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Despite all the fire alarms to decarbonize and use less energy, investment dollars into these objectives hasn’t budged much in a decade.

Having said that, the capacity of solar and wind power is still growing, because their costs are falling. A dollar of spending installs more renewable energy today, about 55 per cent more, than it did in 2010. Even so, that’s nowhere near enough to facilitate a “transition” away from fossil fuels, because the world’s insatiable hunger for energy is wanting for everything.

In fact, industrializing regions of the world are so demanding for all sources of energy that even the “approvals of conventional oil and gas projects fall short of what would be needed to meet continued robust demand growth,” says the IEA.

Spending on the infrastructure for delivering electricity is also way behind, some 35 per cent less than what’s needed to achieve sustainable development goals like those in the Paris Agreement. Looking outside our bubble of western hubris, most regions of the world are a long way from being able to displace barrels and pipelines with wires and electrons.

All this says that the probability of achieving any aspirational target over the next decade or two is nil. Social attitudes, economic conditions and investor incentives are not strong enough to force expedient change.