The great steel mills of Middletown, Ohio, are the economic center and cornerstone of the city. Origin story J.D. Vance, a local senator who is running for vice president against President Donald Trump.
But the future $500 million in funding Vance called it a “scam” and will withdraw from the landmark climate change bill that President Trump has targeted for destruction.
In March, President Joe Biden’s administration Announced The largest subsidy in U.S. history to produce environmentally friendly steel Cleveland Cliffs The company plans to build one of the world’s largest hydrogen-fueled furnaces at a facility in Middletown and cut one million tons of emissions a year by eliminating the use of coal that is fueling the climate crisis and polluting the air for nearby residents.
For a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati whose fortunes have long been tied to the ups and downs of the U.S. steel industry, the investment promised a revitalized plant that would create 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction jobs, delighting residents and labor unions.
“It was like a miracle, like an answered prayer that we wouldn’t die,” said Michael Bailey, now a Middletown pastor who worked for 30 years at the plant then owned by Armco.
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“It was all on the news, and you could almost hear people yelling, ‘Yay! We did it!'” said Heather Gibson, owner of Triple Moon Cafe in downtown Middletown. “It showed a long-term commitment. It was very exciting.”
This funding is Inflation Control Law The $370 billion Clean Energy Accelerator Act (IRA), which narrowly passed Congress with Democratic votes in 2022 and was signed by Biden, is not all that exciting for Vance, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs Generating Station.
Dating back to 1899, the steel mill, which now employs about 2,500 people, was a cornerstone of Middletown, helping to mass-produce the first generation of automobiles and tanks during the war. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, which he called his family’s “economic savior, the engine that led us from the Kentucky hills to middle-class America,” Vance wrote in his memoir. Hillbilly Elegy.
But the prosperous, nationwide city Middletown, which prospered through the steel and paper industries, became a place of “job and hope loss” as industry left the city for overseas markets in the 1980s, Vance writes, and he sees little hope for the IRA. estimateIt has already attracted $10 billion in investment and created approximately 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.
While campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate change bill was “stupid, would do nothing for the environment and would make us all poorer,” and more recently, as a vice presidential candidate, he called the IRA “a green energy scam that’s actually bleeding manufacturing jobs to China.”
America needs “a leader who will reject Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ new environmental scam and fight to bring back great American factories,” Vance said. At the Republican Convention in July. “We Need a President Donald J. Trump.”
Republican lawmakers repeatedly Tried To eviscerate the IRA Project 2025It’s a conservative blueprint written by former Trump administration officials. Request for abolition If the Republicans take back the White House.
These plans have big implications for Vance’s hometown: A $500 million Department of Energy grant for the Middletown plant, which has yet to be formally awarded, could be suspended if Trump wins in November. The former president recently vowed to “end Kamala Harris’ new environmental scam and remove all unspent funds.”
Some longtime Middletown residents are perplexed by the opposition. “How can saving a life be the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small-business adviser who has spent decades revitalizing Middletown’s downtown district, hollowed out by economic downturns, offshore jobs and suburban shopping malls.
“People thought this plant was on the verge of moving out or closing down and that it would completely destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think this plant is not going anywhere.”
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Shearer, an independent, Vance’s Book She said she was upset because the president had “denigrated our community” and failed to offer an alternative vision for her hometown. “Those who served with him in Washington may know him, but those of us in Middletown don’t,” she said.
Climate activists have been even harsher in their criticism of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to wipe out a half-billion dollar investment in American manufacturing in his hometown,” said Pete Jones, emergency director for Climate Power. “Vance wrote the book about the economic hardships in his hometown, and now he’s making the problems worse by bringing in 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 plan.” Major Oil Company You can make a profit.”
Local Republicans have been more favorable, though with some differing views, about the IRA. Mark Messer, the Republican mayor of neighboring Lebanon, used the huge bill’s clean-energy tax credits to offset the cost of solar panels that would help reduce his residents’ energy costs. Still, Vance was a strong running mate for Trump and “did some good things for Ohio,” Messer said.
