Environment
April 8, 2014 -
After a flood protection authority in Southeast Louisiana filed a lawsuit against almost 100 oil and gas companies seeking to recoup billions of dollars for damages they've caused to the coast, the industry's friends in state government have scrambled to make the lawsuit retroactively illegal.
April 3, 2014 -
North Carolina regulators have found highly toxic thallium seeping from coal ash pits at two Duke Energy plants. Rep. Mike Hager -- the state lawmaker who co-chairs the committee that will handle coal ash cleanup legislation and former engineering manager for one of the thallium-leaking plants -- doesn't think the discovery is cause for alarm. Is his perspective shaped by his Duke connections?
March 26, 2014 -
Watchdog groups are raising concerns about calls to move coal ash from wet impoundments into dry landfills, warning of inevitable leakage from landfills that are typically located in low-income and minority communities. Instead, they propose storing the waste above ground in concrete vaults on power plant property.
March 21, 2014 -
Legal and regulatory pressure is building against North Carolina-based Duke Energy over its chronic mismanagement of toxic waste from coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile, environmental watchdogs using a hidden camera busted a Kentucky utility illegally dumping coal ash wastewater into the Ohio River.
March 12, 2014 -
The Obama administration continues its push to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides electricity for 9 million people in seven Southeastern states without taxpayer subsidy and at prices below the national average.
March 11, 2014 -
Before its coal-fired units were shuttered in 2012, Duke Energy's Dan River plant burned coal from mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia. The reality that the arsenic-laden ash now contaminating a North Carolina river was once a forested mountain peak highlights the destructive lifecycle of coal.
March 10, 2014 -
Record-breaking domestic oil production is likely to swamp any effort to inject climate concerns into 2014 mid-term elections -- and could even cost Democrats the Senate.
