When President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris appeared together at a rally for union members in Pittsburgh earlier this month, Harris opened her speech with a nod to the industrial legacy of a city in a key swing state for the presidential election.

“U.S. Steel is a historic American company, and it is vital for our country to maintain strong American steel companies,” she said. “U.S. Steel should remain American-owned and American-operated, and I will always have the backs of America’s steelworkers.” 

Coming weeks after former President Donald Trump made a similar statement, Harris’ speech was meant to stake out her position on what has become a major issue of the 2024 election: Japanese company Nippon Steel’s bid to buy the Pennsylvania-based U.S. Steel for $15 billion. 

Lost in the frenzy of national attention—and missing from the presidential candidates’ comments on the sale—are the consequences for the environment and the thousands of residents who live downwind of U.S. Steel’s three aging manufacturing facilities in western Pennsylvania. 

Many of those residents say they have suffered for years from the pollution generated by the plants. In Nippon Steel, an outsider to the region, residents initially saw the potential for change. Perhaps, they thought, the sale offered an opportunity to solve a generational public health problem.

One possible solution is a transition away from the coal-based type of steelmaking that U.S. Steel relies on in the Mon Valley, the area southeast of Pittsburgh where all three plants are located near the Monongahela River. Climate advocates were also optimistic about Nippon’s bid, seeing in the deal the prospect of a transformative investment in the future of green steel in the United States.

But instead of producing innovative solutions, the sale has become a political drama, with pundits analyzing every move from the companies and the federal government, weighing in on the repercussions for swing state voters, union workers and foreign policy. 

The candidates’ and Biden’s objections to the sale are unusual because the obscure committee that could sink the deal is supposed to evaluate whether the foreign acquisition of an American company poses a national security risk, and Japan is an ally. In September, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., the group conducting the national security review of the sale, granted Nippon a 90-day extension, postponing a final decision until after the election.

“It’s been a wild ride so far,” said Roger Smith, the Asia lead at SteelWatch, a nonprofit focused on the decarbonization of the steel industry. “This is a very strange process for a business transaction to have to go through.”

For residents, the past few months have served as an ongoing reminder that the whims of politicians and businessmen who live far from the region still hold powerful sway over their future. They wonder what the Mon Valley will look like when the election and the battle for U.S. Steel is over: Will the company abandon the Mon Valley? Will it keep its operations running without investment until the mills are no longer profitable, no matter the cost to public health? If Nippon prevails, how will it treat the region’s union workers and residents, and what kind of steelmaking will it champion?

Because of the global steel industry’s outsized contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, the answers to these questions have implications far beyond the Mon Valley and even Pennsylvania. What happens to U.S. Steel is not just a bellwether for the election—it’s a portent for the planet.

‘All Hope Has Left the Building’

When the sale was first announced in December 2023, residents were hopeful about what it could mean for pollution in the Mon Valley. 

Public health advocates and residents have long fought to hold U.S. Steel accountable for the pollution its plants cause, but they have faced opposition from the company’s leadership, its union, local politicians and understaffed government agencies. Some residents thought new ownership could lead to better communication with the community. 

They hoped Nippon Steel, the fourth-largest steel company in the world, could do what the much smaller U.S. Steel had failed to do for decades: clean up and update the coal-based Mon Valley Works, as the three Pennsylvania sites are called collectively. The newest of the three sites opened in 1938.

Two of the 10 largest industrial emitters of air pollution in Allegheny County are owned by U.S. Steel, and one of them, the 123-year-old Clairton Coke Works, is by far the largest. 

Since 2020, the company has racked up millions of dollars in fines for violations of air quality standards. In January 2024, U.S. Steel agreed to a $42 million settlement to end a lawsuit filed over a 2018 fire that shut down the Coke Works’ pollution control systems. The settlement included a $5 million penalty for violations of the Clean Air Act. This pollution has significant consequences for residents’ health: Among the pollutants emitted by the Coke Works are cancer-causing chemicals like benzene, lead, mercury and naphthalene. Some Mon Valley communities have higher rates of asthma than other parts of Pennsylvania and elevated cancer risks. A recent report found that up to 12 percent of premature deaths in Allegheny County are attributable to current levels of fine particulate air pollution there.