“My focus is on my constituents and doing what’s best for them. There’s no other way this empty floodplain is going to bring a million dollars to the people of our town,” Messer said. “There’s no other way to make that happen other than solar power. I don’t mind using an IRA, but if I were in state office, my view might be different. That said, printing money and handing it out to people doesn’t solve inflation, it just makes it worse.”
Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s promotion. “You have to give him credit. [Yale] “He graduated from law school and started his own business in finance. He’s a self-made man. He did it all by himself,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who welcomes the investment in the steel plant but blames Democrats for high inflation and plans to vote for Trump and Vance.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
That points to a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate the surge in new clean energy projects and the resulting job surplus into voting power. Public opinion poll Showing Most Americans don’t know much about IRAs and don’t credit Biden or Harris for their benefits.
Ohio was once a swing state, but it voted for Trump in the past two elections. Trump has promised to revive the Rust Belt, which is finally happening under Biden. It plans to vote for Trump again in November. Harris, on the other hand, only mentioned climate change briefly and made little attempt to promote her groundbreaking but totally unappealing IRA refund and tax credit ideas on the campaign trail.
“Democrats haven’t done a good job of patting themselves on the back. They should be shouting, ‘Here’s what we’ve done,'” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers firsthand from the current situation by living next to the Middletown plant, a particularly polluting process that turns coal into coke and will be eliminated in the steel mill’s new era.
“The pollution is so bad that the idea of not having to use Coke makes me happy in ways I can’t put into words,” Gibson said. Sun CokeThe company heats 500,000 short tons of coal each year to make coke to send to the steel mill, a process that creates a strong odor and spews debris into the neighborhood. Because of the pollution, Gibson rarely opens his windows.
“We had snow in July last year and white stuff falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “Soot covered everything, cars covered, we had to use Clorox on the windows. We had to cut social gatherings early because the smell was so bad it made everyone sick. You get headaches right away. Your throat burns, your nose burns. It’s just awful.”
States have been slow to use IRA funds to address climate change.
The prospect of a cleaner, safer future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to highlight in March with U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Appeared “We are pleased to partner with Cleveland-Cliffs to develop a hydrogen furnace that will help reduce emissions and reduce carbon emissions from our plants,” said Jeffrey Friedman, president of the Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Corporation.
“Steelworks like these are more than just employers, they are hubs with deep roots in their communities, and we want to ensure that your children and grandchildren will be making steel here in America, too,” Granholm said. “Consumers around the world are demanding cleaner, greener products, and we want to make sure we’re not just making the best product in the world, but the best, cleanest product in the world.”
Lourenço Goncalves, CEO of Cleveland-Cliffs, North America’s largest steel-sheet maker, followed Granholm in boasting that the low-emissions furnace was the first of its kind in the world and that the technology would be expanded to 15 other U.S. plants.
Other Republicans across the U.S. have also jumped on the bandwagon with similar ribbon-cutting events. Vote against funding It’s this facility that makes them possible. But notably absent from the dignitaries sitting that day in front of the two giant American flags that hung at the Middletown warehouse was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from here. His office did not respond to questions about the facility or his plans for the IRA’s future.
Bailey, 71, who retired from the steelworks in 2002, said he had several conversations with Vance about how he could help Middletown as a pastor, but then grew worried about the senator’s shift to the right. Comments about womenand his lack of support for funding a new steel plant.
“J.D. Vance has not said anything about helping Middletown recover,” said Bailey, who witnessed its “brutal” run in 2006. Worker Lockout “In my opinion, he used Middletown for his own personal gain,” he said, during a labor union dispute that caused a spike in drug addiction and homelessness in Middletown.
“Somewhere along the line, JD changed,” he added. “He allowed outsiders to prostitute themselves. This man is embarrassing us. We are not like that.”
