Carsten Schneider, Germany’s federal minister for climate protection, has defended the EU’s new CO₂ import taxes in a public television interview. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), coming into force in 2026, will tax imports of “carbon-intensive” goods. Schneider claims this will protect European industry from “unfair” competition and accelerate decarbonization.
He’s right about one thing: Europe’s industry is collapsing under the weight of its own climate policy. Yet the obvious solution — abolishing CO₂ taxes and the entire climate cult surrounding them — never crosses the minister’s mind. Instead, Brussels prepares to escalate.
The timing could hardly be worse. Donald Trump is back in the White House, having called climate change “the greatest hoax in history.” The United States has again withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and abandoned the global climate religion. Washington now plans to counter the EU’s CBAM with retaliatory tariffs on European exports.
China, which still meets around 80 percent of its energy needs with coal, oil, and gas, dismisses CBAM as discriminatory and promises its own counter-tariffs. India and Brazil have joined the chorus: New Delhi calls the measure an attack on developing countries, while even left-leaning Brazil — host of COP30 in Belém — condemns it as a unilateral European overreach. Delegates from the Global South warn that such climate tariffs will trigger new trade wars rather than prevent emissions.
So Brussels now finds itself ready to wage an economic war not only against the United States, but also China, India, and most of the developing world. What could possibly go wrong?
The official justification is “carbon leakage” — the idea that emissions merely move abroad if Europe deindustrializes. The EU bureaucracy, having realized that outsourcing production to China doesn’t actually reduce global CO₂, reacts in the only way it knows: by creating another layer of taxes and control.
This is classic central-planner logic. When the world refuses to follow Europe’s madness, Brussels simply doubles down. The result is a self-inflicted economic siege. Even countries once aligned with Europe — including Australia — are stepping back from carbon pricing. But in the world of unelected, all-powerful EU technocrats, reality is never allowed to interfere with ideology.
After sanctioning Russia, its largest supplier of raw materials and energy, over the war in Ukraine — which wrecked Europe’s energy supply and inflated costs — the EU now opens a second front: a trade war against the rest of the planet. All in the name of forcing others to join a faith that has long since lost believers outside the green-woke elite of Brussels.
Arrogance, detachment, and naivety on this scale are hard to overstate. Europe’s economy is faltering, its industries are fleeing, and yet the EU leadership believes it can reshape the planet by decree. The coming “climate war” will not save the world. It will merely finish what the Green Deal began — the slow destruction of Europe’s own prosperity.
📚 Sources
- ARD interview with Carsten Schneider (2025)
- European Commission – CBAM documentation
- COP30 statements – UNFCCC Belém (2025)