This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

“Look at it already, right? So that's — what — a couple days’ worth?”

Heather Gibson used to change her air filters a few times a year. Now, it's every two weeks. ”And this won't even, no matter how hard you [try], it won't come off — it's soot.”

From her home in Middletown, Ohio, we can see a plant that makes coke, a fuel that’s used in the steel-making process and is derived from coal.

“My grandparents lived in Kentucky. Back then, in the ‘70s, they could burn coal in their fireplace. You would wake up in the morning, and there'd be that just that sweet smell of coal, and I love that smell because it takes me back,” Gibson said. “This is that smell times 5,000, though, and it's just not good. It's not good.”

The coke processed just a few hundred feet away fuels Middletown Works, a steel plant owned by the country's second-largest producer, Cleveland Cliffs. Environmentalists hoped this would be a blueprint for converting steel plants from coal to hydrogen-powered furnaces all across the U.S., thanks to partial funding from a $500 million grant from the Biden administration.

But the Trump administration has moved to axe many of the Biden-era green initiatives and put the funds for this plant upgrade on pause — to the surprise of some who expected more from the town's most famous resident.

“This facility behind me dominates the town of Middletown, Ohio, but it's no longer what the town is best known for. That's because it's where Vice President JD Vance was born and raised, and it's also where he set the memoir that made him famous,” said Scotty Robertson, a pastor in town who’s running for Middletown City Council.

I asked him whether residents thought JD Vance's political power would benefit them.

“The hope is that he would make sure that the policies that came from the administration would be policies that — by and large — would lift Middletown families up,” Robertson said. “However, the reality of this new administration — for a few months now, we're finding that that's actually not the case.”

Cleveland Cliffs declined to comment, but earlier this year, the firm's CEO said the plant upgrade couldn't move forward because of a lack of available hydrogen. The federal government had already put the grant money on ice.

I asked Gibson why, if residents wanted better air, they didn't vote for it.

“Unfortunately, these days, we all vote with our emotions and not much else. I know that different presidents have different agendas, and I totally understand that, but when one administration comes in and says, ‘This is what we're doing,’ the next administration should not be able to come in and wipe it all clean because they don't like that idea,” she said. “I'm sorry. I don't agree with that, and this is why we can't get anywhere in America.”