This guy is right but for completely the wrong reasons. This article is an anti-green energy hit piece.
The West is de-industrialising itself in the quest for Net Zero.
government-forced energy transition race to net zero.
Germany, where a rapid deindustrialisation in the pursuit of net zero has been underway for several years now
What fucking planet is this man living on where Western governments are taking climate change so seriously that they’re sabotaging their economies over it?
No buddy, I don’t think the drive to net zero is responsible for any of these closures, even if the company in question happened to be talking about some greenwashing initiative when the closure occurred.
So, where will the steel-making capacity be made up? Why, in China, of course. The furnaces there won’t be fired by clean, green electricity or hydrogen, but by coal. Because, well, coal is the most energy-efficient, cheapest way to fire the blast furnaces needed to make the steel. Physics still matters.
The implication here is that China doesn’t care about green energy and that that gives them an advantage. This despite the fact that China has been investing more into a green energy transition than every other country combined - yes they still use coal, but it’s part of a centrally planned, carefully carried out transition that they have been executing for over a decade now, a plan that has been so successful that in that time they went from having some of the worst air quality in the world to some of the best, and that now sees them making the overwhelming majority of all green-energy related tech from panels to windmills to batteries.
Another recent headline out of the UK reads, “United Kingdom closes its last coal-fired power plant.” That September 30 header came from CBS News, and again is descriptive of the story itself: The last coal power plant in the UK was shuttered at the end of September, bringing an end to an era as the UK government strives to meet its carbon reduction goals.
Or it could be that large scale solar and wind generation have gotten cheaper per MWh than coal. Hell, they’re currently cheaper in Europe than coal was ten years ago. While the changes are rolling out too late/slowly to stop the worst of what climate change will bring, we have objectively reached the point where the green energy transition (at least for grid power) is inevitable due to market forces.
The magic sauce here isn’t disregarding the atmosphere as the writer wants it to be, it’s centralized, thorough and long term planning in a society where Capital is under the thumb of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This man imagines that if only the Western governments would deny climate change more and become even more destructive towards their environments, that they would become competitive with a socialist economic system - but he doesn’t see the simple and obvious truth that that would only further accelerate our self-destruction.
I wouldn’t go that far. China makes something like 80% of the intermediate products used in “American” manufacturing, so I’d still expect price increases across the board.