For most of my life, whenever I drove west down the M4, as I came round the bend towards Swansea, the iconic Tata blast furnaces would tower over the streets of Port Talbot.
The prominence of those blast furnaces in Port Talbot wasn’t just physical. They also provided employment for thousands of people as the town’s largest employer.
In October, the last blast furnace closed, marking the end of traditional steelmaking in Wales. The end of an era, and an extremely worrying time for the residents of Port Talbot.
But oddly, a month earlier, Tata Steel commissioned India’s largest blast furnace. Tata said the new furnace would significantly boost production and allow the company to meet the growing demands in areas like shipbuilding, defence and infrastructure.
Why couldn’t Wales, and the fine people of Port Talbot, be the ones boosting steel production and rising to the growing demands for steel?
The answer is climate policy. It’s textbook carbon leakage. Our environmental policies are driving industries away from Britain and into countries with more relaxed carbon policies.
It’s barmy that the Labour Government is repeating the mistakes of the past by this week announcing that the UK will cut 81% of emissions by 2035.
Net zero is a noble aim, but if other countries in the world aren’t signed up, then all we’re doing is making ourselves poorer while other countries get rich and erase our climate progress.
LATEST MEMBERSHIP OPINION:
Tata Steel factory in Port TalbotPAWe all want to look after the environment. I have four children, and I think about the future they will have, and the future their children will have. But we cannot sacrifice our industries and our communities at the altar of net zero.
We must square these interests. Rishi Sunak struck the right balance when he delayed the petrol and diesel car ban to give people more time to transition to electric vehicles. That’s common sense, and it’s a way of taking people with you, instead of setting arbitrary targets and telling people to like it or lump it.
Keir Starmer may want to grandstand on the international stage and brandish his green credentials, but it’s not leadership to increase our reliance on imports from other countries, like China, which is what overzealous climate targets will inevitably lead to.
It might make us feel better that emissions aren’t being produced here, but is it any better to ship the emissions off elsewhere, import the products, and then be totally at the mercy of the country that is selling to us?
What happens if, for one reason or another, China decides to stop selling us something we need and we don’t make ourselves?
No matter what the posh twentysomethings with preposterous names who vandalise paintings think, we can’t control India and China, and we aren’t going to be able to stop Donald Trump drilling, which he has a mandate for.
Until we can genuinely get countries across the world to agree to reduce emissions together, going hell-for-leather for net zero will make our people poorer without making the world cleaner.