U.S. Steel has said in the past that it is committed to “safe and environmentally responsible” steelmaking and upholds “a compliance rate over 99 percent and attainment with all National Ambient Air Quality Standards.” 

“We were hopeful that there could be some change because we thought that with Nippon coming in, there will be some type of public engagement,” said Qiyam Ansari, the president of Valley Clean Air Now, a grassroots environmental group based in Clairton. “We thought there would be some way of having a seat at the table, which is what we haven’t had.”

That hoped-for communication—or any concrete, forward-looking vision for the Mon Valley Works—has not materialized. Instead, residents have watched the drama between Nippon, U.S. Steel and the federal government from the sidelines, with little say in the process or outcome. 

“People are being treated like pawns, and no one’s really listening to voices of the community for what they need,” said Matt Mehalik, the executive director at Breathe Project, a coalition of residents, academics and environmental advocates that is based in southwestern Pennsylvania and focused on improving air quality. Mehalik said the back-and-forth of the deal discussions is taking a toll on Mon Valley residents and workers as they wonder what will happen to their towns and jobs. “The high-profile and volatile corporate sale process induces very high levels of community stress,” he said.

“There hasn’t been any sort of community meeting, and there’s no mention whatsoever about improvement in terms of air quality or water quality,” said Edith Abeyta, an artist and activist who lives in North Braddock, not far from U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works, and is a member of an advocacy group for residents in her town, North Braddock Residents for Our Future. “No one’s saying the things that I’m interested in hearing. There’s no one coming to the table and saying, ‘We want to buy U.S. Steel and we’re going to clean it up.’”

Ansari said his organization tried to reach Nippon to express concerns about what the sale would mean for local communities, but received no response. “It’s just been radio silence,” he said. “They’re operating in the same old industrial playbook where they only speak to the elected officials, they control them and there’s no engagement with the public.” 

Ansari said residents were disheartened by the spectacle of the sale. “Most folks feel like we’ve become a political bargaining chip,” he said. “All hope has left the building.”

Though they’ve often been at odds with environmentalists, in part because many U.S. Steel workers don’t live close to the mills, United Steelworkers union members feel similarly left out of the conversation. U.S. Steel’s Pennsylvania facilities employ about 3,000 union workers. The union opposes the deal, arguing that it will harm workers and America’s national defense and critical supply chains.

On August 28, Nippon announced what it called “transformative investments” in the Mon Valley Works and the Gary Works in Indiana. The announcement included $1 billion to be invested in the Mon Valley. 

“Nippon Steel plans to ensure Mon Valley Works operates for decades to come and will undertake the necessary investments so that it remains viable and provides jobs for future generations of steelworkers in Pennsylvania,” the company said.

“They never contacted us. They didn’t talk to us about it ahead of time,” Bernie Hall, the Steelworkers’ District 10 director, who represents USW members in Pennsylvania, said of Nippon’s announcement. 

USW has had a contentious relationship with U.S. Steel since David Burritt became the CEO in 2017, and the protracted negotiations over this deal have only increased the tension, with Burritt threatening earlier this month to close the Mon Valley mills and relocate the company’s headquarters to the U.S. South if the sale fails to go through. Hall does not trust Nippon’s commitment to keeping U.S. Steel’s unionized facilities open or not to lay off union workers. He fears that Nippon could use its planned “transformative investments” against the union in future contract negotiations. 

“We’re looking more [like] 20 years down the road instead of five years. We want these facilities here for the long run. We want the necessary investments put into it so they remain competitive and operational for years to come,” Hall said. “Their promises have been very hollow.”

Nippon Steel did not respond to requests for comment, but a statement on a website created to promote the sale highlighted the company’s “sincere and persistent dedication to developing and maintaining a trust-based productive dialogue and addressing any concerns that the USW members and leadership have.”

