Scenarios

Premise: Functional by design By 2040, BRICS+ emerges as the world’s most effective climate alliance—not through luck, but through shrewd strategy, sovereign solidarity, and an uncanny ability to turn adversity into opportunity. What begins as a pushback against western hypocrisy evolves into a multipolar green order, driven by energy pragmatism, diplomatic agility, and some rather bold infrastructure experiments. How it happens The west’s green hypocrisy backfires (2025–2030) The European Union launches its much-touted carbon border tax with great fanfare—and little diplomacy. In the Global South, it is promptly dubbed “eco-colonialism in spreadsheets”. Meanwhile, the United States fails to pass its second Green New Deal, after a series of fiscal deadlocks and an unexpected banking crisis send climate funding into retreat. ...

Premise: Dysfunctional by design By 2035, BRICS+ doesn’t collapse under its own contradictions, nor does it morph into a cohesive challenger to the G7. Instead, it stumbles into superpower status by a series of messy accidents, economic disasters, and geopolitical farces. Less deliberate empire, more Frankenstein with a membership card. As the West self-harms through sanctions, debt cliffs, and diplomatic hubris, BRICS+ rises—not through coordination, but sheer entropy. They didn’t build an empire. They inherited the scrapyard and accidentally started selling tickets. — Anonymous EU diplomat, 2034 ...

The BRICS alliance began life as something between a Goldman Sachs marketing gimmick and a drunken bet among emerging market traders. “I’ll wager you a case of champagne these four economies will dominate by 2050!” Fast-forward two decades, and what started as an investment banker’s acronym has somehow morphed into a geopolitical bloc with expansionist ambitions. The recent addition of new members under the “BRICS+” banner suggests this is no longer just about economics. This is about building an alternative world order where the rules are made by autocrats and petrostates. ...

The received wisdom—trotted out at Davos panels, EU Commission summits, and in the more sentimental columns of the Financial Times—is that Europe, having learned its lessons from two world wars, has spent the past eight decades basking in a glow of enlightened tranquillity. No more trenches, no more blitzes. Just a polite consensus of democratic cooperation, cross-border trade, and the occasional fracas over mackerel quotas. How charming. And how utterly wrong. ...

Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved—just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most digital scenarios consistently overlook is the actual state of the world. You know—finite planet, finite resources, that sort of inconvenient reality. Likely effects Economic development might slow down, unless you’re a transnational behemoth with a flair for tax evasion and a fondness for shareholder value. Employees are already being told to “make do with less”—which in practice means being set up to fail and then blamed for it. Burnout, frustration, and plunging performance are the inevitable side effects of pretending scarcity isn’t a thing. ...