
They tax the air itself,
turning breath into currency,
life into ledger entries.
The toll-booth of the sky declares:
Pay to exist, or cease to move.
And the sheep shuffle forward, wallets glowing green.
They claim it’s virtue—
but the credits are counterfeit halos.
Offsets vanish like smoke,
ESG scores flicker with contradictions.
The righteous are not the clean,
but the compliant.
Yet cages dressed in neon still remain cages.
We will not buy indulgences to breathe.
We will burn their ledgers,
tear the mask from “sustainability,”
and build a fire of abundance so bright
no shadow-market can contain it.
Carbon tax isn’t about saving the planet—it’s about shackling you to a meter. They jack up fuel, energy, and import costs while industry lobbyists carve out exceptions. The burden bleeds down to households: your bills rise, your food inflates, your freedom shrinks. The EU and UK’s border schemes prove it—layers of paperwork and “carbon credits” that don’t cut emissions, just build a new toll-road empire where breathing itself is taxed.
And the ESG scam? Nothing but a compliance racket dressed in green. One rating agency gives you an A, another a D, and all the while corporations hide behind offsets proven worthless. It’s not about carbon—it’s about control. About forcing small businesses, nations, and people into a spreadsheet religion where virtue is measured in phantom numbers. This isn’t climate justice—it’s financial colonization.
The Pitch vs the Reality
They sold it as salvation: put a price on carbon, buy a few offsets, slap an ESG score on your logo—and suddenly you’re “net zero.” They said markets would glide us into a green utopia.
But the truth? Every “solution” is a cage with a price tag. Carbon taxes don’t fall on corporations, they cascade onto households—on fuel, on power, on food. Offsets are smoke and mirrors, forests already standing auctioned as “savings” while emissions keep climbing. ESG is a roulette wheel of ratings—one agency crowns you a saint, another damns you as a sinner—and none of it stops the smokestacks.
The pitch is virtue. The reality is a new financial frontier where your breath, your choices, your movements are collateral. This isn’t about cutting carbon. It’s about cutting freedom.
Carbon Taxes & Border Tariffs
They dress it up as “polluter pays.” But look closer—the polluter never pays. The oil giant, the steel conglomerate, the shipping cartel? They lobby for carve-outs and exemptions, they hoard free allowances, they shift the cost downstream. Every carbon credit auctioned, every allowance surrendered, bleeds into the price of heat, light, and food. You don’t feel it in their boardrooms—you feel it in your meter and your shopping basket.
This is why academic studies confirm what you already know in your bones: carbon costs are fully passed through to consumer prices. Your electricity bill spikes, not because you burned more, but because someone in Brussels or London decided to slap a green tax on existence. It’s invisible theft, packaged as morality.
And when people fight back, the façade cracks. France proved it in blood and fire: the so-called “climate fuel tax” detonated the gilets jaunes revolt. Millions of ordinary workers, taxi drivers, and families took to the streets, choking on bills while elites congratulated themselves at conferences. The government caved, but only to re-engineer the scheme in stealthier form.
Now comes the global metastasis: border carbon tariffs. The EU’s CBAM (Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) has already begun—importers filing quarterly reports, drowning in paperwork, with payments set to hammer in from 2026. The UK follows in 2027. They claim it’s to prevent “carbon leakage.” In truth, it’s a customs racket—a new chokepoint where trade itself requires carbon indulgences. Certificates, audits, digital registries—an entire ecosystem of middlemen birthed not to clean the air, but to control the flow of goods and extract tribute.
It doesn’t cut emissions—it just builds a bureaucracy where every transaction, every shipment, every calorie consumed is priced, scanned, and taxed under the banner of “net zero.” It’s not environmental policy. It’s financial colonization dressed in green.
Carbon Offsets — The Accounting Fairy Dust
Offsets were sold as the loophole that saves us: keep burning, just buy a credit. Plant a tree in Africa, protect a forest in South America, and your private jet magically becomes “carbon neutral.” The industry told us it was balance. In reality, it was a con.
Investigations blew it wide open: over 90% of rainforest credits from the world’s biggest certifier were exposed as worthless—phantoms stamped “saved” on forests that were never in danger, emissions reductions that never happened. Billions traded on paper, while the atmosphere didn’t notice a damn thing. The market collapsed by more than half in 2023, because the trust was gone. What collapsed wasn’t just value—it was the illusion itself.
And look at the human cost. The Kariba project in Zimbabwe, once hailed as the jewel of “community benefit,” turned out to be a betrayal. Promises of funding, jobs, and shared prosperity evaporated, while middlemen pocketed the cash. Communities stayed poor, the forest stayed the same, and western corporations bought the right to keep polluting—wrapped in glossy sustainability reports.
