The government’s plan to ramp up defence spending means relying on carbon-intensive industries – and those won’t be the only policy compromises they have to makeThe UK will become a “defence industrial superpower”, said the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in Wednesday’s spring statement, an ambition that will involve using much more steel, one assumes.Now comes news that the Chinese owner of the UK’s second largest steel plant may close its two blast furnaces as early as June, which would further erode the UK’s already-thin steel-making capabilities. Indeed, closure of Scunthorpe would also mean an end to domestic steel-making from scratch using traditional carbon-intensive blast furnaces – the other two, at Tata’s Port Talbot site, closed last year. Continue reading...