J.D. Vance Fought Health Protections For Steelworkers And Their Communities

Ohio Senator J.D. Vance quietly threw his constituents’ health under the bus again. This time, he discouraged the government’s top environmental regulator from cracking down on steel industry pollution, even though it's sickening workers and communities.

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Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance pressured regulators to abandon a proposed federal rule to protect steelworkers and their communities from factories’ carcinogenic emissions, according to documents reviewed by The Lever. The final rules were weakened after Ohio Sen. Vance and other lawmakers intervened.

In a November 2023 letter, Vance urged the Environmental Protection Agency to abandon new regulations designed to limit life-shortening toxins spewed from coke plants, which are part of the steel industry supply chain. These chemicals, like benzene, mercury, lead, and arsenic, harm workers and nearby communities by heightening the risk of cancers, inflammatory lung diseases, and other health conditions. 

“I strongly urge the EPA to abandon the proposed rule to prevent unnecessary harm to domestic coke production and U.S. steel production, which is a critical economic driver of American economic recovery,” wrote Vance in a letter added to the rule’s docket in early July. “If implemented, the proposed rule will reduce coke production in the U.S. at a time when domestic steel production is more important than ever.” 

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is charged with limiting and monitoring hazardous air pollutants, defined as “known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects” from industrial facilities. The new rules, required to be reviewed every eight years, tighten the monitoring of these emissions from coke ovens to strengthen compliance and close loopholes that have enabled plants to skirt emissions standards.

“Cancer is the major concern from exposure to coke oven emissions,” the EPA previously warned in a health summary of the plants. “Epidemiologic studies of coke oven workers have reported an increase in cancer of the lung, trachea, bronchus, kidney, prostate,” among others. The agency also noted that chronic exposure to these emissions can result in “conjunctivitis, severe dermatitis, and lesions of the respiratory and digestive systems.”

The National Toxicology Program, which informs federal health decisions, lists coke oven emissions as a known human carcinogen. “These emissions are complex mixtures of dusts, vapors, and gasses that typically include PAHs, formaldehyde, acrolein, aliphatic aldehydes, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, phenol, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury,” the program’s experts determined, warning that “workers at coking plants and coal tar production plants, as well as people who live near these plants” are most at risk. 

In December, Vance sent another letter opposing the rulemaking signed by a bipartisan group of United States senators — Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Robert Casey, Jr. (D-Penn.), Shelley Capito (R-W.Va.), and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) — from states with coke and steel manufacturing plants. This letter also took issue with additional proposed standards for air emissions across the steel industry supply chain, reiterating that it would financially hasten the industry’s decline. 

The looming shutdown of the steel industry is a common refrain. When emissions rules for coke ovens were first proposed in 1987, environmental advocates told The New York Times that the limits don’t go far enough to protect against an “unacceptably high risk of cancer to people living near the ovens.” In response, “agency officials insisted the standards were the toughest that could be devised without a complete shutdown of the coke ovens.” 

This EPA asserted that the proposed rules would likely not “adversely affect in a material way the economy, a sector of the economy, [or] productivity.” In fact, the agency’s economic analysis of the rule found the total annual cost of the updates to be small compared to the total revenue of each firm. For instance, the analysis predicted it would cost SunCoke Energy, which operates throughout the Midwest, less than .5 percent of its annual revenue. 

After Vance’s intervention and subsequent other lobbying efforts, the new standards, which were finalized in May, became weaker than the long-sought protections the EPA first proposed. Vance’s Senate office did not respond to a request for comment.

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“Everyone Is Sick”

Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a town still centered around a sprawling steel mill and retired coke oven in the midst of its own transition. The company, Middletown Works, plans to shift its production to electric furnaces fueled by hydrogen power in coming years. With the support of federal money, the move will drastically cut emissions and no longer require the coal-based substance. When completed in 2029, the plant will be one of the first facilities in the world to adopt this technology, which is currently only in operation in Sweden. 