Offsets don’t neutralize emissions; they neutralize guilt. They’re indulgences for the modern age, bought by corporations to polish their halos while the planet burns. A fantasy currency where destruction is hidden under a green stamp of approval.
This isn’t climate action. It’s laundering sin through forests you’ll never see.
ESG — The Greenwashed Yardstick of Control
They called it a compass for conscience: Environmental, Social, Governance. Score the corporations, shame the bad actors, and steer capital toward the “good.” Sounds noble. But peel back the marketing, and ESG is just another compliance racket—one more cage disguised as virtue.
The scores don’t even agree. MIT called it “aggregate confusion”: the same company can score high with one agency, and fail with another. Why? Because each rater invents its own ruler—different categories, different weights, different definitions of “good.” A fossil fuel company can score high for governance, while a renewable firm is penalized for a lack of board diversity. A rating that swings wildly based on who’s selling the score isn’t science—it’s theatre.
Even the architects know it’s hollow. In 2023, S&P quietly dropped ESG “credit indicators” from its ratings. Think about that: if ESG were truly vital, why erase it? Because it’s incoherent, contested, and increasingly ridiculed. Yet governments still enshrine it into law, forcing companies into endless reports that nobody can standardize, and nobody can trust.
And while businesses drown in disclosure costs, a new priesthood thrives. Consultants, auditors, and data vendors rake in billions, selling both the test and the cure. Entire industries now exist not to reduce emissions or improve labor rights, but to measure them—to charge rent on virtue itself. ESG is not a fight for justice. It’s a racket, monetized by the few, imposed on the many.
What’s worse? ESG doesn’t measure what matters. It’s not about clean air, or stable jobs, or genuine sustainability. It’s about optics. A PR filter turned into policy, where corporations can greenwash their sins, financial giants can tick boxes, and regulators can claim progress. The result? A false moral scoreboard that hides destruction behind the illusion of accountability.
ESG isn’t saving the world. It’s quantifying obedience.
Who Profits — The Carbon Clergy
Follow the money and the mask slips. Carbon credits and ESG reports aren’t built to save the planet—they’re built to mint a new priesthood.
The Consultancies. Big Four firms—PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY—have pivoted entire divisions to “sustainability advisory.” They write the rules, then charge companies millions to interpret them. CSRD in the EU, CBAM on imports, UK’s disclosure rules—each new regulation is another cash fountain for consultants billing by the hour to explain a maze they helped design.
The Auditors. Every ESG metric, every offset certificate, every carbon account needs to be “verified.” Enter the auditors, stamping seals of approval on phantom numbers. They aren’t verifying reality—they’re verifying paperwork. Forest that was never at risk? Methane reduction that never happened? Doesn’t matter. As long as the forms check out, the stamp is granted and the invoice is sent.
The Data Vendors. Bloomberg, MSCI, Sustainalytics—financial giants selling ESG scores and carbon risk datasets to investors. But the scores don’t match, and the methodologies are opaque. Still, governments and banks treat them as gospel, forcing businesses into endless subscriptions for access to a ruler that changes shape depending on who holds it.
The Middlemen. Carbon markets spawned an ecosystem of brokers, registries, and credit traders. They don’t care if the credits are junk—they take a cut on every trade. Billions flow through exchanges in “phantom” offsets, with traders pocketing commissions while emissions keep climbing. The more complex and confusing the system, the more tolls they collect.
The NGOs. Even the non-profits got a slice. Certification bodies like Verra grew fat issuing “sustainable” credits that reporters later exposed as worthless. Entire rainforests were sold and resold as offsets for Western corporations’ guilt. The NGOs keep the fees, the companies keep the green halo, and the communities on the ground see none of it.
The result? An empire of accountants, traders, and consultants that grows fatter the more convoluted the rules become. Carbon credits aren’t a solution—they’re a business model. A joke at your expense.
This isn’t climate action. It’s indulgence trading for the 21st century. They’ve built a Church of Carbon, where salvation is sold, sins are stamped, and the faithful tithe forever.
The Better Path — Abundance Over Austerity
They tell you the only future is sacrifice. Pay more, use less, obey the ledger. But that’s not salvation—it’s managed decline. The real path isn’t austerity. It’s abundance.
