanis are proud of their oil, whatever conference attendees might think of it. For instance, it fueled the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in World War II.

Another point of pride lies beneath the dusty, shrub-dotted hills of Naftalan, a city a four-hour drive from 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. Naftalan’s recoverable deposits of “medical” oil were already halfway gone as of 2022. So the photographer Emile Ducke and I traveled there for an intimate encounter with the dwindling substance.