What is happening now:

That is the package. What it really is, in the same language as the The Hague article:

The madness in four numbers

€75.36. What Brussels imposes per tonne of CO₂ on its own industry — while American and Chinese competitors pay €0 on their home markets.

€2.1 billion. What one quarter of CBAM currently costs. For all of 2026 that means between €8 and €15 billion. All coughed up by European importers and their customers.

€0. What an EU exporter to third markets receives as rebate. He pays the ETS price inside Europe and then competes with parties who pay no carbon price elsewhere. Pure structural self-destruction.

15%. The minimum tax that neutralises every national economic steering instrument. Patent box in the Netherlands? Top-up. Investment deduction in Belgium? Top-up. Strategic-investment stabilisation in Greece? Top-up. National economic policy is by definition put out of operation.

Four numbers, one conclusion: the European inhabitant is being impoverished by his own leadership. Not by China, not by America, not by Russia. By Brussels.

The BiCRS blindness

What Brussels does not see — or does not want to see.

Europe has one productive route for its own energy and its own carbon cycle that can be scaled up now: BiCRS and bio-ethanol. Biomass from its own agriculture, fermentation to ethanol, carbon captured and returned to the soil. No import dependence on LNG or hydrogen from distant countries. No CBAM needed, because it is a closed European loop. No subsidy needed, because the market works.

Friesland has the living proof in the Agricycling cooperative: one year, one cooperative, 85,844 kg of nitrogen replaced via circular compost, €4.4 million in societal value, no subsidy. Scale this up to Europe via bio-ethanol and you have the end of import-dependent energy — and of the nitrogen surplus.

What does Brussels do? It chooses hydrogen. Germany received a 10% RFNBO quota in transport by 2040 in April 2026, plus "overriding public interest" status for hydrogen infrastructure until 2045. Bio-ethanol from food crops is phased out under RED III. CropEnergies AG wrote it in so many words in June 2026: "Treat crop-based biomass, recycled carbon and CCU as complementary solutions" — Brussels rejected it.

Three attacks, one pattern

What CBAM, ETS expansion and Pillar Two have in common: each on its own is "defensible" policy. Prevent climate leakage. Tackle tax avoidance. Level the competitive playing field.

But compressed together, simultaneously, without coordination and without a proper alternative, they form one attack on the European productive tissue.

• CBAM makes importing EU firms more expensive, suppresses exporting EU firms, and yields no revenue for workable alternatives.
• ETS makes energy inside Europe more expensive, forces industry to leave or innovate, and returns no European energy foundation for that.
• Pillar Two dismantles national fiscal instruments, imposes uniformity, and offers no European industrial policy in exchange.

Three clamps on one productive cell. The cell yields — to Texas, to Shanghai, to Dubai. And within Europe, the inhabitant remains behind with higher prices, a shrinking working economy, and a leadership that says: "This is good for the climate."

What the figures show — and what they hide

The Sandbag analysis of 12 June 2026 partly acknowledges it openly: there is a "temporary funding gap" until 2034 in which CBAM revenues are too low to compensate the affected sectors. Subsidies "should focus on the period until 2034". But those same subsidies are effectively neutralised by Pillar Two top-up. Brussels hands out with one hand what it takes back with the other.

The PIK study (Phys.org, June 2026) shows that CBAM at a carbon price of $100/tonne can cause a "Brussels effect": four countries (Canada, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) would join in climate pricing. China only under $20/tonne. Under current conditions China will not join — and carbon leakage stays at 15%.

In other words: Brussels pays a price of €75 to prevent 15% leakage — while leaving 85% of the problem untouched and driving its own industry to the edge.

What must change

The inhabitant is being impoverished

The effect of all this is predictable. The European inhabitant will, in 2026-2030:

• Pay more for energy (ETS price rises, ETS2 is coming)
• Pay more for goods (CBAM pass-through on steel, aluminium, fertiliser, cement)
• Be able to build less wealth (Box 3 fiction + Pillar Two + DAC9)
• Have less work (industry moves to Texas and Asia)
• Have less food security (farmers leaving the Netherlands, energy input imported)
• Get no European energy foundation (BiCRS ignored, hydrogen too late)

This is no conspiracy. It is no Chinese plot, no Russian disinformation, no American trade trick. It is Europe's own leadership attacking its own organism, with the best of intentions, from models that fail to account for where European prosperity actually comes from.

What now

The Dutch farmer is a mirror for European industry. The €212,795 per kilo of nitrogen in the Netherlands is the €75 per tonne of CO₂ in Brussels. Both amounts appear logical in models and are in reality self-destructive.

Both amounts continue as long as the inhabitant does not say: not this.

Brussels is further away than The Hague. The European Parliament is harder to reach than the Dutch Second Chamber. But precisely for that reason this moment is critical. The CBAM expansion is now moving through the ECOFIN track. The Pillar Two GIR deadline is 30 June 2026. RED III implementation is being fixed in national legislation this month. Whoever does not name it now will bear the consequences for at least a decade.

Het Open Vizier names it. And asks every reader, entrepreneur, farmer, SME owner, DGA, employee: Pass it on. Awaken your own Treg cells. The European auto-immune disease is a curable disease — but only if the patient dares to acknowledge its own recognition error.