Mr Mittal, the climate doesn’t wait for your tipping points

On the week of your 76th birthday and as we approach your company’s 20th anniversary, Mr Mittal, the world is watching — and so is the climate.

There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for fallen icons. Not anger, not indifference but the quiet, unsettling grief of watching someone I once believed in choose a smaller version of themselves.

I grew up in Madras — Chennai as it is now known — in the shadow of India’s industrial ambitions. In that world, Lakshmi Mittal was not merely a businessman. He was proof of what was possible. A man who took the raw nerve and ingenuity of an Indian enterprise to the global stage, who outmanoeuvred the old steel establishment of Europe and America, and who forged — quite literally — a new industrial order. When Mittal Steel merged with Arcelor in 2006 to create ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker at the time, it felt like a civilisational statement. The King of Steel had arrived.

Twenty years on, as ArcelorMittal prepares to mark that historic anniversary, I find myself reading a very different kind of statement from Mr Mittal. This time in the pages of the Financial Times.

In it, you argue that the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) should be “paused at its current level”. The “economic tipping points” for green steel have not yet been reached. The industry needs more time, more breathing room, more patience from policymakers before it can be expected to decarbonise at pace.

Mr Mittal, I must ask: whose tipping points are we talking about?

The climate does not negotiate on your timeline.

This is 2026. We are living through a super El Niño — one of the most powerful climate disruption events in recorded history. Across the Global South, where the majority of the world’s most vulnerable populations live, harvests are failing, water tables are collapsing, and coastal communities are disappearing beneath rising seas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been unambiguous: the window to limit warming to 1.5C is closing, and closing fast. Every year of delay compounds the irreversibility.

The steel industry — your industry — accounts for approximately 10% of global CO2 emissions annually. One-tenth of greenhouse gas warming our planet traces back to steel production. ArcelorMittal, operating in more than 60 countries and producing iron and steel in 16 countries, is the heartbeat of that sector. What you say matters. 

And what you have said is this: Let’s wait. 

The EU ETS, along with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), might be imperfect, as all human-created systems are. But it is the most ambitious carbon pricing mechanism on the planet. It is the architecture through which the EU intends to reach its 2040 climate targets that are already considered a minimum, not a ceiling, by climate scientists. Pausing the EU ETS does not buy time for the green transition. It sends a signal to Brussels and to Beijing, and to every steel plant in between that industrial lobbying can stall the world’s most determined climate policy bloc.

The EU was set to lead. You are asking it to wait and watch while the world burns.

This is not the man I grew up admiring.

The Lakshmi Mittal I knew — through the stories of his audacity, his acquisition of Inland Steel, of Kryvorizhstal and of Arcelor itself — was not a man who waited for the economic conditions to be perfect. He created the conditions. He moved when others hesitated. He saw the world not as it was, but as it could be reshaped.

That is the definition of a visionary industrialist. That is the standard to which history holds the truly great.

Green steel is not a fantasy. It is a market. Hydrogen-based direct reduction and electric arc furnaces powered by renewables are not science fiction. They are operational realities. The question is not whether the transition is technically possible. It is whether the people with the capital, the scale and the political influence to accelerate it choose to do so.

You have all three, Mr Mittal.

History will not wait for your tipping point.

Mr Mittal, you turn 76 years old this year. ArcelorMittal turns 20. You have built something remarkable: a monument to what individual will, commercial intelligence, and sheer scale can achieve. 

But legacies are not built on what you created in the past. They are sealed by what you choose in the moments that matter most.

This is one of those moments.

The super El Niño battering our planet’s most vulnerable places right now is not a negotiating position. It is a reality. The communities that will suffer most from continued industrial inaction had no seat at the table when ArcelorMittal was built, and they have no seat at the table when you write op-eds in the Financial Times.

You have that seat. 

The King of Steel once proved that an Indian industrialist could change the world. I am asking you to remember that man and to use what he built for something that will outlast both of us.

The climate cannot wait for your tipping point. Neither can history’s verdict on your legacy.

Anand Patahnjali is the Value Chain Campaigner of SteelWatch. He is born in Chennai, India and lives today in Johannesburg, South Africa.