“The goal of this transaction is to protect and grow U. S. Steel, and its union and non-union employees are critical to that goal,” it said. 

U.S. Steel has called on Pennsylvanian politicians to “recognize significant benefits of the transaction,” including protecting jobs, tax revenue and the company’s local charitable donations, as well as “the unavoidable consequences if the deal fails.” In a statement to Inside Climate News about the sale, a U.S. Steel media representative said one of the “top benefits” of the deal is “the investment and opportunities it provides for all employees.”

“Many people profess to want what is best for our employees, and that is why we negotiated a deal with a partner who will bring $2.7 billion of transformative investments in USW-represented facilities, keeping them in operation for decades to come,” said the spokesperson, Andrew Fulton.  “There is no scenario where U. S. Steel would make these investments absent Nippon Steel.” The $2.7 billion includes investment in the Gary Works in Indiana. 

The statement did not include any information about the sale’s impact on public health or the communities near U.S. Steel facilities.

Nippon’s promises remind many people in the Mon Valley of U.S. Steel’s. In 2019, U.S. Steel said it would invest $1 billion to “transform” the Mon Valley’s Clairton Coke Works and the Edgar Thomson Works into “the most innovative steel mill in the United States of America.” Two years later, the company canceled the project, citing delays caused by the pandemic and changing business conditions “in a rapidly decarbonizing world.” (In 2021, U.S. Steel committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) 

Instead of investing in Pennsylvania, U.S. Steel pledged to spend $3 billion to build its “most advanced steelmaking facility in North America” in Arkansas at a non-union site. At the time, the union demanded that Burritt “stop running away from our communities, jobs and Union!”

Abeyta remembers U.S. Steel pitching its version of a “transformative investment” to residents in 2019, holding meetings and talking about what the proposed changes would look like. Looking at Nippon’s pitch in 2024, she’s unconvinced. “It’s public posturing,” she said. 

“It’s been almost 150 years now that Edgar Thomson has been there. It’s never been on the side of the people that live adjacent to it. Its priority isn’t the health and safety and prosperity of the people that live adjacent to it,” she said. In Braddock, 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, compared to just under 11 percent in the Pittsburgh metro area. The town has lost more than 90 percent of its population since the 20th century, a collapse driven by declines in manufacturing jobs and white flight. About 30 percent of Braddock’s homes are vacant.

Abeyta said living near Edgar Thomson Works is like “being gaslit 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.” 

“You’re constantly being told there’s nothing wrong, it’s not a problem and if you don’t like it, you should just move away,” she said. For most residents, moving away is not an option, especially as housing prices in other parts of southwestern Pennsylvania have increased. 

As U.S. Steel invested in Arkansas, its facilities in Pennsylvania have languished. “The latest investments occurred in the 1980s,” Mehalik said of the Edgar Thomson Works, noting that some of the manufacturing components at the Clairton Coke Works date to the Truman administration. This neglect is a major reason for the high levels of air pollution in the county, he said.

Toward Decarbonization

U.S. Steel’s impact on the environment isn’t limited to Allegheny County. It also has a significant impact on Pennsylvania’s greenhouse gas emissions. In 2020, the industrial sector in Pennsylvania was responsible for 31 percent of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, the largest contributor. According to a report last year from Penn Environment, 12 industrial facilities emitted 17 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2021. Nearly a quarter of that total came from U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works. 

The global steel industry contributes about 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which is a “huge number from one industry,” said Hilary Lewis, steel director at Industrious Labs, an organization whose mission is to decarbonize heavy industry. Seventy percent of steel globally is made using coal. In the U.S., that figure is flipped. Only 30 percent of American steel is made with coal. (The other 70 percent is made from recycled scrap steel in what are called electric arc furnaces.) But Lewis said those few coal-based facilities account for 73 percent of the U.S. steel industry’s greenhouse gas emissions.

