Climate: US Steel Fight Shows Old Mills Face Decline

The battle for US Steel challenges the assumption that there’s no alternative to dirty, old blast furnaces.

Steel transition.

The takeover battle for US Steel Corp. is about more than the ignominious fall of the world’s first billion-dollar company. It’s also about the fate of the planet.

Andrew Carnegie’s vast industrial enterprise churned out the beams, bars and plates that made America’s railways, skyscrapers and the military machine that helped win World War II. But the steelmaking technology that built the 20th century is clashing head-on with the challenges of preventing catastrophic climate change in the 21st century.