Detroit building officials are waging a court fight to shut down a concrete crushing operation on the city’s west side that has been covering a majority Black neighborhood in dust. The city issued nearly 300 blight tickets to Grand Rapids-based Green Valley Properties over two years, according to a BridgeDetroit analysis of online city records. […]
Environmental Justice
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Partner Content
‘What Corruption Gets You’: How Utility Companies Bought Support in the Black South
Former Florida state Rep. Joe Gibbons sat in the library of the Faith Community Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, trying to convince its pastor to quit promoting rooftop solar. With a lobbyist’s charm, Gibbons told the Rev. Nelson Johnson that rooftop solar, which allows customers to generate their own renewable electricity, was bad for people […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Partner Content
Environmentalist’s Warning About Toxic Beauty Products Allows Black Women to Own Their Health
Dereliction of Beauty: Part of a series from Inside Climate News on how lax regulation of beauty care products victimizes women of color. ICN is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here. When Heather McTeer Toney thinks about the disproportionate harms that she […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Environmental Justice, Partner Content
Public outcry against carbon capture in Louisiana growing
Communities across south Louisiana want to protect themselves from what they consider to be a risky and possibly dangerous prospect of having tons of carbon dioxide injected underground to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) — capturing the planet-warming gas from industry and storing it permanently underground — has become […]
Posted inClimate Change, Environmental Justice
Moving South, Black Americans Are Weathering Climate Change
This is the fifth installment of a yearlong Capital B series on the country’s current Black migration, the most significant movement of Black people in the U.S. in 50 years. It was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative at Wake Forest University. Stephanie Roberson wasn’t expecting this phone call from […]
Posted inAir Pollution, Climate Change, Environmental Justice
At COP28, a Growing Sense of Alarm Over Air Pollution Crisis
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. In one home video, Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah bops to a choreographed Beyoncé dance. In another, she looks at the camera, and her mom, and plants a big […]
Posted inClimate Change, Environmental Justice
Black Louisianans Grapple With a Climate Change-Denying Governor-Elect
Every 100 minutes, a football field-sized piece of Louisianan land is swallowed by rising seas. But the state, the second-Blackest in America, recently elected a governor who says that climate change is a “hoax.” Just a year removed from Louisiana’s release of its first climate action plan, Black activists fear that Republican Gov.-elect Jeff Landry […]
Posted inClimate Change, Environmental Justice
New Fed Report Outlines the Unequal Burden of Climate Change
Athens, Alabama, isn’t unique – and that’s the issue. Streetlights are nonexistent, homes aren’t connected to the city’s sewage lines, and streets are poorly maintained. But in the town, which is the third-fastest growing in Alabama, residents say this reality disproportionately impacts Black people, contributing to residents being expected to live shorter lives than 94% […]
Posted inClimate Change, Environmental Justice
Why Upgrading the Nation’s Electric Grid Is a Racial Issue
Having grown up in Minnesota, the second-coldest state in the continental United States, Mia Brooks smiled at the thought of the year-round soggy Southern heat before moving to Texas. But as climate change makes summer more oppressive nationwide, it’s made Southern winters particularly more intense. Over the past two decades, the South’s winter and spring […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice
Pollution Is Driving Today’s Reverse Great Migration
This is the fourth installment of a yearlong Capital B series on the country’s current Black migration, the most significant movement of Black people in the U.S. in 50 years. It was made possible, in part, by a grant from the Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative at Wake Forest University. ENGLEWOOD, CHICAGO — Deborah Payne’s […]