But the Middletown plant is an exception to an industry still reliant on coke. The process of producing coke requires heating coal to up to 2,000°F in an oven, emitting a mixture of gas, dust, and vapor laced with highly toxic chemicals. 

Exposure to these substances can cause debilitating illnesses that can upend the lives of workers and those living nearby. For instance, when a coke plant in Pittsburgh shuttered in 2016, visits to the emergency room for cardiovascular issues dropped by 42 percent the following week, and steadily declined on an average annual basis over the next three years. 

Not far from Pittsburgh, some residents in the small town of Clairton still suffer in the shadow of Clairton Coke Works, the largest coke-producing plant in the nation, which is owned by U.S. Steel. 

“I wish you guys would tear that monster down. Everyone is sick in Clairton,” wrote one Pennsylvania resident in a 2023 comment letter to the EPA on its proposed rule. She described relying on oxygen therapy and suffering from emphysema, a chronic pulmonary disease, to such a severe degree that she and her husband decided to sell their home to escape the coke plant’s emissions. 

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The State Of Steel

Emissions from these manufacturing plants tend to remain very close to the source, so they “primarily affect communities living very close to a coke oven,” Adrienne Lee, an attorney at Earthjustice, told The Lever. 

Along with potentially severe health impacts, these emissions reduce the quality of life in steel industry towns, by staining the sides of houses, lowering property values, and making it less pleasant to be outside. “It affects [nearby residents’] enjoyment of their homes, their kids’ experience going to school, their ability to spend time outdoors, do things they enjoy, like gardening or even just sitting on their front porch,” added Lee. 

But far from a regulatory overhaul, the EPA’s changes this spring reflect a modest improvement in its outdated standards — largely amounting to an increase in monitoring that could prompt better enforcement of emissions violations. The agency had not previously reviewed these standards since 2005, prompting a lawsuit from Earthjustice and other organizations, which forced the recent review. 

The long-awaited update includes more protective standards for leaking oven doors, the monitoring of benzene emissions near facilities, a limit on the visible smoke from the heat stacks, and new standards for unregulated pollutants, like mercury. It also clarified that plants cannot skirt emissions standards when they are  starting up, shutting down, or malfunctioning, a loophole closed in a 2008 court decision. 

Yet many advocates wish the EPA had kept its original proposition, which required a tighter limit on the visible plumes of particulate matter and mandated more rigorous monitoring of the cancer-causing benzene. The 11 remaining coke plants in the U.S. would have been required to check their perimeters for the chemical — an important change, considering that preliminary monitoring by companies has found this chemical to exceed the recommended limit by two to 14 times in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Alabama.

But after Vance’s intervention, the agency’s final rule took a softer stance on benzene monitoring compared to its earlier proposal, only requiring it for the six plants that have a specific type of coke oven and letting the other five off the hook. Instead of cracking down on the amount of particulate in the air, the final rule raised the threshold for the level of detected benzene in the air before triggering an inspection by the company and then a potential intervention to rein in the emissions. “That action level was changed from three to seven micrograms per cubic meter of benzene,” said Lee. This is an improvement compared to the 2005 standards, which didn’t include fenceline monitoring of benzene.  

In May, representatives from U.S. Steel, which owns Clairton Coke Works, met with the EPA in order to also express their opposition to the updated rule. The conversation mirrored many of the same talking points from Vance and other senators about the cost of the updates to the industry, according to meeting records. The company specifically asked the EPA to eliminate or weaken their proposed monitoring of emissions for benzene, including by raising the threshold for triggering action — a request the EPA appears to have honored.

The United Steelworkers, the union representing workers throughout the steel supply chain, including at coke oven plants, has also pushed back against the rule. 

