Once upon a frosted century, in the Year of Our Thermostat, the High Priests of Progress convened, not in cathedrals or commons, but in shimmering towers of glass, sanctified by subsidy and self-regard. There, where parchment meets protocol and budget is scripture, they scratched the New Commandments into tablets of silicon: Thou shalt not emit.

Here were gathered the Alchemists of the Age, data druids and metrics mystics, who, through obscure incantations of spreadsheets and sponsored studies, promised to transmute gas into guilt and guilt into grants. Their laboratories were funded, not by the fruits of labour, but by the sweatless flick of governmental pens. Each graph rose like the Tower of Babel, though built of conjecture and drawn in crayon green.

“Rejoice!” they cried. “For we have banished the bovine flatulence! No longer shall cud-chewing beasts foul our sacred winds!” And thus, the cows were cast out into memory, their pastures paved and parcelled into eco-condos with hydroponic yoga balconies. Where once tractors tilled, now lay rusting hulks beside the plinths of failed solar initiatives.

The sun, a most fickle deity, declined to appear for the unveiling of Utopia. The turbines stood still, as solemn and useless as wind chimes in a tomb. But the Alchemists were undeterred. “We are carbonless,” they declared, teeth chattering in their climatized cloisters, while the hill-folk, formerly called citizens, froze beside unswept hearths in cottages now deemed “unsustainable heritage hazards.”

In the bustling city-states of Progress, London, Berlin, Ottawa, and their carbon-neutral clones, came forth new prophets in trim-cut suits and shoes fashioned from pineapple skin. They spread their gospel via recycled drone footage and whispered to the masses through AI-generated pastoral poetry. The people were promised not bread but balance, not heat but hope, not fuel but faith in the future™.

Meanwhile, in far-off lands where dragons still roamed in smokestack flocks, the furnaces belched merrily. Coal, the unholy relic, was burnt not by the West, it having undergone climate conversion, but by their benefactors, their manufacturers, their creditors. Jet streams, those careless couriers of carbon, laughed across the hemispheres, carrying smog and sanctimony in equal measure.

The Green Inquisition knew no border, however. They counted cow-breath and compost bins, condemned kettles and crucified cookers. They forbade the fire and mocked the meal. One could only be warm if one could afford to apologise, via a carbon offset, to the great god Emission. This god, remote and profitable, dwelt in a cloud, not celestial, but digital, where offerings were made by PayPal and penance issued in kilowatt-hours.

The Prophet of Purity strode forth in his garments, each thread dyed in foreign fuel. “Let us go,” he declared, “unto the climate summits, by private jet, of course, for we must preach simplicity far from the squalor.” In Bali and Davos, he ministered to the virtuous elite who dined on air-flown algae and drank glacier tears distilled through carbon-positive filters. Each utterance was anointed in grants and appended with footnotes and models, which always showed catastrophe, unless the funding increased.

In these temples of Net Zero, science bent the knee to the high priests of bureaucracy. Heretics, farmers, welders, engineers, were shunned, deplatformed, or denounced as climate apostates. Their tools were labelled relics, their knowledge unclean. The past, with its warmth, its factories, its bloody effort and grimy triumphs, was painted in soot and shame. A new man was to be born: thin, chilled, allergic to beef, and spiritually nourished by vertical lettuce and ideological podcasts.

But hark! From yonder East arose the coal-fed colossus. With soot-stained fists it built windmills for the West, then sold them back at green premiums. Their cities thundered with growth, and their skies were veiled in what we once called "industrial progress." The West, meanwhile, whispered over digital candles, debating whether kettles were too colonial, or whether infants should be taught to apologise for their carbon footprints before learning their own names.

And so, the age turns, a globe in spin, convulsed with policy and punctured by good intentions. The wind, unmoved by hashtags, blew as it pleased. The sun, indifferent to offsets, warmed the nations that dared to burn. And we, the dwindled children of coal and conquest, sit wrapped in recycled fibres beneath heatless roofs, contemplating a righteous starvation.

Net Zero, they told us, was the future. And so, the future came, cold, hungry, morally certain, economically dependent, and scientifically subsidised.

Let us build monuments, not to the engineers and miners who lit our former century, but to the savants who priced carbon like tulip bulbs and froze a civilisation in its own virtue.

Glory be to the Green. May your compost be with you.