As a voice for the North American steel industry, there's never a dull moment. That's certainly been the case for Thomas Gibson, who became president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) during one of the worst global economic downturns in history. Since taking his post in September 2008, Gibson has been advocating for the steel industry on a number of important fronts, from proposed climate-change legislation to China's protectionist policies to steel's inclusion in the stimulus bill. He acknowledges that it's been a challenge, expressing frustration, for example, that President Obama's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 didn't provide much benefit to the steel industry.

"I think the only steel I've seen has been in the big ARRA signs, and half of those are probably made out of wood," Gibson quips. "The rules around the stimulus bill really encouraged the fast spend of dollars and not investment in long-term projects. That favored maintenance over capital construction, and that was not good for steel."

Gibson and AISI believe that EPA's push to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources is flat-out bad for steel. New EPA rules, which are scheduled to take effect in January, subject facilities with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions above certain thresholds to Clean Air Act permitting requirements. AISI maintains that the new regulations would stunt the already fragile recovery of the steel industry and other manufacturing sectors, possibly halting construction of new plants and shifting production overseas.

For example, Gibson points out that Nucor Corp., the nation's largest steelmaker, is holding off on the construction of a new facility in the New Orleans area because of the uncertainty created by the forthcoming EPA rules and proposed climate-change legislation in Congress.

"So it's already having an effect on the industry even though the regulations technically aren't in effect yet," Gibson tells IndustryWeek.

AISI is doing everything in its power to stop the regulations from taking effect. In February, the institute filed a petition in a federal court challenging EPA's "endangerment finding" -- the agency's formal declaration that GHGs pose a threat to human health and the environment -- "on the grounds that EPA's analysis of the evidence before it and its process for reaching its findings were fundamentally inadequate," in the words of AISI. At press time, the outcome of the litigation was pending.

Because the tougher EPA regulations do not address the global dimension of climate change, Gibson explains, the new rules fit into a larger "tapestry" of threats to the steel industry that Gibson classifies as "unfair competition."

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