A large steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story from JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice president.
However, its future may depend $500 million in funding of landmark climate legislation that Vance called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.
In March, President Joe Biden’s administration announced the USA’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, which the Cleveland Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, reducing emissions by a million tons per year by abandoning the coal that is accelerating the climate crisis and polluting the air for nearby residents.
In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes on the volatility of the U.S. steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction jobs was greeted with jubilation among residents and unions.
“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant for 30 years , which was then owned by Armco, for 30 years. years.
“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody yelling, ‘Yay yay yay!'” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon Cafe in downtown Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”
This funding of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to supplement clean energy signed by Biden after he passed Congress in 2022 via Democratic votes, however, was far less exciting to Vance, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland -Cliffs plant.
The steel mill, which dates back to 1899 and now employs about 2,500 people, is the foundation for Middletown, helping to build the first generations of automobiles and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, which made it the family’s “economic savior — the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky to America’s middle class,” Vance said in wrote his memoir. Hillbilly Elegy.
But although it grew into a prosperous all-American city Built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place that “let jobs and hope degenerate” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even if, by one treasureit has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.
When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill was “stupid, does nothing for the environment, and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice presidential candidate the IRA a “green energy scam that is actually being shipped. many more manufacturing opportunities to China.”
America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025a conservative blueprint written by many former Trump officials, demand its repeal would Republicans regain the White House.
Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, which still has not been formally awarded, could be stopped if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “end Kamala Harris’ green new scam and revoke all unspent funds.”
Some longtime Middletown residents are perplexed by such opposition. “How can you think that saving people’s lives is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business consultant who has spent several decades helping revitalize Middletown’s downtown, which has been hollowed out by economic downturns, foreign jobs and out-of-town shopping centers.
“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”
Shearer, a political independent, said she doesn’t like it Vance’s book because it “destroyed our community” and that he did not show any alternative vision for his hometown. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.
Climate campaigners are even more scathing about Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to get a $500 million investment in American manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages of Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so Big oil can make a profit.”
Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the big bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar system that will help reduce energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong runner for Trump and has “done well for Ohio,” according to Messer.
“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them – how else will this empty floodplain generate $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going to do that except solar power. I am happy to use the IRA but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”
Some voters in Middletown are also proud of Vance’s ascension. “You have to give him credit, he went [Yale] Law School, he built his own business in the financial industry — he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and plans to support Trump. vote and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
It illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to turn a boom in new clean energy projects and a flurry of jobs into voting power, with polls show most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.
Ohio was once a swing state, but voted for Trump – with his promises of rust belt renewal only now coming to fruition under Biden – in the last two elections and will do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, only briefly mentioned climate change and barely tried to sell the IRA, a ground-breaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.
“Democrats haven’t done a good job of patting themselves on the back, they should be out there shouting from the rooftops, ‘This is what we did,'” said Gibson, a political independent who directly under the status quo suffer by living next to the Middletown facility that converts coal into coke, a particularly dirty process, which will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.
“The air pollution is terrible, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” Gibson said. The website, mentioned SunCokeheats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that is fed to the steel plant, a process that produces a strong odor and sprays debris over the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.
“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff fell from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad that I have gathered at my house early because people are getting so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just horrible.”
The prospect of a cleaner, safer future for Middletown is something the Biden administration sought to emphasize in March when US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm appeared at the steel mill with the CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, union leaders and workers to celebrate the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough existing examples of such technology.
“Mills like this are not just employers, they are anchors deeply embedded in the community. We want your children and grandchildren to produce steel here in America as well,” said Granholm. “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 sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”
Lourenco Goncalves, CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm in boasting that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology behind 15 others companies will be expanded. plants in the USA
Republicans elsewhere in the US jumped on board despite similar ribbon-cutting events to vote against the funding enabling them, but notably absent among the dignitaries sitting in front of two enormous American flags that hung in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just 4 miles from this location. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.
Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he spoke with Vance several times about ways to help Middletown, but then became concerned about the senator’s rightward shift in comments about womenas well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.
“JD Vance has never mentioned anything to help restore Middletown,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” administration in 2006. exclusion of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness skyrocketed in Middletown. “He used Middletown for, in my opinion, his own personal gain.
“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy embarrasses us. That’s not who we are.”
