I agree with Stephen

 There are people, including some liberals, who would like nothing better than to see the whole Tata Steel complex in Port Talbot demolished completely. They envisage it being replaced by a massive holiday park behind a splendid marina. While solving the local air pollution problem, it has a deleterious social effect in that four thousand skilled and semi-skilled jobs would be lost to be only partially replaced by mainly low-paid ones. Globally, it would do nothing for carbon emissions as it would ensure that polluting plants elsewhere would become more viable. There will always be a need for virgin steel, as it has been described, refined from the basic ores.

Diametrically opposed are those who take a more blinkered approach, believing that there is no reason for change, that traditional steel-making can continue and that "net zero is bollocks". They ignore not just the science but also the international political pressure. More to the point, Port Talbot is loss-making. Tata's balance-sheet will benefit from simply abandoning the plant. It was a mixture of family connection (a former head of Tata Steel had trained in British Steel in South Wales) and politics which kept Tata in South Wales in the first place. A more hard-headed administration has now taken over in Mumbai. 

Friday's long-awaited announcement of a deal to keep some steel-making here is some comfort. Three thousand jobs will go, but around a thousand will remain (the exact numbers remain to be announced). However, a chance has been missed as local MP Stephen Kinnock explained in an ITV Wales At Six interview last Friday (still not on ITVx, unfortunately). An electric-arc furnace will not produce the variety of product currently available from Port Talbot, so that the order book will shrink as key customers look elsewhere. Mittal (that other Indian conglomerate) has already embarked on the path to 100% hydrogen-based iron reduction at its Hamburg plant and Tata itself was reported last year to be considering the process for its Dutch works. Admittedly, both would rely initially on "blue" hydrogen, sourced from natural gas and requiring carbon capture and storage, but in the longer term more environmentally-friendly methods of extracting hydrogen would surely become viable.

So a chance has been missed to save more jobs and at the same time make a global contribution to carbon reduction. It could be that the deal struck by the Sunak government is not the final word and the opportunity remains for a new administration in Westminster to extend the deal in a more positive direction. That day cannot come soon enough.