The celebration of Black History Month calls for us to reflect on how experiences and history for Black liberation have shaped our present and future. To highlight the invaluable groundwork Black individuals have laid for the environmental and climate movement, each week this month CleanAIRE NC will be highlighting Black leaders at the intersections of...

by Darya Silchenko Last week Darya Silchenko (The National University of Ireland, Galway) traveled to Glasgow to attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, a.k.a. COP26. She shares her reflections from the conference with CleanAIRE NC here as a guest author. My observations of COP26 began as soon as I landed at the Glasgow...

by Nancy LaPlaca Power plants waste 65% of their energy. Cars waste even more. The fossil-fueled cars we drive today are extremely inefficient. What does that mean? It means that 70-80% of the energy in the gasoline that you put into your car doesn’t do any work, it doesn’t move a car an inch. Instead,...

by Nancy LaPlaca The Age of Consequences for so-called ‘externalities’ has arrived – but what is an externality? In the jargon of economists, an externality is a cost (or benefit) to a third party who did not agree to it. Air pollution is a classic externality. For example, power plant owners or car manufacturers don’t...

by Bill Schlesinger Each day we breathe more than 10 cubic meters of air—more if we are exercising—so it stands to reason that stuff in the air can enter our body in large quantities.  One of the pollutants of current focus is fine particulate matter, expressed in micrograms per cubic meter.  The US Environmental Protection...

by Joel Porter and Andrew Rasetti The North Carolina House of Representatives has passed legislation that is supposedly in response to climate change; in reality, it would derail our state’s transition to a clean energy economy. The bill, HB 951, fails to even mention the words ‘climate change.’ It does, however, acknowledge that the economic...