Labelling petrostates as unfit hosts is a hypocrite’s game (“COP29 and the greenwashing of Azerbaijan”, FT View, October 14). When Azerbaijan hosts COP29 next month, it will be the 28th time the climate summit has been held in an oil and gas producer. Every host — bar Switzerland — has been involved in extraction. Every country in the world — bar none — is a fossil fuel consumer.

Instead, it’s wiser to ask how a country came to host, what they plan to achieve and why. Azerbaijan never anticipated playing host this year; we expected our bid to be vetoed by neighbour Armenia, which had occupied almost a fifth of our territory for 30 years. Yet in an unprecedented deal last December, Armenia agreed to back Azerbaijan as host as part of ongoing peace talks.

Negotiations continue and substantial progress has been achieved. Border delimitation commissions are active. Armenia’s commission has recently accepted the Alma-Ata Declaration — a commitment to the sovereignty of borders among post-Soviet states agreed in the 1990s.

Many would wish to see an official peace agreement signed before COP, but this is a very different proposition from two sides agreeing a deal in the negotiating room. Armenia’s constitution still contains a revanchist claim on Azerbaijani territory. The speed at which we can finalise a peace deal largely depends on how quickly Armenia can move on the issue. Critics calling this stalling should ask if they would sign a peace deal while their former adversary still claims their territory. Yet regardless of whether one is signed by the time COP begins, it will still be a COP of peace because of how it emerged. This year’s COP will focus on increasing the finance target — the New Collective Quantified Goal — to turn the global transition from fossil fuels into reality. Furthermore, Azerbaijan has seeded a climate fund, into which we expect other oil and gas producing nations and companies to invest.

Azerbaijan is demonstrating how an oil and gas producer can transition. We are not only implementing the region’s largest renewable projects but shifting from fossil fuel to electricity exports. In partnership with the EU, Azerbaijan is developing an electricity cable beneath the Black Sea to link Caspian Sea wind power to the continent. While we can’t influence the demand that drives foreign energy markets, we are reshaping the supply side.

Azerbaijan is hosting COP because we are walking the path to peace. At COP, we will advocate for new funds to finance a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables, a shift we are already actively pursuing ourselves.

Hikmet Hajiyev
Foreign Affairs Adviser to the President of Azerbaijan, Baku, Azerbaijan

Banking stocks like HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, and the State Bank of India were the biggest gainers among the Top 10 companies last week.

ICICI Bank soared Rs 28,495.14 crore to record a market capital of Rs 8,90,191.38 crore while HDFC Bank surged Rs 23,579.11 crore to Rs 12,82,848.30 crore and SBI zoomed Rs 17,804.61 crore to report Rs 7,31,773.56 crore in valuation.

Telecom giant Bharti Airtel leaped Rs 11,272.45 crore, taking its market cap to Rs 9,71,707.61 crore. Four of these companies added a combined market valuation of Rs 81,151.31 crore last week.

However, Infosys, Reliance Industries, Hindustan Unilever, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and ITC saw their market capital eroding by Rs 76,622.05 crore.

Infosys plummeted Rs 23,314.31 crore to Rs 7,80,126.10 crore while Reliance Industries dropped Rs 16,645.39 crore to Rs 18,38,721.14 crore and Hindustan Unilever plunged Rs 15,248.85 crore to Rs 6,38,066.75 crore.

TCS tumbled Rs 10,402.01 crore to Rs 14,91,321.40 crore, LIC dipped Rs 8,760.12 crore to Rs 5,91,418.91 crore and ITC slumped Rs 2,251.37 crore to Rs 6,08,682.29 crore.

Going by rank, Reliance Industries the most-valued company in the country. It is followed by TCS, HDFC Bank, Bharti Airtel, ICICI Bank, Infosys, State Bank of India, Hindustan Unilever, ITC, and LIC.

The new boss of Starbucks says he will overhaul the global coffee chain’s menu as the company continues to see its sales slide.

Brian Niccol also announced that he was suspending the firm’s financial forecasts for the coming year due to the “current state of the business”.

At the same time, the firm reported preliminary quarterly profits showing its sales and profits had dropped.

Starbucks shares fell by more than 4% after the announcement.

Starbucks needed to “fundamentally change” to bring back customers, Mr Niccol, who took over as chief executive in September, said.

“We will simplify our overly complex menu, fix our pricing architecture, and ensure that every customer feels Starbucks is worth it every single time they visit.”

Starbucks has seen customers cut back on spending as the rising cost of living squeezed people’s budgets.

A week before Starbucks was due to release its results for the three months to the end of September, the company said it expects comparable sales in the US to have fallen by 6% compared to a year earlier.

The downturn was more dramatic in China, where sales fell 14% for the same period, as the economy there falters.

“Despite our heightened investments, we were unable to change the trajectory of our traffic decline,” said Rachel Ruggeri, Starbucks chief financial officer.

Mr Niccol, who previously headed the Mexican food chain Chipotle, was brought into Starbucks to help turn the business around.

But he faced criticism over his plan to commute almost 1,000 miles (1,600km) from his family home in Newport Beach, California, to the firm’s headquarters in Seattle on a corporate jet.

Critics saw it as in contradiction with the company’s public stance on green issues.

The Nobel awards currently distort public perception of which sciences are important. They also, by failing to acknowledge collaborative and parallel work, give a misleading impression of how science is done. Moreover, vibrant new fields were left out of Alfred Nobel’s will. This year’s awards for artificial intelligence and computing are welcome signals that the Nobel committee recognises these deficiencies (Opinion, October 16).

These gaps are also being remedied by philanthropists who have established new prizes — some with even bigger jackpots and razzmatazz than the Nobels. Among these are the Breakthrough Prizes set up by Yuri Milner, a Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur (which has given prizes to large teams).

No scientist’s achievements are really solo, any more than a goalscorer’s triumph in football is independent of other players on the field. That’s why the seeming “clustering” of the awards in favoured countries or institutions is unsurprising. But Anjana Ahuja, your columnist, is right to urge that it’s ever more important to cast the net wider than Europe and the US. And, as she says, the proportion of female winners is deplorably low. But this should improve: the cohort of present winners were educated several decades ago, when fewer girls studied physics and maths.

Some argue that we should welcome the existence of mega-awards that elevate a few intellectuals to a transient celebrity status. But there is a downside: the winners’ opinions are sought by the press, and accorded undue respect.

Even the best scientists have narrow expertise; their views on broader topics carry no special weight. Some of the greatest become an embarrassment if given a public platform. A laureate can be found who will support almost any cause, however eccentric, and some exploit their status.

Laureates aren’t necessarily towering intellects: some of the most epochal and rightly recognised discoveries have been made (serendipitously) by people who wouldn’t claim any intellectual superiority to the average university professor. So we should specially welcome the award to such genuinely brilliant pioneers as Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis.

Martin Rees
Astronomer Royal, Cambridge, UK