What's really happening is that China and India have been beating them on price for years now and are currently buying out European production capacity, so those factory owners are just pulling every lever they have to stay afloat.

It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete. It's all the same across your northern border with coal - the coal miners want a graceful phase out because they understand that Australian pit-mined coal is cheaper despite being hauled across the world, but the owners want to keep the status quo and associated government subsidies.

"It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete."

So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?

Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.

Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.

No, it's just that Chinese and Indian steel is produced in ways that would not work in the EU (or even the US). The main reasons are (1) a disregard for environmental damage (2) state subsidies (more so for China than for India) (3) a disregard for safety.

The playing field simply isn't level, the ideas are there, the technologies are there but you can't compete if the competition is not bound in the same way.

While this might have been/is true for China, that country is speed running when it comes to automation and "green" in general. I wouldn't be surprised if they are on par in environmental concerns to the EU in a few years. People forget but the country only stopped taking garbage in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_waste_import_ban

> The playing field simply isn't level

It never was. European and Western countries had a significant head start. There should be a "right for CO2 emission" per capita offered for countries that didn't industrialize and are way behind. And exported CO2 shouldn't count.

All true. China is moving at a very high speed, but they are still more than capable of killing competition in a way that would not be legal for instance in the EU between EU countries. Clearly they are not bound by the same rules but we'll all pay the price for this eventually.

How is life treating you? Are you doing well?

China isnt super magical or anything, they can be emulated. I think they're a prime example of when and where central economic planning can work. Other countries can do that for specific industries, like energy, if they want.

> actual factory owners say

Those people who have large investments in traditional production facilities? Hmm, I wonder what they have to say about disruptive tech on the horizon..

"Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.

I'm sorry, but you don't ask the fox if the chicken coop should be protected.

Of course their capitalist interest would suffer if they had to make investments, but I don't really care if the monopoly man can have one fewer yacht.

> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.

That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.

In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.

The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering. The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).

Steel would become more expensive and/or would be produced with less emissions.

I'm sure that would disrupt some business models. But we'd still being using steel (but perhaps not as much).

Of course importing cheap steel produced without the same regard for emissions would have to be forbidden.

I agree with your last statement. Otherwise it's not about changing the business model but just 100% guarteeed destruction of entire industry.