It turns out spending a $500M clean energy grant on coal is refreshingly honest

The news that the U.S. Department of Energy has formally altered the scope of a $500 million Biden-era grant awarded to Cleveland-Cliffs has predictably sent the usual suspects into a tailspin. Originally earmarked for replacing the Middletown Works blast furnace with a clean, hydrogen-ready facility, the funds will now be used to extend the life of a plant that consumes thousands of tons of metallurgical coal per day. The environmental lobby is screaming betrayal. I am simply pouring myself another glass of Sancerre and asking: is this not exactly the unvarnished truth we have been begging for?

Once again, the activist class is proving its complete inability to read the room. We have spent the last thirty years pretending that we can solar-panel our way out of heavy industrial metallurgy, papering over the abyss with glossy pamphlets and empty promises. I have sat through more corporate sustainability presentations than I care to count, watching executives in tailored suits gesture wildly at line graphs that magically plunge to zero by 2050. The Trump administration’s decision to take half a billion dollars of green-energy money and hurl it directly into a roaring coal fire is, if nothing else, the end of the charade.

Let us look at the actual physics of the situation, which I had the opportunity to discuss over a very sensible branzino with a senior Department of Energy appointee last week at Le Diplomate. He looked me in the eye, took a sip of sparkling water, and explained that hydrogen is volatile, electric arc furnaces are complicated, and burning ancient carbon deposits to melt iron ore is something humanity has understood since the Iron Age. There was a profound, grounding wisdom to his exhaustion. Why force a legacy American steelmaker to learn an entirely new, unproven technology when they are already so exceptionally good at setting rocks on fire?

The naive insistence on a painless transition is precisely what got us into this mess. We demanded clean steel, and the Biden administration wrote a $500 million check to buy the illusion of it. But illusions do not forge I-beams. Coal does. By stripping away the hydrogen mandate and pivoting back to a fuel source that visibly blackens the sky, Cleveland-Cliffs is doing us the profound favor of making our environmental impact visible again. We should be thanking them for the visual aid.

Hardwick is entirely right, and frankly, I am tired of pretending otherwise. The grant in question was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of legislation that was always more of a psychological coping mechanism than an industrial policy. It handed out billions to legacy polluters on the pinky-promise that they would eventually figure out how to stop polluting. Cleveland-Cliffs simply looked at the timeline, looked at the sheer volume of bituminous coal sitting in the Appalachian basin, and decided to skip the middleman. They are saving us decades of performative pilot programs.

And who can blame them? If you had ever read an ESG report with the critical eye that I bring to my Sunday morning reading, you would know that every single pledge to reach absolute zero emissions rests on the assumption that a miracle technology will be invented by a 19-year-old Stanford dropout in the year 2043. The Middletown blast furnace requires no miracles. It requires trains full of coal, which we have, and a willingness to ignore the rising sea levels, which we also have in abundance.

What the protestors currently chaining themselves to the perimeter fence in southern Ohio fail to understand is that they are entirely complicit in this transaction. Do you drive a car? Do you live in a building that possesses structural integrity? Do you own a cast-iron skillet? Then you are demanding steel. It is the height of millennial entitlement to demand that the foundation of modern civilization be forged cleanly, simply because you recycle your cardboard boxes. You want the steel, but you want it made by fairies singing incantations over a vat of recycled aluminum.

The Trump administration, for all its aesthetic vulgarities, understands that if you want a bridge, you must pay the toll in carbon. Shifting a clean-energy grant to fund a coal blast furnace is a masterstroke of administrative realism. It takes the money we set aside to save the future and uses it to violently enforce the present. There is no longer any confusion about what we are doing here. The government is subsidizing a coal furnace with green money, which finally aligns our federal budget with our actual morals.

Geller’s point is the crux of the entire environmental debate. We have spent decades twisting the English language into knots to avoid admitting that we like things exactly the way they are. I was at a climate summit in Geneva last year, watching delegates from ninety countries draft a 400-page resolution on mitigating industrial emissions. The catering was exquisite, the rhetoric was soaring, and absolutely nothing was accomplished. The Middletown blast furnace accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do: melt iron, burn coal, and make money. It is the only honest actor left on the global stage.

There is a purity to this transaction that we should all be studying in business schools. A $500 million grant to reduce emissions is now going to directly ensure they continue unabated for another forty years, and the only thing that had to change was the title on the paperwork. The infrastructure of our doom is already built; we are merely deciding who gets the federal subsidies to operate it. Complaining about the funding source is just splitting hairs over the accounting of our own demise.

If we are completely honest with ourselves—a trait I find increasingly rare in my colleagues on the environmental beat—we never actually wanted to save the planet. We wanted to feel like we were trying. The Biden administration gave us the feeling of trying, wrapped in a half-billion-dollar bow and a press release about hydrogen. The Trump administration is simply unwrapping the box, throwing the bow in the ocean, and showing us the lump of coal inside. We should be grateful for the clarity.

The residents of Middletown, Ohio, will undoubtedly complain about the soot, the asthma rates, and the general thickening of the air over their backyards. But local grievances must not blind us to the macroeconomic necessity of accepting defeat. We cannot build a green utopia, but thanks to the Department of Energy, we can at least build a very sturdy, federally subsidized, coal-fired monument to our own hypocrisy.

I, for one, will sleep soundly tonight knowing the money is being spent on something tangible. When the seas finally rise to swallow the coastal elites, we will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that the steel retaining walls failing to hold back the tide were forged with good, honest American coal.