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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/27/british-steels-chinese-owners-reject-500m-go-green/
What a pathetic story of British-style governance in action. Sell the steel industry to China. Wreck the economy with ridiculously expensive 'clean energy'. Lose basic industrial capabilities for warmaking or building anything. Lose jobs. Lose relevance. Lose everything, sooner or later (sooner).
Development economics needs a new category to go along with developing and developed, studying declining countries like the UK.
Australia does basically the same thing, albeit with the extra steps of 'bail out the industries wrecked by gross economic negligence' and 'invest in green hydrogen': https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/20/whyalla-steelworks-government-bailout-administration-sa
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy. Who has ever dreamed of expensively converting electricity into hydrogen, struggling to store the ultra-leaky, diffuse, explosive gas and then turning the hydrogen back into electricity? Even in the fantasy-world of renewable energy economics it's an unusually silly dream. Nuclear power is still banned of course.
Yes, this is the most egregious failing of our world from Dath Ilan rational paradise perspective.
Imagine alternate world that is just like us, except it has problems with food. Not like us, problems of too much food, but problems of not enough food.
In this world, in richest countries, people spend about half of their income on food, the poor regularly go hungry and it is not uncommon for the poorest to starve to death. And in poor countries, massive famines killing millions are normal occurence.
The world does not like it, and tries hard to remedy it. Every day, there is new government initiative to solve the food problem, every day there is new startup business promising new and revolutionary ersatz food from sawdust and coal. But the problem persists.
You, as visitor shocked with their plight, offer an obvious (to you) solution.
"Do you know you could use pesticides to kill pests and this way to raise agricultural yield by order of magnitude?"
"Here are some very simple ones your chemical industry can easily manufacture."
"This way, no one will have to go hungry, food will be in such abundance that even homeless could be as fat as millionaires!"
The locals, shocked and horrified, answer:
"This is organophosphate chemistry! This is NERVE GAS! Do you want to kill us all? Are you Adenoid Hynkel, the most evil man that ever lived?"
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