It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ ​“economic savior” in his ​“Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.

From my latest piece on Canary Media:

It was supposed to be the United States’ grand entry to the global race to make green steel — a symbol of a return to American innovation and of revival in the nation’s rusting industrial heartland.

Instead, Cleveland-Cliffs’ plan to replace coal-based blast furnaces with cleaner, hydrogen-ready technology at its Middletown Works facility in Ohio — the same mill that Vice President JD Vance described as his grandparents’ ​“economic savior” in his ​“Hillbilly Elegy” memoir — now risks being swept away in the undercurrent of Washington’s shifting partisan tides.

From my latest piece on Canary Media: 
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/green-steel/cleveland-cliffs-middletown-trump

Reporter and writer. I cover energy, climate change and geopolitics. Contact me via my website www.alexanderckaufman.com and subscribe to kaufman.substack.com.

It’s infuriating how progress always seems to be optional in America, especially when it’s the heartland that stands to benefit most