In 1992, global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions stood at 22.3 billion metric tons. By 2024, they had reached a record high of 37.4 billion tons—an increase of nearly 68%.
Europe, by comparison, emitted 4 billion tons in 1992. By 2023, this figure had fallen to around 2.5 billion tons, a reduction of approximately 40%. However, on a global scale, this reduction is a derisory amount.
China, for its part, emitted only 2.5 billion tons of CO₂ in 1992. Today, China is responsible for nearly 12 billion tons of CO₂ emissions—five times Europe’s current emissions and one-third of the global total.
While Europe flagellates itself in a supposedly virtuous asceticism, aiming to eliminate carbon from the continent (“net-zero”), the rest of the world, led by China, is burning coal at full throttle, propelling global emissions to unprecedented heights.
### Industrial Collapse
Worse still, this European decarbonization has been accompanied by an accelerating industrial collapse. In 1992, manufacturing represented 20% of the European Union’s GDP; today, it accounts for barely 14%, and the trend is downward.
Globally, Europe once produced nearly 30% of global manufacturing; it now represents only 15%, overtaken by China, which dominates with more than 30%. Europe’s misguided decarbonization has handed its prosperity to China on a silver platter. Moreover, it has done so through the European Union.
Many people despise the EU without really knowing why. Now they do.
Decarbonization is a pure myth—a fiction skillfully designed by Malthusian ideologues to keep Europeans in servitude (see Robert Zurbin, *Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism*).
Under the pretext of “saving the planet,” Europeans have dismantled their factories, outsourced their jobs, increased their energy costs, and subjected their economies to the tutelage of an authoritarian, arbitrary Brussels bureaucracy as ignorant as it is malevolent and complicit with Beijing.
### Murder by Energy
When an American pays $100 to heat his home, a European pays between $300 and $500. When an American spends $100 to light his home, a European spends $200 despite the average gross income in the United States being twice that of Europe and the average net income 2.5 times higher.
In Germany, 10,000 industrial jobs are being lost every month. The chemical industry, once the pride of the port of Antwerp, Belgium, is in rapid and massive decline. Chemicals in Antwerp are not a minor detail; they are a fundamental and structuring element of its prosperity.
Antwerp politicians who attempt to balance public finances while adhering to the myth of decarbonization are deluding themselves. One can have either decarbonization or prosperity—not both. A choice must be made now.
### “But Global Warming!”
Environmentalists from all parties have turned Europe into a vast, unproductive, and dependent wind farm. But, say the well-trained creatures, “What about global warming? Won’t we all perish in torrents of lava and a deluge of floods if we stop building wind turbines, and fail to sacrifice our last factories on the altar of decarbonization?”
Even America’s premier climate alarmist, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, last week dismissed in his words the “doomsday view” that climate change would “decimate civilization,” and, according to *Time*, called for:
> “a recalibration of priorities—including more funding for global health and a narrower focus on key technologies that can make a difference on climate.”
Paired with a move to cut funding for efforts to craft climate policy earlier this year, Gates’ memo was perceived as an indication of a dramatic pivot.
Since the beginning of the industrial era, a slight warming has indeed been observed—+1.2°C—not exactly the Apocalypse. Humanity will adapt as it has always done to ice ages, droughts, and floods.
This will be all the easier now that we have at our disposal rapidly advancing technological tools: artificial intelligence, precision agriculture, and large-scale desalination. Humans are preparing to colonize the Moon and Mars, where the average temperature is -63°C.
But we are told we could not adapt to a 1.5-degree increase on Earth? What a grim joke.
We mock the credulity of ancient peoples who believed in myriad deities, to whom they did not hesitate to offer human sacrifices—even children. We condemn the Mayan rites of decapitations, immolations, and the extraction of still-beating hearts to appease Chaac, god of rain and storms, who demanded blood to make it rain; Quetzalcóatl, because blood nourished the cosmic serpent, and so on.
We feel only contempt for such myths.
Yet today, the European Union is sacrificing 500 million citizens on the altar of a faceless green god.
Not a single European will die from “global warming.” But millions could die from not being able to heat their homes during the winter.
### What Europe Needs
Europe needs a policy of strength—economic, military, geopolitical. It must destroy the myth of decarbonization and reaffirm its true goals: the well-being of individuals and families, economic growth, and technological progress.
Relocate industry, free up fossil and nuclear energy, and invest massively in research. Only a sovereign, industrious, and assertive Europe will regain its prosperity.
The Chinese Communist Party, for years, has been opening two coal-fired plants a week. In just the first half of 2025, China expanded these coal-fired plants more than in the last nine years.
Crucially, however, China has also been investing billions in nuclear-fusion energy to provide limitless, clean, cheap energy for the unimaginable electricity demands that will be required for global dominance in artificial intelligence.
Europe and the UK would be well-advised to stop listening to charming little scoundrels like Boris Johnson, that ephemeral former British prime minister who now profits from his “moral commitment” to the totalitarian absurdity of the “net-zero society,” cashing in with the highest-bidding regimes and lobbies.
Decarbonization is a myth. There is no “decarbonization.”
Only Europe alone, like an old drunkard lost in its fantasies, is hanging itself.
### The Sham of Wind Farms
No better example illustrates the sham of decarbonization than the case of wind farms. Not a single wind turbine is profitable without massive public subsidies, which Europeans pay for every month through their exorbitant energy bills.
The real problem, though rarely mentioned, lies in the replacement of these sad monsters. The lifespan of a wind turbine is short. By 2030, around 14,000 of them will need to be replaced in Europe.
How fortunate! Simply do not replace them.
The issue is easy: the semi-public companies managing these turbines have set aside nothing at all—not a single cent for their replacement. All that is needed is to dismantle and remove them.
Think of it: our landscapes will no longer be dotted with these useless eyesores. Then we can all write them off as a bet that was lost.
—
**Drieu Godefridi**
Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), and holds a PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group, and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of *The Green Reich* (2020).
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2025/11/07/europes-race-to-net-zero-and-total-self-destruction-by-drieu-godefridi/
