Carbon Tax and the Green Deal: The EU’s Climate Heist Is Underway – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

On the hunt for fresh sources of cash, the European Commission has zeroed in on households and motorists. A planned expansion of the EU’s carbon pricing scheme to include home heating and transportation fuels is set to plug Brussels’ gaping budget deficit — at the expense of its citizens. What we are witnessing is a fiscal smash-and-grab dressed up in green.

Starting in 2027, private homes, small businesses, and passenger vehicles will be folded into a second emissions trading system (ETS2), placing them under the strict control of EU-level cap-and-trade mechanisms. This bureaucratic power grab is less about saving the planet and more about saving Brussels’ finances. With its budget running an annual deficit of €30 billion, the Commission is desperate to stabilize and expand its institutional reach, both within the EU and on the global stage. (RELATED: Europe’s Energy Suicide: Brussels Trades Industry for Ideology)

Emission Sleight of Hand and Market Rigging

By manipulating the price of emissions certificates under ETS2, Brussels hopes to generate up to €705 billion in new revenue between 2027 and 2035. The incentive to inflate prices — to the breaking point of households and small industries — could not be clearer. The only constraint? Not killing the golden goose entirely. Expect a level of ruthlessness here that we’ve never seen applied to immigration policy or bureaucracy reform. And all this despite growing resistance from member states like Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia. (RELATED: Germany’s Suicide Pact with Green Ideology)

The EU’s bureaucratic machinery is insatiable. It continues to push its agenda deeper into citizens’ wallets under the moral cover of “climate protection.” Shielded by a curtain of NGOs and a compliant media complex, Brussels rolls out its green transformation agenda with an efficiency that starkly contrasts with the real-world disasters it leaves in its wake. While the European economy sputters, the Brussels machine dazzles with five-year plans in the spirit of Beijing.

Nothing improves — except for the EU’s propaganda. With near-total dominance of public discourse, the Commission will sell these coercive levies as “saving the world,” and a disturbing portion of the public will nod in approval.

Climate Hysteria Meets Fiscal Predation

Should the EU succeed in transforming itself into a de facto tax authority, Europe will enter an era of overt behavioral control. The ability to tax emissions gives Brussels state-like power — and places it in direct competition with the national governments that nominally control it. If no serious opposition emerges, we’ll see the irreversible consolidation of a supranational fiscal state with sweeping discretionary power.

The transformation from persuasive policymaking to coercive governance has already begun. From the start, climate policy has served as a moral crowbar for expanding EU authority, especially given the Commission’s lack of direct taxation rights. This limitation sparked a perverse creativity: by linking individual actions to climate “sins,” Brussels created a new kind of indulgence system — administered by the state and enforced by the tax authorities. In terms of power politics, it’s one of the most successful innovations of modern bureaucratic statism.

Guilt is inescapable. We emit CO₂ simply by existing — thus, we are all culpable. Unlike the abstract moral inquiry of Attic tragedy, EU climate policy offers no catharsis, only perpetual obligation. It builds a vulgar fiscal prison out of manufactured moral debt.

The Rise of the Subsidy Entrepreneur

That fiscal prison is no longer theoretical. The green-socialist apparatus has quietly entrenched itself by convincing the public to buy into higher taxes as part of the fight against “climate change.” The collateral damage — a deepening economic malaise across core Europe — is dismissed via emotional diversions: fighting the far right, defending democracy, building “firewalls.” Yet the EU’s most insidious creation is its growing class of subsidy entrepreneurs — businesses and individuals whose primary expertise lies in extracting state funds. (RELATED: Biden EPA’s ‘Gold Bars Off the Titanic’ Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg)

Across the EU, hundreds of thousands are now feeding at the Green Deal trough. They sustain this Frankenstein of a transformation agenda — not through innovation, but through dependence on public cash. And who pays the bill? The unsubsidized remnants of the productive economy. It is cynical Tocquevillism in its purest form.

Divorced From Reality

Unbridled power creates blindness. The proposed carbon tax on old heating systems — meant to “nudge” people into buying new ones — could raise heating costs by over 40 percent. Forecasts predict annual costs of €1,400 per German household if Brussels locks in carbon prices between €200 and €300 per ton. And let’s be honest: the central planners will succeed in doing just that. Creating artificial scarcity is their only true talent. (RELATED: Dangers of Global Governance: UN Aims for Global Carbon Tax on Shipping)

The burden will be massive. But who cares about the families, freelancers, and small business owners already crushed by years of inflation initiated by the ECB? The damage — 550,000 new job losses in Germany since 2021 — is the price “we” must pay to reach a green utopia. The technocrats in Brussels, of course, will frame this devastation as manageable: after all, there’s a “Social Climate Fund” for the losers of the green transition. Everyone must come along. No one will be left behind. (RELATED: Carbon Capture: The Scam Agreed Upon)

The EU is quick and efficient — when it’s spending your money. That same Social Climate Fund is set to receive €87 billion to finance home insulation, heat pumps, and low-emission mobility. Green socialism merges seamlessly with old-fashioned welfare statism, and the result is an economy whose energy is siphoned into the dead soil of Brussels’ technocratic fantasies.

The EU’s Hollow Expansion

To the untrained ear, Brussels’ programs sound smart, even sovereign. But to those not yet dulled by the propaganda, they reek of ideological rigidity. These technocrats entertain no doubt about their mission, no conflict over tradeoffs. They don’t need to: it’s the nameless taxpayer who picks up the tab.

Miraculously, Brussels has managed to obscure its destructive role in Europe’s long economic decline. The foundation of EU power is intact — and expanding. In just a few months, Bulgaria is set to join the eurozone, giving Brussels new geopolitical leverage at the Black Sea. No matter that Bulgaria’s economy may be bled dry, just like much of southern Europe. (RELATED: The EU’s Imperial Overstretch: Bulgaria Joins the Euro Club)

The EU’s true genius lies in translating complex issues into dumbed-down, media-friendly slogans. The causal chain is clear: the fiscal black hole in Brussels demands more power, invents new taxes, and uses the revenues to tighten its grip, only to repeat the cycle again. It’s a bureaucratic circulus vitiosus that won’t stop until the EU Leviathan collapses under its own weight, perhaps returning — finally — to its original mission: ensuring free competition in the single market.

READ MORE from Thomas Kolbe:

Meloni’s Italy: A Refreshing Crescendo to Brussels’ Dissonance

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The EU’s Imperial Overstretch: Bulgaria Joins the Euro Club