More than likely it’s a cost issue, coal is artificially cheap thanks to several countries subsidizing the coal industry like Germany, USA and Australia.
There’s also I guess the practical question of how much plant fiber per ton of metallurgical coal is needed, i.e. how land would be dedicated towards ‘producing plant fiber’ for the steel industry.
Metallurgical coal only makes up for rather small part of coal mining, around 7% of all coal production goes towards it, and while the process produces more GHG than just burning it for power it has a less profound impact because it’s just smaller. It’s also one of the places where we can’t really find an alternative, to produce steel you need to use bitumen coal because they have more carbon and less volatiles than charcoal.
On top of that steel is extremely recyclable meaning that any steel produced can be reused pretty much 1:1 with only a small amount of energy needed.
Sure I’ll bite, competition is incredibly hard to attain so hard in fact that it doesn’t exist in the real world.
For one I’ll say that when we talk about competition should have the following elements:
No competitor has a large market share (A large marketshare would help them influence prices which they can use to drive out other competitors taking their market share) Almost no barrier to enter and exit the competition Consumers have perfect information
Now ignoring that ‘competitors’ will activly try to destroy perfect competitions to go for higher profits why do even consumers not want competition? Economies of Scale
In order to have perfect competition you need an ‘excess’ of competitors. So think 100 furniture factories when 10 could do that work, every factory needs to figure out their own logistics, sale and management, this means that the state of competition is less efficient than a state that is closer to a monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly with several larger companies, even if those companies suck.
This is also of course ignoring natural monopolies aka utilities.
In a just society all those people that force these workers to work those hours, wrecking their health like for example they’ll be exponentially more likely to suffer strokes and more severe ones at that, would be thrown in jail, holy shit what a misery that is put upon these people and for what? So some financial ghoul can shift some numbers from one pile to another and maybe buy a new jetski. It makes my blood boil how people are abused up for literally miniscule amounts of additional profit at this point, they are just grinding up the stone to get that last droplet of blood out of it.