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It’s nice to have aspirational targets, such as aiming to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees C by 2030, but who is prepared, or has the financial ability, to pay the tab that would (maybe) achieve that goal?

That 0.5 degree C difference, by the way — much of the chatter ahead of COP21 was about 2 C — is estimated to cost five times more.

To put that in perspective, Bjorn Lomberg in a recent Financial Times article, said the cost to reduce emissions by 56 billion tonnes by 2030 would run as high as US$1 trillion per year. And even that reduction won’t get us anywhere near to the 2 C limit.

Economists talk of the optimal allocation of scarce resources. So, does it make sense to allocate a disproportionate share of those scarce resources at the expense of meeting basic needs in other parts of the world? Think about the fact one in five U.S. adults live at or near the poverty line, or that 10 per cent of children in Alberta live in poverty.

There are huge socio-economic costs to those kinds of statistics.

Absent from discussions is how the evolution of energy use has metaphorically made the world a smaller place and enabled countless experiences and services that have spurred economic growth and an enviable quality of life not imagined a century ago.

We fool ourselves when claiming to reduce emissions in our own jurisdictions, when we’ve really only offshored them to India or China, where goods designed in the Western world are manufactured and then exported back for our use and comfort.