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.
I don’t know if I want to harp on them too much, die Linke is pretty much only a thing in eastern germany. The west germany has basically suppressed them heavily, first by what some historians would call a ‘colonization’ of east germany due to just how fucking bad reunification was for eastern germany, as well as deliberate neglect by western germany letting the situation spiral out of control. A lot of Die Linke politicians were also illegally surveilled and harassed and were often smeared as red fash using horseshoe theory stuff.
This leads us to now where they just suck like they are to the left similar to how AOC is to the left of Biden unable/unwilling to do anything so they’ll keep losing ground to the AfD they’ll not get anywhere.
Yeah a lot of germans are full on 
which is incredibly bleak because the SPD is full on let’s cut the education budget in half in fact we need to do so much austerity, Linke is well Linke. So yeah, I hate german libs a lot but I feel so sorry for my german comrades.
Since I was using this to write a little defederation thing on which instances find hexbear so repulsive they had to defederate I noticed the number from exploding-heads go up quite a bit from the 75 to 170 now. I will make it a point to call out two specific instances for being hilariously disgusting feddit.de aka the german federation, and feddit.dk both defederated hexbear but didn’t defed the outright nazi instance exploding-heads earlier today, class act from the german and danish mod team.
Also apparently they were aware of it two months ago but didn’t chose to act until today which yeah class act from the german admins. https://feddit.de/post/1151473?scrollToComments=true
Germany is not alright and Bavaria is the least alright , nominally leftist parties barely get up to 10% in elections there so yeah was to be expected.