Deindustrialization
/Decline and Fall
In the London Times, Diana Furchtgott-Roth traces the economic suicide of Western Europe:
At the Munich Leaders’ Meeting in Washington DC this week, vice-president JD Vance put his finger on a major cause of Europe’s recent decline. “One of the things that the Germans were very good about,” he declared, “is that they had kept the industrial strength of their economy consistent with the first world standard of living. But now what we see in Europe is a lot of our European friends are de-industrialising.” Hard power, he continued, requires strong industry.
It’s tough to be a naval power, for example, if you don’t make any steel and don’t build any ships.
[Europe’s] industrial base is getting whittled away by net zero policies, with the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to preserve the environment placed ahead of almost everything else, including economic growth. Worse, China is ramping up coal-fired power at the same time. The net effect is not likely to be net zero but economic suicide for the West.
The European Union is trying to reduce CO2 emissions by 90% by 2040. That can’t be done, and won’t be. Nor would it have any discernible impact on climate, even if you believe the warmists’ own formulas:
[A]ccording to the Heritage Institute’s Climate Calculator, based on government economic and climate models, reducing Europe’s entire CO2 emissions to zero would have a net temperature mitigation of only about 0.12 degrees Celsius by 2100, assuming the highest climate sensitivity to carbon.
What “net zero” will do, however, is destroy Europe’s industrial base, and thereby impoverish its people and render Europe irrelevant in world politics:
Due to higher prices for electricity in the West, energy-intensive manufacturing has been shipped to countries like China, which do not so slavishly follow net zero nostrums. Europe’s progressive policies are effectively contributing to China’s industrial might.
England once rode coal to its status as the premier world power. Not it is China’s turn:
[C]oal-powered generation [in China] rose from under 1,000 TWh in 2000 to 5,864 TWh in 2024, highlighting the ongoing expansion of coal power in China.
With the election of Donald Trump, I think the U.S. has turned back from the brink of “green” destruction in the nick of time. If Europe continues to de-industrialize in service of environmental folly, it can only be regarded as deliberately suicidal.
(FWIW) I’ll add this: Britain has closed all but one of its blast furnaces, and that one isn’t long for the (western) world. 2019 Steel Production figures were: UK: 7 million tons; China: 996 tons. Will the disappearance of that last remaining 7 million tons save the world? Of course not: there’s a different goal being pursued here. PJ Media’s Stephen Green explains.
The industrial town of Scunthorpe is home to Britain's last operating steel mill. While the corporate sign in front might say "British Steel," the company's owner since 2020 is a Chinese industrial giant, Jingye, operating out of Beijing. Jingye claims to lose about £700,000 (about $925,000) each day keeping Scunthorpe's furnaces running. The company says that's due to high energy costs, environmental expenses, and competition from lower-cost producers around the world.
All big companies must deal with global market pressures, but Jingye's other two loss-driving expenses are due to London's insistence that Britain moves to a "net-zero" economy. Scotland's largest oil refinery at Grangemouth closed earlier this year "after struggling to cope with soaring energy costs, carbon taxes and Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences."
Jingye threatened to shutter "British" Steel at the cost of 2,700 jobs, so Parliament stepped in to take control during an emergency session on Saturday. The emergency was because once a blast furnace is turned off, it can't be switched back on like a light switch. Think millions of dollars and weeks of downtime.
While British Steel dangled from a government lifeline, Labour's Minister of State for Industry, Sarah Jones, was on Times Radio yesterday saying that British Steel would eventually transition to zero-emission "hydrogen to make direct reduced iron," a technology that doesn't yet exist and won't come cheap. In the meantime, I suppose Britons will have to absorb British Steel's million-dollar-a-day losses until DRI is available to generate even bigger losses.
There's been enough finger-pointing from both sides to conduct all nine of Beethoven's symphonies during a Hulu commercial break. So let's not even get into all that. The issue is that British Steel is — once again — effectively nationalized. Anyone who knows anything about post-war/pre-Thatcher Britain understands how badly that went the first time around.
Or for a more recent example, look at Chavismo Venezuela.
You'd have to be a fool to put money into British heavy industry so long as both Labour and the Tories remain committed to legislatively mandated deindustrialization via Net Zero. Now that Parliament is the effective owner of British Steel, they're likely stuck with it. So if — when? — the mill at Scunthorpe goes dark, Britain will have achieved an ignoble first: they'll be the only G7 nation with zero domestic steel production.
Britain without steel is like Britain without bangers and mash.
I've written some about the ongoing deindustrialization of Germany, Europe's (former?) economic powerhouse. But the process might be even further along in Britain.
An increasingly Venezuelan economy with an increasingly Islamic culture and an atrophied military is not the future I envisioned as a budding Anglophile teen — back when Margaret Thatcher and pre-Woke Doctor Who exemplified modern Britain in my eyes.
On reflection, deindustrialization might not be the correct word for that country's accelerating move toward economic, military, and cultural irrelevance. Perhaps the correct word is de-westernization.
Welcome to Gran Bretaña, comrades. Or is that al-Biritaniya?
"There will always be an England," Britons sang when their island nation stood alone against the conquering Nazis.
Will there?