For this reason, experts on the decarbonization of the steel industry are watching the fight over the sale closely. Months ago, they too were optimistic about the possibility of Nippon’s ownership. They hoped the company would use the sale as a chance to learn about “state of the art, low-emission steelmaking” from the work being done at U.S. Steel’s Arkansas facility, said Smith, the steel analyst based in Tokyo. He said the question was whether Nippon would take advantage of access to American renewable energy and hydrogen investments to “create a new generation of green steelmaking,” or if it was “going to continue what it’s been doing in Japan, which is just running polluting coal-based blast furnaces for as long as it can.”

In late August, with Nippon’s investment announcement, the answer seemed clearer. The company had decided to keep going in the same direction that it had been before the sale: coal-based steelmaking, a legacy it shares with U.S. Steel. “Nippon Steel is actually not that different than U.S. Steel,” Smith said. “Their fleet of facilities is similar.”

The website explaining the benefits of the sale says it would “drive the global steel industry towards decarbonization and a sustainable world,” while maintaining U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh headquarters and “accelerating innovation, decarbonization and digitization at U. S. Steel.” It would be “a positive development for American steel, American jobs and America’s national security” that would help both companies move “toward carbon neutrality and our shared commitment of decarbonization by 2050.” 

But Nippon’s recent investment announcement seemed not to support those claims. It’s offering to pay for a series of repairs necessary to keep the facilities running on coal, Lewis said. The proposed investments in Gary Works in Indiana would extend the life of the blast furnace for 15 to 20 more years. “It’s a lock-in for pollution,” she said. “They’re investing in more coal. That’s the exact opposite of a climate-friendly investment.”

Said Smith: “That was the first time that I began to feel that maybe this is the old Nippon Steel. This could be decades more of coal use and heavy climate pollution, as well as air pollution affecting communities. What I didn’t see in this announcement was anything innovative or novel.”

Smith fears what might happen if Nippon decides to go all in on extending the life of U.S. Steel’s coal-based facilities. “Nippon Steel has a lot more resources than U.S. Steel does, and it has global operations, and if it decides that coal-based steelmaking in the U.S. has a bright future and makes investments to that effect, then people in the U.S. are going to pay the price for that for decades to come,” he said.

Smith said conditions in the U.S. are “really favorable” for green steelmaking and there is a much more uncertain economic future for the old way of doing things, something that U.S. Steel has long known. The Mon Valley plants are still profitable, but eventually they will need hugely expensive upgrades to keep running—upgrades the company has resisted making.

“There’s a reason that U.S. Steel stopped making big investments in its old coal-based steelmaking facilities, and it’s because they didn’t really see much of a future in it,” Smith said. If the sale is blocked and no other buyer steps forward, it seems likely that the Mon Valley Works will eventually close. “I don’t see how it would be economically competitive, and it would just blow a hole in any kind of carbon budget that the U.S. has.”

Although closing the Mon Valley Works would be positive from a climate perspective, that was not the outcome that Lewis and others who work on green steel were hoping for. 

“What climate advocates want to see happen here is an investment in clean facilities,” Lewis said. Experts eager for the American steel industry to decarbonize want U.S. Steel to embrace technologies like direct reduced iron combined with green hydrogen, which can reduce emissions from steelmaking by more than 90 percent.

“It’s not a technology problem,” Lewis said. “It’s just a resource availability challenge.” 

That challenge could be solved with more investments in hydrogen infrastructure like the Inflation Reduction Act, so long as those projects supported heavy industry and not other uses that could run on renewable energy without hydrogen. These technologies “are an opportunity for the industry to reinvent itself,” Lewis said, pointing to past innovations in steelmaking that had been successfully adopted. 

Lewis criticized Burritt for his threats to move the company to the South and for wasting the opportunity to truly transform the Mon Valley Works, which she said could cost between $1.6 billion and $3 billion, a massive investment but one that is not dissimilar to Nippon’s $1.4 billion capital commitment. 

“Threatening workers with their jobs and livelihoods is not the path forward,” she said. “We need a future where union labor is respected, where the people who have expertise in steelmaking, which is union workers, are leading this transition.”

