In brief
In a striking juxtaposition, this year’s U.N. climate change summit is taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan—an oil capital steeped in fossil fuel production—against a backdrop of the recent U.S. presidential election, which saw Donald J. Trump advocate increased fossil fuel output and distancing from global climate agreements. Lydia Kiesling’s evocative novel “Mobility” provides profound insight into this dichotomy, featuring an unconventional protagonist, Bunny Glenn, who navigates life in Baku during its oil boom.
Kiesling’s narrative explores Baku's dual identity: a city of immense wealth fueled by natural resources and the adverse effects wrought by climate change. The author reflects on her personal connection to the region as the daughter of a Foreign Service member, emphasizing the contrasting fortunes between Baku's prosperity and Armenia's struggles during the 90s. In a candid interview, Kiesling elaborated on her choice of Baku as a setting, revealing her intrigue with the significant global attention fostered by the region’s oil reserves. As the conference unfolds in the very heart of oil wealth, “Mobility” invites readers to reckon with the absurdity of selecting a petrostate as the venue for advancing climate action in a time when parallels draw us into a narrative of contradiction between policy and practice. With the summit poised to impact future climate action initiatives, the fiction encapsulated in Kiesling's work simultaneously serves as a satirical lens to scrutinize our current environmental plight and ponder the multifaceted relationships between politics, natural resources, and the prospects of sustainable futures.
