Sherry Auxier Errera

The green tax is just another wealth-extraction tool that rakes in taxes paid by the public and redistributes them to the parasitic bureaucratic class, and every carbon tax, green levy, and renewable subsidy your government collects destroys more wealth than it could ever protect. Frédéric Bastiat gave us the analytical tool in 1850: the seen and the unseen. Politicians point to the wind farm they built with your money. They never point to the factory that never opened, the heating bill paid by a pensioner in Leipzig, or the industrial jobs that relocated to Vietnam, where coal plants run around the clock with zero European oversight. Germany's Energiewende is the cleanest case study in Western economic self-destruction since the 1970s price controls on oil. Germany committed to phasing out nuclear power while simultaneously mandating renewable expansion. The result was predictable to anyone willing to read a price signal. By 2022, German industrial electricity prices hit roughly 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, triple what American manufacturers paid. BASF, one of the world's largest chemical producers, announced it was permanently shrinking its Ludwigshafen operations and shifting investment to China. The carbon Germany "saved" by closing its nuclear plants evaporated entirely, because German grid operators burned lignite, the dirtiest coal available, to cover the gaps renewables couldn't fill. Subsidizing inefficient energy doesn't reduce emissions globally. It exports industrial production to jurisdictions with weaker environmental standards and higher carbon intensity. You pay more at the pump, your government claims a moral victory, and a steel mill opens outside Guangzhou running on unfiltered coal. Net atmospheric CO2 rises. The accounting is done on a territorial basis, which means your government measures only what happens inside its borders. The atmosphere does not share that convenient boundary. Taxation extracts resources from productive private actors and routes them through bureaucracies with no profit-and-loss feedback. Every pound, euro, and dollar filtered through that system funds less actual decarbonization than a competitive energy market would generate on its own, driven by genuine price signals rewarding genuine innovation.