In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent an urgent letter to President Joe Biden. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest accomplishments, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will build a brighter future. for American manufacturing will include. But there was something, they warned, that threatened to impede this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and approaching a court order deadline.
“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have so far been unable to do: deter and reduce continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. They claimed the regulations would cost companies billions, enough to force widespread layoffs, despite the EPA’s estimate of $7.1 million in costs for the two companies, US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, which own all 10 of the nation’s steel mills.
Shortly after the senators sent off the letter, the EPA introduced its final rule, the first time the agency has ever tried to reduce emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills. The EPA expects the new regulations will reduce particulate pollution by 473 tonnes each year. But the final rule is weaker than the one it proposed in 2023. While the agency originally planned to cut steel mills’ toxic emissions by 79 tons a year, an overall decrease of 15 percent, the final version is expected to cut emissions by 64 tons each year. The EPA also dropped a proposed limit on the thickness of the smoke coming out of mills’ doors and roof vents.
Jim Pew, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who has filed several lawsuits against the agency for its failure to curb steel mill pollution, told Grist that the regulations would have “real benefits” for the people living in the shadows of home to the nation’s most polluting steel mills. , but laments the safeguards that have been removed.
“This is a small step in the right direction,” he said, noting that the EPA provided the final rule with a standard to regulate a type of incinerator used by some highly polluting mills. “The steel companies launched a real disinformation campaign about the cost of the rule that I think put pressure on EPA to take out some provisions that would have been beneficial.”
The new rule gives the nation’s steel companies two years to update their facilities with the required emission reduction equipment and workplace standards. In an email, an EPA spokeswoman said the agency “carefully considered stakeholder feedback and made data-driven changes in the final rule that provide needed flexibility while also providing health protection for surrounding communities.”
The letters from the senators represent a rare opportunity of congressional involvement in the EPA’s rulemaking process, a years-long effort that requires extensive data collection and engineering expertise. The agency’s air pollution regulations, while backed by science and riddled with industry jargon, have far-reaching consequences for communities that house the nation’s industrial infrastructure, dictating the amounts of toxic chemicals that companies can emit — and residents can inhale.
Steel production is a highly polluting enterprise that heats coal above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a product known as coke, which is then combined with iron ore in a blast furnace and melted into liquid steel. The brooding heat releases a host of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as fine particles that can accumulate in the lungs after prolonged exposure. Many studies have linked pollution from steel mills to impaired heart and lung function.
Ninety percent of the steel industry’s emissions coming from four mills which dot the edge of Lake Michigan near the border between Illinois and Indiana. Once bustling hubs for manufacturing, towns like Gary, Indiana, sank into decline in the latter half of the twentieth century as manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. Today, the steel mills spewing black smoke into the air of the area’s overwhelmingly low-income and Black communities are holdovers from this era, symbols of a prosperous past that politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to protect.
The first attempt by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change course came last December. A group of eight senators, including Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, as well as Republicans Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan, arguing that the agency’s proposed regulations would harm national security by making the domestic steel industry — the “world’s cleanest major producer of steel” — uncompetitive.
“We support the reduction of harmful air pollution,” they wrote. “We also support rules that are durable, realistic,” and based on the view that the federal government “must improve public health while protecting good-paying jobs and supporting industries essential to our national and economic security. These rules do not meet to those standards.” The senators did not specify which provisions in the proposed rule would have this effect. The letter in March from Manchin and the other Democrats carried even stronger warnings. “If these rules are promulgated as proposed, Cleveland-Cliffs and US Steel could with are left with no choice but to close mills prematurely, resulting in job losses and irreparable damage to their local communities,” the senators argued.
In its final rule, the EPA estimated that the total cost to the steel industry would be $7.1 million, an amount that would cover the installation of air monitors to measure chromium contamination around the perimeter of facilities and the implementation of new workplace practices to contain leaks. reduce from previously unregulated emission sources. But in a press release supporting the senators’ claim that costs are in the billions, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves argued that the rule would “jeopardize well-paid middle-class union jobs in the steel industry”. In 2023, US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs have sales of $18 billion and $21 billionrespectively.
Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said concerns that the new rules would wreak havoc on the industry are unfounded. “The cost claims were so shocking to us because EPA routinely overestimates the costs of its rules,” Pew said, citing a study in 2020 from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “They say that EPA not only underestimated the costs of these rules, but that it underestimated them by orders of magnitude.”
After learning of the senators’ efforts to gut the steel mill regulations, Bruce Buckheit, the former director of the EPA’s air enforcement division, decided to send Regan a letter on behalf of Earthjustice in February. He analyzed the content of the new rule and argued that its impact would be “simple” and meet the minimum pollution reductions required by the federal Clean Air Act. “I have seen nothing in the rulemaking record for these proposals that supports the cost claims in the Senators’ letter,” he wrote. The total capital expenditures, he concluded, would be small compared to US Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs’ revenues.
“I believe it is important to push back against such excessive industry claims so that narrative does not drive public opinion and agency policy,” Buckheit wrote.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers play no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
