The Alchemists gathered in towers of glass, where ledger meets law in a climate crusade,
With parchments of promise and graphs that surpass the famine of reason their madness has made.
No wind in the turbines, no sun in the pane, the sky over London is iron and still,
But lo! We are carbonless, frozen and sane, while peasants grow colder atop their own hill.
The cows have been banished for flatulence sin, their fields turned to condos of concrete and steel,
As tractors lie rusting where green had once been, and dinners are printed, not ploughed, cooked, or real.
The lords of the cities, in smart-coated pride, sell dreams of a planet renewed and reborn,
Yet ghettos now rise where the wheat used to ride, and homeless men barter for kernels of corn.
Their carbon is counted in offset and bond, a metric of faith, not of heat or of light,
While stoves are forbidden, the hearth has been conned, and darkness returns with the long winter night.
But far in the East where the furnaces glow, the black lungs of empires still thunder and flare,
And there, the wind dances where factory-rows blow their smoke into jet streams that circle the air.
A globe in convulsion spins round on its pole, and logic is lost in a fervent campaign,
The jet stream is laughter, immune to control, it carries all dogma from mountain to main.
They measure the West for each cow’s final sigh, then pay through the nose for a virtue unseen,
While dragon-forged panels are shipped ‘neath the sky, their profit ablaze in an air thick and green.
And who burns the coal that the West now disdains? Who floods half the world with their turbines and drills?
The same who sell silence to bureaucrat brains, a silence that deepens while industry stills.
The prophet of carbon walks carbonless roads, in sandals of plastic and robes from abroad,
He speaks of the warming, the ocean that goads, while flying to Bali to worship his god.
A god made of credits and offsets and fees, of models and pledges and lies softly told,
Where data is gospel and grant money sees the virtue of turning hot air into gold.
They chant in the temple of Net Zero’s name, where science is servant to power and will,
And carbon’s a sin in this secular game, unless it is purchased and taxed by the shill.
Oh sing of the age where the fires were tamed, when coal lit the night and the chimneys stood proud,
When empires were built and the engineers named, not scorned as the poisoners banned by the crowd.
Now steel is imported by carbon-rich fleets, and concrete is poured where the crops used to grow,
And children eat insects and processed soy treats while carbonless lords feast in silence below.
The peasants are promised a cleaner, green earth, though heating is rationed and travel a crime,
Yet each green decree sees its profit and birth in nations where smog is the rhythm of time.
So let the wind falter and let the sun hide, and let cowless meadows grow silent and bare,
Let farms be the memory buried with pride, replaced with high towers and soot-laden air.
For carbon is traded like alchemist gold, a mark of salvation for those who comply,
And those who dissent, whether youngling or old, are heretics sentenced to freeze, starve, or die.
Thus rings the great hymn from the towers above: “Net Zero, our saviour! Our kingdom, our plan!”
While coal-breathing dragons, devoid of all love, still build with our money, and sell to our ban.
(By John Shenton)