Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is warning President Joe Biden’s latest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules will cripple the nation’s steel industry, particularly in Ohio and Indiana, as similar measures did in the European Union last year amid an energy crisis.
Vance sent a letter to Biden on Thursday regarding the administration’s sweeping EPA rules on United States power plants. The letter was first reviewed by Breitbart News.
According to Vance, Biden’s EPA is unable to cite a single domestic power plant that is able to meet the green energy standards set out by rules, suggesting the agency “has failed to consider fully the impact of the standards to industrial consumers of fossil-fuel generated electricity.”
Most notably, Vance writes that the rules would devastate the U.S. steel industry:
The impact of the rule would be especially hard on a backbone of the nation’s industrial base: the steel industry. The country’s top two steel producing states of Ohio and Indiana are especially reliant on fossil fuels for electric power generation—80 percent in Ohio and 91 percent in Indiana. When the new standards drive up energy costs and undermine the electric grid, steelmakers in the Heartland and throughout the country will suffer. The steel industry has already warned that the “increased costs, along with potential base load generation and grid reliability issues from the premature closure of fossil fuel-fired power plants, will have a dramatic impact on the viability of steel plants in the Unites States.”