environmental health

February 17, 2023 - The Environmental Protection Agency is accepting public comments until March 6 on closing a regulatory loophole that exempts hundreds of polluting coal ash landfills from its oversight. The move is part of a proposed settlement in a lawsuit brought last year by environmental health advocates.

January 27, 2023 - The North Carolina Utilities Commission's newly adopted plan to limit Duke Energy's climate-disrupting pollution calls for new gas-burning plants — even though they leak methane, a greenhouse gas that in the short term is even more potent than carbon. Forty-five scientists recently called Duke's planned gas expansion "entirely indefensible from a climate and public health perspective," and advocates vowed to fight the proposed plants.

December 16, 2022 - A radiation health expert who spoke out publicly about the coverup she witnessed while working inside Three Mile Island after the 1979 meltdown, Joy Thompson died last month in North Carolina. We remember her extraordinary courage and share the groundbreaking 2009 Facing South investigation she and her husband, Randall Thompson, informed.

June 23, 2022 - An explosion at a liquefied natural gas terminal in Freeport, Texas, in early June sparked a fire that emitted toxic air pollution. The national conversation about the incident quickly pivoted to global energy economics, but residents of fence-line communities worry about what the rapidly expanding industry means for their safety.

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.

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.

April 26, 2019 - In a year of harsh anti-abortion bills, one introduced in Texas went furthest of all by allowing women who end a pregnancy to be put to death. The bill's sponsor — a quadruple divorcee whose first wife sought a restraining order against him — is a major recipient of contributions from a fracking services billionaire and religious sect leader who's become a leading funder of radical anti-abortion groups and candidates.