CBAM: Making Carbon Vanish to a Zero

It is abstract carbon accounting imposed by institutions with no accountability.

The European Union wants you to believe it is serious about climate action. It has invented the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. CBAM is mandatory. It sounds important. It is not.

Here is what CBAM actually is: a revenue extraction tool dressed in climate language. The EU prints money. Printed money requires backing. Extracted wealth backs currency. CBAM extracts wealth from trading partners whilst claiming to reduce carbon. The climate reduction is incidental. The extraction is the point.

The numbers prove it. The EU’s own analysis shows that expanding CBAM to cover more sectors will add 0.6 to 2 per cent to carbon reduction. Expansion is not happening because it works. Expansion is happening because the mechanism works for revenue collection.

Compare this to what climate action should look like. It should measure actual embedded emissions. It should audit actual reductions. It should produce public books that show whether money spent resulted in carbon cut. CBAM does none of this. CBAM measures carbon intensity in production and charges tariffs. It does not require that emissions fall. A factory can pay the tariff and keep emitting. Nothing forces change.

The genius of CBAM is that it appears to do something whilst requiring nothing. A company pays the border adjustment. The EU collects revenue. Everyone claims victory. The atmosphere notices no difference.

This is what happened with voluntary offsets. Companies bought credits whilst their actual emissions grew. The accounting changed. The atmosphere did not. The institutions called it net zero. Called themselves virtuous. Lied.

CBAM is the same lie scaled up. It is mandatory rather than voluntary, which sounds tougher. But mandatory theatre is still theatre.

Look at who created CBAM. The same EU that hid vaccine contracts through text messages. The same EU that claims transparency whilst fighting court orders to release documents. The same EU that funds wars, prints currency without restraint, and extracts wealth from the Global South through trade structures. This institution now tells you it is serious about climate.

You can verify economic extraction. You can read the books. The EU’s currency printing is recorded. The tariff revenues are logged. But you cannot verify climate action. You cannot audit the future state of the atmosphere. You cannot prove that CBAM carbon accounting matches physical reality.

Institutions build opacity around what they cannot defend. They build transparency around what they can afford to lose. The vaccine contracts were hidden. CBAM transparency is limited. Climate outcomes are never audited against spending.

The silence from so-called sustainability experts about CBAM’s actual ineffectiveness is telling. These people built careers on voluntary offsets. CBAM threatens that model by making it mandatory and thus more obviously useless. But CBAM also offers them a new career. It creates jobs in carbon accounting. It generates consulting fees. It provides institutional authority to measure and manage carbon for corporations.

Everyone benefits except the climate and the people whose resources are extracted to fund this machinery.

Watch the magic. Three universal things disappear in the climate change frenzy. Pollution. Global warming. Weather. The institutions make you forget what you could see and measure. Now you stare at carbon dioxide instead.

Mayilamma fought Coca-Cola over poisoned groundwater. That was real environmental damage. That required real accountability. A corporation poisoned what people needed to survive. The fight was local, concrete, verifiable.

CBAM is nothing like this. It is abstract carbon accounting imposed by institutions with no accountability. It extracts real money from real economies whilst producing no measurable climate change. It is called action. Honesty would expose its purpose.

The EU cannot survive public audit of CBAM. If you traced tariff revenue to actual emissions reduction, you would find the reduction negligible. If you compared spending to outcome, you would find the outcome barely exists. So the audit never happens. The books are kept in ways that obscure rather than reveal.

This is how you know CBAM is corrupt. Not through conspiracy theory. Through simple observation. Honest institutions invite scrutiny. CBAM avoids it.

The real environmental problem is pollution. Measurable, local, verifiable. Poisoned water. Toxic air. Contaminated soil. These things kill people now. They require accountability from specific institutions. They cannot be offset. They cannot be traded. They must be stopped.

CBAM does nothing about pollution. It creates a parallel accounting system that allows extraction to continue under a new name.

The climate will not be saved by CBAM. The climate will only be saved if institutions are forced to actually reduce emissions, which would require them to reduce consumption and growth. CBAM manages growth. It makes extraction sustainable-looking. It allows the empire to print, extract, and expand whilst claiming restraint.

You can believe carbon matters. You can also believe CBAM is the empire’s toll. These are not contradictory positions. They are perceptions of how power protects itself whilst appearing to serve the public good.

CBAM will expand. It will generate revenue. It will create institutional jobs. It will allow the EU to appear serious about climate. And the actual emissions will keep climbing.

That is not climate action. That is institutional theatre. We are all forced to watch.

Carbon stays. Your money vanishes. That is Net Zero.