Lo and behold, the real cost of Net Zero. Last weekend, roughly 400 workers from the steelworks in Port Talbot, Wales marched in protest against the prospect of up to 3,000 redundancies. Earlier this year, Tata Steel, the Indian owner of the Port Talbot factory, struck a deal with the UK government – it would receive £500million for switching to ‘greener’ methods of steel production. And that means redundancies.
Port Talbot’s two low-productivity, high-CO2 emissions blast furnaces are to be switched for a high-productivity, low-CO2 electric arc furnace (EAF). With this transition, 3,000 of the plant’s 4,000 jobs may become obsolete.
The picture is similar over at Tata’s rival, British Steel. The Chinese-owned British Steel has begged for £600million of government support to replace its two blast furnaces at Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire with EAFs. British Steel, which is currently haemorrhaging around £30million a month, will shed perhaps 2,000 of the 3,200 jobs at Scunthorpe.
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