They fear the air now. Not the smog of real pollution or the sulfur of industrial abuse — but the very breath of life: carbon dioxide. One carbon, two oxygen, and suddenly it’s the new Satan. The original green molecule — invisible, essential, ancient — recast as a planetary threat by people who wouldn’t know a photosynthetic cycle if it bit them in the ethics.
Aeraphobia is the irrational terror of atmospheric balance. It’s what happens when a civilization forgets it’s part of nature and starts treating nature as a hostile force to be regulated, taxed, and scrubbed. CO₂ — lifeblood of the biosphere, enabler of crops, forests, coral, plankton — is now hunted like a fugitive. Not because it kills, but because it dares to exist.
This section dismantles the dogma. It peels back the hysteria, the virtue-signaling, the corporate profiteering, and the policy theater that turned a trace gas into a global moral panic. I don’t write this to defend emissions — I write it to defend proportion, logic, and the kind of clarity that once kept us from eating our own tail.
Numbers have become the new gospel. They no longer reveal truth but sanctify deception. Cooked data, cherry-picked consensus, and anonymous peer review now serve where priests once stood. We built an altar of spreadsheets and called it science. And still, beneath the glow of our charts, the truth quietly waits for its debt to be paid.
The IMF’s “fossil fuel subsidies” aren’t money—they’re morality dressed as math. By assigning imaginary prices to air, weather, and guilt, the Fund conjures five trillion dollars from thin air. It’s bureaucratic theater masquerading as economics, a sermon for the carbon-averse faithful. Meanwhile, civilization still runs—sinfully—on the fuel they condemn.