Hang on a minute; £1.5bn subsidy to keep 4000 workers jobs comes to £375000 for each worker. Sod that, I’d rather the plant shut and that money given direct to the workers. I’m pretty sure they’ve had previous ‘subsidys’ too.
This article is being written around an industry closure perspective, but really it is just part of an ongoing requirement to reduce carbon output in the steel industry in this country. Granted Tata are ramping up the rhetoric but this has been talked about for years, everyone agrees it needs to be done, but no action has been taken.
Port Talbot produces somewhere in the region of a fifth of all UK industry carbon and there have been talks over many years between Tata and the government to come up with a strategy to reduce these emissions through the use of electric arc furnaces or mitigate with carbon capture. Steel production is critical infrastructure, it’s use is unavoidable in a lot of construction and manufacturing. We will need a lot of steel to produce wind turbines, the new nuclear power station, etc. so there is a much bigger environmental picture here.
Tata paying half of the £3bn investment seems like a pretty good deal to retain critical infrastructure and reduce carbon emissions in a high emission industry.
We’re staring down the barrel of a world war and we’re not protecting what little is left of our steel industry.
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Hang on a minute; £1.5bn subsidy to keep 4000 workers jobs comes to £375000 for each worker. Sod that, I’d rather the plant shut and that money given direct to the workers. I’m pretty sure they’ve had previous ‘subsidys’ too.
This article is being written around an industry closure perspective, but really it is just part of an ongoing requirement to reduce carbon output in the steel industry in this country. Granted Tata are ramping up the rhetoric but this has been talked about for years, everyone agrees it needs to be done, but no action has been taken.
Port Talbot produces somewhere in the region of a fifth of all UK industry carbon and there have been talks over many years between Tata and the government to come up with a strategy to reduce these emissions through the use of electric arc furnaces or mitigate with carbon capture. Steel production is critical infrastructure, it’s use is unavoidable in a lot of construction and manufacturing. We will need a lot of steel to produce wind turbines, the new nuclear power station, etc. so there is a much bigger environmental picture here.
Tata paying half of the £3bn investment seems like a pretty good deal to retain critical infrastructure and reduce carbon emissions in a high emission industry.
We’re staring down the barrel of a world war and we’re not protecting what little is left of our steel industry.