In his recent report, Alberta's Auditor General, Fred Dunn, chastised the Alberta government for its greenhouse gas emission reduction plan. Dunn rightfully suggested that "Alberta could spend a lot of money but not achieve emissions targets. Or it could achieve targets, but not cost-effectively."

This assessment is both correct and expected from Alberta's auditor, but perhaps a more global perspective needs to be taken into account. After all, it's called "global warming" not "Canada warming" or even "Alberta warming."

The $2-billion the Alberta government has committed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects are expected to remove five megatonnes of C02 from the atmosphere by 2015. To put that into context, five megatonnes of C02 is only 0.69 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in Canada (721 megatonnes in 2006).

Or put another way, since Canada's emissions are only 2.2 percent of all C02 emissions world wide (2004), this project will remove 0.015 percent of world emissions at a cost of $2,000,000,000.

Essentially, it will cost taxpayers $400 per tonne to capture and store this C02 underground. From a per tonne standpoint, this is extremely expensive compared to the prices of carbon offsets that can be purchased around the world.

Offsets allow citizens, companies or even governments to bankroll projects that will reduce, sequester or avoid emissions elsewhere.

The cost to purchase these offsets range from a low of $3 per tonne to a high of $80. Even companies like Air Canada sell offsets. For example, someone wanting to off-set the carbon emissions from their flight can calculate their emissions on-line and then purchase an offset from Air Canada at a cost of $16 per tonne. Air Canada then passes the money on to an offset company who uses it to plant trees in British Columbia.

These prices are a far cry from the $400 per tonne Albertans will pay to sequester carbon under ground. However, to be fair, the $400 per tonne price may drop in the future as this $2-billion investment in CCS technologies may lead to lower prices for CCS in the future.

Further, it's a lot more likely carbon will actually be removed with CCS here in Alberta than had the Alberta government merely purchased offsets. The popular British rock band, Coldplay, learned this the hard way when they paid to plant 10,000 mango trees in India in an attempt to off-set the carbon emissions created by the production of their second album. Four years later many of the trees withered and died (if they were ever planted at all), negating any off-set.

Taking the carbon capture price tag one step further; consider the costs if Canada were still obligated to meet the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. Our nation would have had to shed 163 megatonnes of C02 by 2012 to meet Kyoto. At $400 per tonne, the total cost to taxpayers would be over $65-billion.

And what would Canadians and Albertans get for our $65-billion A reduction of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions of less than one-half of one percent.

More importantly, what would it do to stop climate change Virtually nothing. It would only off-set about one month's worth of growth in China's emissions -- as China is building coal-fired power plants at a rate of one every five days.

Developing nations currently contribute 40 percent of Earth's annual carbon emissions, and some believe they will be contributing 75 percent by the end of the century.

Until a global solution is found, costly projects will only reduce the size of Albertans and Canadians bank accounts -- not global temperatures.