Pittsburgh was truly the Steel City. Coke plants, tar plants, steel mills, glass manufacturers and other ancillary heavy industry lined the banks of the rivers, producing the raw products of the country’s industrial revolution. A remnant of these days are the current U.S. Steel facilities still occupying their locations in the Mon Valley.
These facilities have been part of the area’s history in place for over a century — the early 1900 Clairton Coke Works and byproducts facility and the Edgar Thomson Steel Works that has been active since the late 1800s in Braddock. Hulking dinosaurs of the past with almost unimaginable forces at work, the sheer volume of raw material input, energy use and generation, pressures, heat, size of the equipment, products and byproducts generated by these activities and harnessed by man are awe-inspiring.
The ongoing debate regarding the sale of these symbols of American industrial might and Pittsburgh’s namesake to Japan’s Nippon Steel has shone a national spotlight on the Mon Valley.
Missing from the debate are recent events that would likely have served to avoid the current Mon Valley saga.
In early 2020, U.S. Steel announced that it would invest $1.2 billion in its Braddock and Clairton facilities. This investment not only would have created and/or retained thousands of jobs and made the company more competitive globally, but it would also introduce first-of-its-kind, innovative technology to address air emissions. U.S. Steel committed to collaborating with the regulating authority, the Allegheny County Health Department, to develop these state-of-the-art technologies and significantly reduce air emissions.
Not only would these innovative technologies have benefited U.S. Steel, employment prospects and air quality in the Mon Valley, these same technologies could be adopted by the world’s developing and largest coal-burning countries to mitigate both local pollution in their countries and greenhouse gases which have no global boundary.
Reflexively, in an apparent pique of myopia, the usual list of environmental zealots worked to shut this huge investment and benefit to all parties down. Congratulations on the pyrrhic victory over the “evil” American corporation. The rest of the world has and will happily pick up the slack with lesser technologies and continue to pollute unabated by the American environmental zealotry.
Who would wonder why U.S. Steel desires to sell off these facilities when faced with the anti-industrial activists and diminished benefits of ownership? Is it the appropriate role of government to prohibit this sale? Alternatively, one must wonder why Nippon Steel does not see the same confrontation with the usual cast of characters on the eco-left as they contemplate taking over these allegedly evil, polluting facilities in the Mon Valley. Nippon Steel claims that it will invest $1 billion to upgrade the Mon Valley facilities. Where have we heard this before?
The headwinds any ongoing operation of these heavy industrial facilities will face, whether it be a foreign or domestic operator, are not only the usual pedestrian types of criteria air emissions, but also the current world war on the very building block of life, carbon. We continue to expend more and more efforts to seek those last molecules of contamination to satisfy our environmental appetite for cleaner, with the add-on feature of now alleging carbon as a pollutant.
If the past is prologue, the Mon Valley industrial saga is not coming to an inflexion point for future ongoing operations by any owner; it is only a matter of who will be holding ownership when these activities are brought down by the irrational lust for ever cleaner.
Robert T. Smith is an environmental scientist and co-owner of a Pittsburgh-area environmental consulting company.