The Donald Trump- JD Vance administration has sentenced Middletown, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance’s hometown — to decades of environmental devastation by canceling a $500 million federal grant that would have transformed a major steel plant into the world’s cleanest industrial facility. Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs is now planning to reline its aging blast furnace with coal and coke, locking the region into at least 15 to 18 more years of toxic pollution and the health consequences that come with it. According to The Guardian’s Stephen Starr, new permitting documents filed with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency show the steel company is moving forward with a several-hundred-million-dollar investment to keep the fossil-fuel burning operation running indefinitely. CEO Lourenco Goncalves has embraced the decision with Trump’s own rhetoric. “Beautiful coal, beautiful coke,” he announced to investors last summer, echoing the president’s signature phrasing. The No. 3 blast furnace, installed in the 1950s, consumes hundreds of thousands of tons of coke annually to produce around 3 million tons of raw steel per year. The damage to the region will be catastrophic. Research from Industrious Labs estimates that over the 18 years following the furnace relining, the Middletown steel mill and its coke supplier, SunCoke Energy, will result in 810 to 1,476 premature deaths, 132,300 lost school days, and numerous other serious health ailments. The facility is already the 11th worst carbon monoxide emitter in the United States, according to EPA data from 2020. Local residents are already suffering. Vivian Adams, who moved to Middletown from Louisville just four years ago, has watched her six-year-old daughter’s health collapse. “My daughter was born prematurely so she already had lung issues, but it’s gotten worse. She stays sick and coughing and can’t breathe. She’s had to go on everyday medication for her asthma, plus she has a rescue inhaler,” Adams said. The environmental contamination is inescapable. “The smell some days is absolutely awful,” Adams said. “We sit on our chairs and there’s a bunch of black stuff on them, on our vehicle, it’s soot. It’s on their toys, so you can’t leave them outside.” The Biden administration had attempted to modernize the facility. The $500 million grant would have replaced the coke-burning infrastructure with a hydrogen-powered furnace that, according to some analyses, would have made Middletown the lowest greenhouse gas-emitting steel plant in the world. Instead, Trump and Vance have prioritized fossil fuels over clean energy and human health in the vice president’s own backyard.
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