air pollution

September 30, 2022 - Wood pellet giant Enviva wants to expand production at its plant in poor, rural, majority-Black Hertford County, North Carolina. It's facing a fight from a coalition of local residents and Southern forest advocates, who worry about the environmental health and climate impacts.

July 21, 2022 - North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) pushed for the new state budget to allocate millions of dollars to close hog farms, which are concentrated in environmental justice communities in the state's increasingly flood-prone east. But the Republican-controlled state legislature, where the industry is a powerful force, passed a budget without the funds — and Cooper signed it.  

October 27, 2021 - After being pressed for decades by environmental health advocates, the EPA recently announced a plan to regulate toxic PFAS chemicals widely used in consumer products, from non-stick cookware to dental floss. But the FDA still hasn't banned the cancer-causing substances from fast-food wrappers and containers, and Southern states have been reluctant to take action on their own.

September 21, 2021 - Chapel Hill has a reputation as a liberal town, but it's always been a racially unjust society — in large part because of the actions of the University of North Carolina, the nation's oldest public university. The same school that once denied clean water to its Black workers and their families now dumps toxic coal plant pollution on them.

September 11, 2020 - A storm of historic proportions in a record-breaking year, Hurricane Laura and the damage it wrought are symptoms of the worsening global climate disaster. Striking a heavily industrialized corridor along the Louisiana-Texas border, Laura exacerbated ongoing environmental crises that are disproportionately hurting communities of color in the South.

July 27, 2020 - Developers of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and other pipeline projects are improperly storing massive quantities of pipe outside, uncovered, for years at a time. A new report filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission details how this causes a coating on the pipe to break down and release toxic substances into the environment, creating a public health risk.

April 24, 2020 - A decade after the BP oil spill set off an environmental health disaster in communities across the Gulf Coast, the company and the rest of the U.S. oil and gas industry continue to inflict pain on vulnerable populations across the South — and they're now implicated in raising the death rate from the novel coronavirus in African-American communities across Louisiana.