David Craig, on July 13th, 2024weekend blog
There was a long (about 30 minutes) piece on the BBC this morning about the disastrous 2,800+ job losses coming at the Port Talbot steel works as the plant closes down its blast furnaces and replaces them with supposedly more environmentally-friendly electric arc steel-making. Here’s a picture of a blast furnace:
As the name suggests, it’s rather hot and thus uses an awful lot of energy. In fact, energy costs account for between 30% and 40% of the cost of blast-furnace steel.
Unlike any of our politicians, I’ve actually worked in two steel mills in two different European countries. But you hardly need to have worked in a steel mill to know that the higher the energy cost is, the less likely a steel mill will be competitive. UK energy prices are around $0.4 kWh. China’s and India’s are about $0.08 kWh. So, if you were Tata Steel, the Indian owners of the Port Talbot steelworks, where would you prefer to make your steel?
- the UK with some of the world’s highest energy prices?
- India or China with some of the world’s lowest energy prices?
Strangely, in the 30 minutes the BBC spent reporting on the massive redundancies at the Port Talbot steelworks, the climate-catastrophist BBC made no mention of the fact that it was mainly the UK’s eye-wateringly high energy prices, caused by our insane and economically-suicidal Net Zero madness, which are the main reason for destroying what pathetically little is left of our steel industry.
Recently, the UK’s crushing energy prices have led to the closure of the oil refinery at Grangemouth and now threaten our remaining chemicals industry. And now that the crazed, economically-challenged (IMHO) waste-of-skin Ed MIliband has banned all new drilling for oil or gas in the North Sea, our energy prices are going to go even higher, asphyxiating even more of our industries.
I wonder how poor we’re all going to get before our useless politicians realise the damage they are causing fighting a climate crisis which doesn’t even exist?
Category: 
Ed Milliband is a thick deluded idiot and that makes him dangerous! And Starmer made him minister of Net Zero? Good help us all.
A few days ago Rees-Mogg interviewed Tim Crossland, a barrister from Defend Our Juries. Mogg described it as one of the best conversations on the topic. Neither of them understood any of the science and they were in full agreement about their knowledge.