The Reese Report: 01-04-2026,
According to the Brookings Institution’s analysis of carbon tax timing, high fossil fuel prices are the worst time to impose a carbon tax, but are the best time to build the underlying market architecture. And that infrastructure is rapidly being built and deployed by the biggest multinational corporations, governments and states, and the United Nations — especially in the past few months.
Announced at Davos in January 2026, the carbon market platform EcoGuard automates the full carbon credit lifecycle. The carbon market is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2035. This infrastructure is designed to be “invisible and ubiquitous” — the goal is for every transaction, settlement, and data point to be managed behind the scenes so that the user is not aware of it.
Also at Davos last January, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said that AI “will destroy humanities jobs,” and described a future in which high school students train for factory jobs, no one goes to college or immigrates, and black-box software run by major government contractors determines whether society is being run properly.
For the more compliant, the so-called 15-minute city, smart city, and freedom city models are being built to incorporate digital ID, carbon tracking, and population monitoring. Where you live, how far you travel, and what your carbon footprint is are already being tracked in multiple countries and several US cities. For the non-compliant, the prison business is booming. Federal and state governments have announced over $2 billion in new prison construction in the past year alone — and the private sector dwarfs that.