The Labour Government's deranged obsession with the baseless insanity that is belief in man-made climate change is now threatening one of New Zealand's most important strategic industries, and thousands of jobs along with it.
This is because steel making uses coal. Coal, we are told, is filthy stuff that is destroying the environment.
What utter bollocks. Steel made with coal has transformed human society. Without it we would still be, quite literally, living in the stone age.
And the Labour/Greens/Winston First Government's Climate Change Response Bill (the 'Zero Carbon' Bill), which aims to do what King Cnut proved couldn't be done, ie alter the course of entirely natural processes, could very possibly make the production of steel in New Zealand economically impossible.
Greens' co-Leader (what a wank title, BTW) James Shaw's doe-eyed fantasy Bill aims to magically alter the homoeopathically quantified amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, from almost measurably nil, to a bit less than almost measurably nil, over the space of 30 years or so, in the vacuous hope that doing so will somehow persuade the Sun (which is the only thing actually driving temperatures in the climate) to put out a little less in the way of thermal radiation. I guess it's a bit like offering a child sacrifice to the Gods so that the harvest will be good. In this case, however, it will be the 4,000 workers whose jobs depend directly or indirectly on the steel mill, who will be the sacrificial lambs.
And the process used at Glenbrook, making steel from ironsand, was pioneered in New Zealand, invented expressly (by the Brits, on our behalf, so thanks to them for that) so that NZ could turn a unique resource into a strategic asset.
If NZ Steel is forced to close the Glenbrook mill, as a result of the Labour Coalition's mind-buggeringly stupidly naive ideology, the roughly 800,000 tonnes of coal it consumes annually won't somehow miraculously disappear from the ledger of the world's coal usage - instead, it will continue to be mined, probably in Australia, and continue to be turned into steel, probably in China (meaning it'll be second-rate junk steel, like the defective crap that half of Christchurch has just been rebuilt with, because the de facto SOE, Fletchers, are only interested in profit, and not remotely concerned with quality - hence their propensity for sourcing product from the Chinese, who are identically motivated), which will continue to be used in New Zealand, after having to be shipped across the world in diesel-powered cargo ships, themselves made from steel.
These are boat trips that aren't currently being made, of course, burning diesel that isn't currently being burned.
This will of course mean that Jacinda and the Greens, and the other air-heads who comprise the New Zealand Government, will have made things worse by their own warped reckoning, rather than better.
Oh, and everyone involved in the mining of coking coal in New Zealand - sorry, but your jobs are down the dunny as well. Jacinda prefers that someone in Australia does your job instead, because that way she doesn't have to fret about it being in her back yard, or explain herself to her Masters at the UN.
That is, of course, unless New Zealanders are not going to be using steel anymore. And at a current rate of consumption of about 650,000 tonnes per annum (1,781 tonnes per day, 74.2 tonnes per hour, nearly one-and-a-quarter tonnes of steel per minute, just saying), has Jacinda, or anyone else around the Cabinet Table of Fools, stopped to ponder what people might be able to use instead?
Bamboo maybe. China can send us lots of that too, if we want.
And while both major New Zealand political Parties remain addicted to massive donations of "free" money from the Chinese Communist Party, that actually remains a distinct possibility.