What is happening now:

That is the package. What it really is, in the same language as the Den Haag 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 bn. What one quarter of CBAM now costs. For the whole 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-country markets receives as a rebate. It pays the ETS price within Europe and then competes against parties that 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 disabled.

Four numbers, one conclusion: the European citizen is being impoverished by their 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 into ethanol, carbon captured and returned to the soil. No import dependency on LNG or hydrogen from distant countries. No CBAM needed, because it is a closed European cycle. No subsidy needed, because the market works.

Friesland has living proof in cooperative Agricycling: one year, one cooperative, 85,844 kg of nitrogen replaced via recycling compost, €4.4 million in social 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 in April 2026 a quota of 10% RFNBO in transport by 2040, plus "overriding public interest" status for hydrogen infrastructure until 2045. Bio-ethanol from food crops is being 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 is individually "defensible" policy. Preventing climate leakage. Tackling tax avoidance. Levelling the playing field.

But compressed together, simultaneous, without coordination and without a viable alternative of their own, they form one attack on the European productive fabric.

• CBAM makes importing EU businesses more expensive, suppresses exporting EU businesses, and delivers no revenue to the workable alternatives.
• ETS makes energy within Europe more expensive, forces industry to leave or innovate, and delivers no European energy base in return.
• Pillar Two demolishes national fiscal instruments, imposes uniformity, and offers no European industrial policy in exchange.

Three pincers on one productive cell. The cell moves — to Texas, to Shanghai, to Dubai. And within Europe the citizen is left with higher prices, a shrinking industrial base, and a leadership that says: "This is good for the climate."

What the numbers show — and what they hide

The Sandbag analysis of 12 June 2026 openly acknowledges part of it: 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 offers something with one hand that it takes away with the other.

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

In other words: Brussels pays the 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 citizen is being impoverished

The effect of all this is predictable. Between 2026 and 2030, the European citizen will:

• Pay more for energy (ETS price rising, ETS2 coming)
• Pay more for goods (CBAM pass-through on steel, aluminium, fertiliser, cement)
• Be less able to build wealth (Box 3 fiction + Pillar Two + DAC9)
• Have less work (industry moving to Texas and Asia)
• Have less food security (farmers leaving the Netherlands, energy inputs imported)
• Receive no native energy base (BiCRS ignored, hydrogen arriving too late)

This is not a conspiracy. It is not a Chinese plot, not Russian disinformation, not an American trade trick. It is Europe's own leadership attacking its own organism, with the best of intentions, from models that take no account of where European prosperity actually comes from.

What now

The Dutch farmer is a mirror for European industry. The €212,795 per kilogram 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 keep running as long as the citizen does not say: not this.

Brussels is further away than Den Haag. The European Parliament is harder to reach than the House of Representatives. But that is exactly why this moment is critical. The CBAM expansion is now running through the ECOFIN process. The Pillar Two GIR deadline is 30 June 2026. RED III implementation is being enshrined 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, owner-director, employee: Pass it on. Awaken your own Treg cells. The European anti-immune disease is a curable disease — but only if the patient dares to recognise its own recognition error.