The massive steel mill in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heart and cornerstone. Origin story JD Vance is a senator from his home state and is currently running for Donald Trump’s vice presidency.
But that future may depend on: $500 million in funding On a landmark climate bill that Vance called a “fraud” and that Trump has targeted for dismantling.
In March, President Joe Biden’s administration announce The largest subsidy in U.S. history is making greener steel possible. Cleveland-Cliffs The facility, located in Middletown, is building one of the world’s largest hydrogen-fueled furnaces and aims to reduce annual emissions by 1 million tons by eliminating the use of coal, which is accelerating the climate crisis and polluting the air quality of surrounding communities.
The blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati has long been betting on the transformation of America’s steel industry, and the investment, which promises 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction jobs, has drawn cheers from residents and unions.
“It was like a miracle, an answered prayer, that we weren’t left behind in the vineyard,” said Michael Bailey, now a pastor in Middletown but who worked for 30 years at the plant when it was owned by Armco.
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“When it was on the news, you could almost hear everyone going, ‘Yay, yay!'” said Heather Gibson, owner of Triple Moon Cafe in downtown Middletown. “It showed a long-term commitment. It was really exciting.”
This funding is Inflation Reduction Method (IRA) is a $370 billion bill to accelerate clean energy that Biden signed into law after narrowly passing Congress on Democratic votes in 2022, but it didn’t interest Vance, who has a deep personal connection to the Cleveland-Cliffs Generating Station.
Dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, the steel mill was the foundation of Middletown, helping produce first-generation automobiles and tanks during the war. Vance’s late grandfather, known as Papaw, worked at the plant as a union man, and it became the family’s “economic savior, the engine that led from the hills of Kentucky to the American middle class.” Vance wrote in his memoir: Hillbilly Elegy.
But it grew into a prosperous, all-American nation. city Middletown, built on steel and paper production, became a place where “jobs and hopes were drained” in the 1980s as industry moved overseas, Vance writes. He sees little relief in the IRA, but calculationIn Ohio, $10 billion has already been invested, creating nearly 14,000 new jobs.
During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill was “ridiculous, does nothing for the environment, and will make us all poorer,” and more recently, as a vice presidential candidate, he called the IRA “a green energy scam that actually moved more manufacturing jobs to China.”
Vance said America needs a leader who “rejects the green gentlemanly behavior of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and fights to bring back our great American factories.” At the Republican National Convention In July. “We need a President, Donald J. Trump.”
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly said Tried To destroy the IRA Project 2025A conservative blueprint drawn up by many former Trump officials, demand abolition What if the Republicans took back the White House?
The plan has major implications for Vance’s hometown. The $500 million subsidy from the Energy Department for the Middletown plant has not yet been formally delivered, but it could be cut if Trump wins in November. The former president recently pledged to “end Kamala Harris’s green new scam and withdraw all unused funds.”
Some longtime Middletown residents are puzzled by the opposition. “How can you think saving people’s lives is wrong?” says Adrienne Shearer, a small business consultant who helped revitalize a downtown area of Middletown that had been devastated by decades of economic stagnation, overseas jobs and out-of-town shopping.
“People thought there was a risk that the plant would leave or close, and that it would completely destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”
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Politically independent Shearer said he did not like it. Vance’s book “Because he destroyed our community” and offered no alternative vision for his hometown, she said, “People who work with him in Washington know him, but in Middletown, they don’t.”
Climate activists are increasingly critical of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to wipe out $500 million in investment in American manufacturing in his hometown,” said Pete Jones, Climate Power’s rapid response director. “Vance wrote a book about his hometown’s economic struggles, and now he’s written a new 900-page book on Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make matters worse. Big Oil You can make a profit.”
Local Republicans are more sympathetic to the IRA, even if their views differ somewhat. In neighboring Lebanon, Republican Mayor Mark Messer used the bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that would help residents slash their energy bills. Still, Messer says Vance is a strong Trump running mate and has “done a good job for Ohio.”
“I’m focused on doing what’s best for my constituents. Can this empty floodplain produce a million dollars for the people of my town?” Messer said. “Nothing but solar can do that. I’m happy to use my IRA, but if I were in a national role, I would think differently. I mean, printing money and handing it out to people doesn’t solve inflation; it makes it worse.”
Some Middletown voters are also proud of Vance’s promotion. “You have to give him credit. He’s [Yale] “He graduated from law school and started his own business in finance. He’s self-made and did it all on his own,” said local business owner Doug Puggram, who blames the Democrats for high inflation and plans to vote for Trump and Vance, but sees the steel plant investment as a welcome one.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
It highlights the problems for Democrats, who are struggling to convert the surge in new clean energy projects and the resulting glut of jobs into turnout. polls display Most Americans either don’t know much about IRAs or don’t credit Biden or Harris with benefiting from them.
Ohio was once a swing state, but it voted for Trump in the last two elections. Trump promised to rebuild the Rust Belt, which is only now happening under Biden. He will do the same in November. Harris has only mentioned climate change briefly so far and has made little attempt to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but largely unattractive tax credit, on the campaign trail.
“The Democrats have not been very good at praising themselves. They need to shout from the rooftops, ‘This is what we did,'” said Gibson, a political independent who lives right next door to the Middletown facility that converts coal into coke, a particularly dirty process that will be rendered useless by the new era of the plant.
“I can’t tell you how excited I am about the idea of eliminating the need for Coca-Cola when air pollution is so bad,” Gibson said. SuncockHalf a million tons of coal are burned each year to make coke, which is then pumped into steel mills, a process that produces a strong smell and scatters debris around the area. Gibson rarely opens his windows because of the pollution.
“Last July, we had snow, and this white stuff just fell from the sky,” Gibson said. “It covered everything, the cars, the windows, you had to wipe them down with Clorox. The smell was so bad that we had to end our meetings early because people were getting sick. You get a headache right away. Your throat gets sore, your nose gets sore. It’s just horrible.”
States are lagging in using IRA funds to advance climate action.
The prospect of a cleaner, safer future for Middletown is something the Biden administration sought to highlight in March, when then-U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said: Appeared Cleveland-Cliffs CEO, union leaders and workers praised the new hydrogen reactor at the steel mill. The grant helps address a thorny issue that has kept the industry from investing in cleaner-burning hydrogen, because there aren’t enough current examples of such technology.
“These plants are not just employers, they are anchors to the communities where they operate. We want your children and grandchildren to be making steel in America,” Granholm said. “Consumers around the world are demanding cleaner, greener products. We don’t just want to make the best products in the world. We want to make the best, cleanest products in the world.”
Lourenco Goncalves, CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, North America’s largest producer of flat-rolled steel, followed Granholm’s lead by boasting that the low-emissions furnace of this scale was a world first and that the technology would be rolled out to the company’s other 15 plants in the United States.
Republicans elsewhere in the country took part in similar ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Vote against funding They can, but conspicuously absent from the dignitaries sitting before two giant American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who attended high school just four miles away. His office did not respond to questions about his plans for the plant or the future of the IRA.
Bailey, 71, who retired from the steel mill in 2002, said he had talked to Vance many times about how to help Middletown as a pastor, but was surprised by the senator’s rightward shift. Opinions on womenAnd his lack of support for financing a new steel mill is one of them.
“JD Vance never once mentioned anything about helping Middletown recover,” said Bailey, who witnessed the “brutal” management in 2006. Workers’ strike During the post-union strife period, when drug addiction and homelessness were on the rise in Middletown, “I think he was using Middletown for his own personal gain.
“Somewhere along the line JD changed,” he added. “He let an outsider whore him out. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”
