IMAGINE you were running for king of the world on a platform of slashing economic growth by 20 per cent forever. You’d be lucky to get your own family to vote for you. 

And yet humanity insists on running the global economy on fossil fuels that are doing exactly that sort of damage. The good news is that we still have time to vote them out before they do even more.

The amount of planetary heating already in the pipeline as a result of a century of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will make global income 19 per cent lower by 2049 than it would have been without global warming, suggests a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.