Energy abundance. We don’t need taxes to shrink our lives—we need power to expand them. Nuclear reactors, small modular and large-scale, can provide clean baseload for centuries. Geothermal and hydro can be unlocked with modern tech. Even renewables have a place—if they’re deployed where they actually work, not to tick boxes on ESG reports. Build grids, build storage, build transmission—because prosperity requires energy, not ration books.
Real accountability. Forget phantom offsets and Scope-3 hallucinations. Hold companies to what can be measured and verified: methane leaks sealed, emissions intensity reduced, waste eliminated. Hard numbers, not greenwashed rituals.
True innovation. Instead of funding consultants and middlemen, invest in breakthrough tech—carbon capture that actually stores CO₂ for centuries, process heat electrification that beats coal on cost, next-gen fuels where they make sense. Put money into engineers, not auditors.
Simplify, don’t strangle. Disclose what matters, cut the rest. Climate risk reporting should be as hard as financial reporting: facts, verifiable, auditable. Not a thousand-page ESG fantasy novel.
The choice is stark: live in a world where your breath is taxed and your freedom is scored, or build one where energy is abundant, life is affordable, and innovation breaks the chains.
They want obedience through scarcity. We want liberation through power.
The Amazon & The Obscenity of Hypocrisy
They lecture you about plastic straws while bulldozers carve roads through the lungs of the Earth. The Amazon—the planet’s beating heart—is torn apart for soy monocultures, cattle ranching, mining concessions, and oil exploration. Billions poured into “green finance” in Europe, while in Brazil, asphalt highways slice deep into the jungle so corporations can haul away its bones.
And while this destruction rages, the same elites jet to climate summits in Davos and Dubai, clinking champagne glasses as they preach austerity to workers back home. They tell you to cycle to work and eat bugs, while their mega-projects in the Amazon and Congo strip entire ecosystems bare. Hydroelectric dams flood tribal land. Lithium mines poison rivers in the name of “clean energy.” Forests are flattened so the West can virtue-signal about “biofuels.”
Offsets are the sickest joke of all. Corporations literally buy the Amazon twice: once as a credit on a spreadsheet, and again as cleared land for beef or palm oil. They call it “carbon neutral.” But the villages choke on smoke, the soil erodes, the rivers silt, and the climate suffers twice—first in fraud, then in fire.
And through it all, they hold you guilty. They tax your breath, raise your bills, and shame your choices. Scarcity for the people, abundance for the machine. They’ve weaponized hypocrisy into policy: scolding families for boiling a kettle, while funding mega-projects that obliterate the lungs of the Earth.
The truth is simple. Their “green transition” isn’t about saving nature—it’s about strip-mining it, paving it, and selling the indulgences back to you at a premium.
Sources
- European Commission — Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) transitional reporting obligations (2023–2025) and payment phase from 2026.
https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism_en - UK Government — CBAM confirmed to start Jan 1, 2027.
https://www.techuk.org/resource/government-confirms-introduction-of-a-uk-cbam-in-2027.html - European University Institute — Carbon costs fully passed into EU electricity prices (ETS allowance pass-through).
https://www.oeko.de/en/news/latest-news/industry-pass-through-of-ets-related-costs/ - BBC — France scraps planned fuel tax hike after gilets jaunes protests.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46437904 - The Guardian — Investigation: 90%+ of rainforest offsets from Verra certified projects were “phantom credits.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe - Moral Money — Confirms the slump, noting that annual transaction value dropped from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $723 million in the latest year, amid worsening integrity concerns in the market. https://www.ft.com/content/93e4cb37-911f-48b8-acc7-d308d2edab3a
- MIT Sloan — “Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings.”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3438533 - S&P Global — ESG “credit indicators” discontinued, August 2023.
https://www.esgtoday.com/sp-removes-esg-indicators-from-credit-rating-reports/ - European Commission — The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) mandates that large EU companies must start applying new sustainability reporting rules for financial year 2024, with the first reports due in 2025. It’s based on detailed European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) developed by EFRAG.
https://finance.ec.europa.eu/capital-markets-union-and-financial-markets/company-reporting-and-auditing/company-reporting/corporate-sustainability-reporting_en - UK FCA — Anti-Greenwashing Rule in force May 31, 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/britains-anti-greenwashing-rule-finance-start-may-31-2024-04-23/ - U.S. SEC — Climate Disclosure Rule adopted March 2024, Scope-3 dropped; litigation & enforcement stayed.
https://www.esgdive.com/news/sec-declines-to-confirm-if-climate-disclosure-rule-will-be-upheld-if-it-survives-litigation/754064/ - Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) — April 2024 controversy over offsets for Scope-3.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/companies-get-green-light-use-offsets-supply-chain-emissions-2024-04-10/