The European Court of Justice has ordered the shutdown of the Ilva steel plant in Taranto, Italy, the largest steel plant in Europe, if the plant keeps “representing serious and significant dangers to the environment and human health.” The ruling, which shall now be adopted by local courts, is the result of the deadly mixture of radical environmentalism, liberal economic policies, politicized judiciary and supranational power.
The Ilva steel plant was privatized as part of the privatization orgy launched after the famous 1992 meeting aboard the Britannia yacht of Queen Elizabeth off the coast of Italy, at which Mario Draghi, then a Treasury Ministry official, addressed a select crowd of British bankers. The plant immediately came under fire from local environmentalists and green-allied prosecutors because of an alleged correlation between emissions and high rate of cancer among the local population. With the pretext of failed action by the new owners to bring emissions under control, the plant was seized by the judiciary, owners were tried and sentenced to prison terms and the blast furnaces were beginning to be turned off, one by one. Currently, only one out of originally five furnaces is active. The new owners, Arcelor-Mittal, after buying the plant in 2018 under conditions of investing for environmental protection, threw in the towel last year. The plant is now under government caretaker and shall be inevitably re-nationalized.