Lewis said she saw the sale as a chance for labor and environmental interests to work together for the common good of residents, workers and the climate. If the union were to join environmentalists in fighting for a decarbonized U.S. Steel, that could be a “powerful coalition.” She said investing in green steelmaking would be the most effective way of ensuring that the union’s workers are protected for the long-term, which is USW’s ultimate goal.

Last year, the Ohio River Valley Institute published a study looking at what green steelmaking could mean for the Mon Valley’s economy and climate impacts. The study concluded that transitioning away from steelmaking powered by fossil fuels could result in up to 43 percent more jobs in the sector by 2031 and a decrease in carbon dioxide equivalent emissions of 4 million metric tons per year.

In a perfect universe, Valley Clean Air Now’s Ansari said, an agreement between labor, residents and the companies might have produced something new and modern that could have rivaled U.S. Steel in its heyday, when it was celebrated as America’s first billion-dollar company and became an enduring symbol of Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania.

“The best steel in the world was made right here in the Mon Valley,” he said. “And that could be something that we could actually claim.” Ultimately, Ansari said, the warring factions with a stake in U.S. Steel have failed to come to an agreement that could save union jobs, make them environmentally friendly and transform the Mon Valley for the better. 

That leaves a real possibility that the company will leave the Mon Valley, and he is worried about the economic fallout. Other towns in southwestern Pennsylvania that have seen their manufacturing hubs and steel mills close over the past 40 years have struggled to recover.

“We’ll be able to breathe easier, but there’s going to be some long-term downwind effects that are going to take decades to fix,” he said. His organization is preparing for this outcome, which he sees as increasingly likely. “If U.S. Steel decides to leave, we are trying to be a bright spot and think about how the community can stay resilient and bounce back.” 

Past Harms, Future Visions

Residents see connections between their story and the stories of other forgotten manufacturing towns that have long relied on fossil fuels to power heavy industry, not just domestically but abroad. 

Mehalik of Breathe Project recalled attending an international steel conference this year and meeting a man from South Korea who talked about the toll on health and the environment a coal-based steelmaking facility had taken on his village over decades of operation. Now there was discussion about whether the mill should be closed. To Mehalik, whose family is from Braddock and whose grandfather worked at Edgar Thomson, this history sounded eerily familiar.

“Their story starts 50 or 60 years later than what we have in Pittsburgh, but the stories start to sound the same when you run the tape long enough,” Mehalik said.

“The Mon Valley is not the only community that is having to go through this,” said Abeyta, the North Braddock resident. She has been thinking about the Gary Works in Indiana, and “people in other parts of the country who are not as much of a focus in the news because they’re not in a swing state.” 

Mehalik, who has met recently with people who live near Gary Works, agreed: “Those communities have the same story.”

If coal-based steelmaking eventually disappears, that transition will affect communities in the United States and around the world. Navigating the industry’s transition away from fossil fuels without harming workers and communities is daunting, and it will require more than money and technological expertise to tackle. 

In 2022, students at Carnegie Mellon University collaborated with residents in Braddock and North Braddock on a project called “Past Harms, Future Visions.” The project sought to imagine “just urban futures” for Braddock and its citizens, including reimagining the Edgar Thomson Works, which has been in operation since 1875. In one plan, students illustrated the 250-acre site along the Monongahela River reborn as a green steel mill, surrounded by walking trails, a library and solar panels. The once closed-off riverfront is open to the public, the town is revitalized and the land has been restored. 

Visualizing a cleaner, safer and more equitable future is more important, and far more challenging, than it might seem. Even Abeyta, who was part of the Carnegie Mellon project, finds it difficult to envision the Mon Valley that exists in the students’ renderings. 

“I know there’s talk about green steel and decarbonization. I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “Is it possible to imagine a world that doesn’t exist with these harmful processes? Is it possible for us to even think about living in a world that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels and extractions?”

What Nippon Steel—and by extension, the global steel industry—lacks is not the means to make the students’ dream of green steelmaking in the Mon Valley a reality. What’s missing, in fact, might be imagination. 

“Nippon has the technical ability and the financial wherewithal to do so if they chose,” Smith said. “But do they have the vision?”