To conclude our #LookItUp series we peer into the future. Do we have data about what life will be like in the year 2100? No. But we do have IPCC emission scenarios, called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways or SSPs, and some people treat them like oracles or even news reports. And they range from happy, hope filled best-case scenarios to a hellish worst-case world to be avoided at all costs. But the people who decide which outcome we should be striving for think only in terms of the amount of warming. The best future they can think of is the SSP1 world, in which there is only about 1.8 C warming relative to 2020. The worst is called SSP5 in which the world warms 3.8 C compared to 2020. Many sensible people don’t think it’s a realistic possibility. But suppose it were to happen. What else would change according to their own scenario? And here we don’t mean its outputs. We mean what they assume would happen as inputs. A crucial one of which is that, they say, this hideous warming would be caused by a lot of fossil fuel use associated with economic growth. Indeed. Growth? Well then, it’s only fair to ask how much income would grow. So we decided to #LookItUp. And the answer, which we repeat is one of their assumptions not one of ours or even one of their conclusions, is that it would be enough to make the whole world 10 times richer than it is today. In fact there would be so much growth that even extremely poor countries like, say, Senegal would be nearly twice as rich as the US is today. And that, we’re told, is what we need to avoid at all costs.

Courtesy of OurWorldinData.org, here are the levels of global GDP per capita associated with each of the SSP scenarios:

The one at the top is SSP5, coming in at a cool $139,797 annual average income for everyone on Earth, compared to the 2020 average of $13,302. Yes, more than a ten-fold increase in average annual income globally, to a level nearly double the current US per capita GDP level of $74,578. In this alleged disaster the world as a whole by 2100 ends up nearly twice as rich on a per capita basis as the US is today.

Ah well, maybe the rich get even richer and the poor are grounded into overheated dust, saving the bleakness. No. Not at all. In this bleak dystopia, every part of the world benefits. The poorest regions, Africa and the Middle East, get to $126,000 per capita, Asia gets to $135,000 per capita and Latin America to $146,000 per capita. The OECD countries aren’t all that far ahead of the rest: they end up at $161,000 per capita. So not only does the world become far richer, inequality is all but erased. What’s left to hate?

Not much. Along with all this income, crop production doubles and energy consumption per capita more than triples.

So here’s a thought experiment. Suppose we set aside our skepticism about modeling and take this projection at face value. And suppose we go around the world and offer people in hundreds of countries the following choice.

1. As of the year 2100 you, or your grandkids can have the world as it exists today, with today’s climate, your current income, and today’s food and energy availability.
2. We’ll give you SSP5. You’ll be richer than you can imagine, you’ll have plenty to eat and there will be abundant energy, though in a world just under 4C degrees warmer, on average, than today.

Our guess is people would gladly choose SSP5, without a moment’s hesitation, because they are not idiots or masochists. And that is why all the elite climate schemes are doomed to failure.