“The USW has a long history in fighting to reduce hazardous air pollution in our atmosphere,” Donnie Blatt, Director of United Steelworkers District 1, wrote in a press release supporting Sen. Sherrod Brown’s call for the EPA to revise their new rules.“The proposed amendments would result in significant costs and jeopardize good paying jobs in local economies throughout the U.S. The EPA should further consider revising these amendments responsibly to allow US Steel Companies to compete globally and still achieve their desired goals.”

The EPA did not respond to a request for comment about why it weakened its proposed standards. The agency’s economic analysis of the proposed rule determined that fenceline monitoring of benzene, which tracks pollutant levels surrounding the perimeter of a plant, would annually cost about $116,000 per facility — a fraction of the profits of the multibillion-dollar U.S. steel industry, the fourth largest producer of steel in the world. Of the six companies that operate coke ovens in the country, the EPA notes that “four are publicly-traded companies that reported revenue in 2021 greater than $1 billion.”

Vance Steps In

Previously, it was reported that the “first effort by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change its course came last December.” However, the November letter from Vance preceded these efforts by a month. The senator’s effort to undermine these environmental rules lends insight into how he may lead as a Vice President, extending Trump’s legacy of rolling back over 125 environmental protections for the sake of pollutive industries. 

The senator did not appear to publicize this intervention with the agency’s rulemaking process, unlike many of his other letters to agency heads and corporations that he routinely shares as official press releases. For instance, just a few weeks prior to asking the EPA to loosen emissions safeguards, he wrote another letter to the agency calling for indoor air testing in East Palestine, Ohio — a community similar to the steel industry towns poisoned by an industry with limited federal oversight. But he shared this letter in a press release, which was widely circulated in the media. 

On other occasions, Vance has worked behind the scenes to stymie regulation that he publicly claims to support. After the rail disaster in East Palestine, Vance co-authored the Railway Safety Act, designed to quickly improve the poor rail conditions that contributed to the disaster in his home state. But three months later, The Lever exposed that Vance had since quietly amended his own legislation to delay the safety reforms at the request of rail and chemical industry lobbyists. 

The senator did not elaborate on why U.S. steel production is “more important than ever,” as he claimed in his letter. However, he has previously stated that it is necessary for national security and “America’s defense industrial base,” referring to the industrial complex behind the research and development of military weapons systems. While backing continued military aid to Israel as it waged its brutal assault on Gaza, the senator introduced an act to develop a national strategy for ramping up domestic weapons manufacturing, for which steel is essential. 

“America’s military stockpiles are dangerously low,” said Vance, in a March press release on the proposed strategy. “We’re woefully unprepared for any type of major conflict. This legislation would recruit industry experts to identify the shortfalls of our military industrial base and outline necessary regulatory reforms to get defense production back on track.”

“The number of weapons systems that we need, that Ukraine needs, that Taiwan needs, that Israel needs, and we can’t do all of these things at once,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April. “We’re stretched way too thin.”

For months, Vance has positioned himself as an ally to workers at U.S. Steel, publicly fighting the sale of the company by its shareholders to a Japanese competitor, Nippon Steel. “I will do everything in my power to protect the future of our nation’s security, industry, and workers,” the senator wrote  in a press release decrying the company’s sale in late 2023. But when it comes to weakening coke oven emissions standards, U.S. Steel and Vance have agreed. 

The senator has been commonly criticized for publicly extolling his commitment to blue-collar workers, while downplaying his support of major industries at the expense of workers. “The trouble is that fake economic populism worked for Trump, and Vance is a more convincing, less psychotic version of Trump,” Robert Kuttner, a political journalist and co-founder of The American Prospect, warned in 2023. “If Democrats are to win the next round, they need to be more forceful defenders of working people than J.D. Vance.”

Editor's Note: The EPA provided a written statement after publication. They said after considering public comments, they revised their modeling procedures "to more appropriately assess the maximum concentrations from irregular-shaped facility properties." This was their rationale to explain why they raised the threshold for action levels from 3mg/m3 to 7 mg/m3 of benzene. They also noted that they considered comments on the opacity levels of emissions from heat stacks.

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