The last time the Earth experienced a July this hot was well, we don’t know for sure. Such extremes occurred long before humans began keeping records.  Two-thousand nineteen will go down as the year of climatic rage: of heat, of floods, of drought, of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric levels are the highest in three million years.

They clutter the gutters and girdle the turtles. They snag in the trees and float in the seas.  Plastic bags are strangling the planet. To reduce the amount of plastic waste in Durham, the city-county Environmental Affairs Board last week unanimously endorsed a proposed draft ordinance that would assess a 10-cent fee on most single-use plastic and paper bags, as well as Styrofoam containers, at many food and retail outlets.

Complex rules, poor coordination by regulators have allowed single property owner to put Raleigh's water supply in harm's way First, the land suffocating under 40 feet of dirt and construction trash was to become a horse pasture. But no horses ever arrived.

Levels of 1,4-Dioxane, which the EPA has linked to cancer, increased for a fourth straight month in raw water entering the Cape Fear River Authority’s Sweeney plant in Wilmington, according to the utility.

If you drive through eastern North Carolina some days, especially in the wet heat of a summer afternoon, you might become immersed in the stench of hog waste. Many farmers hail it as the smell of money. Some neighbors of the industrialized swine operations denounce it as the foul air of misery. But for Murphy-Brown and their insurance companies, the odor represents nearly $100 million in damages and legal fees from hog nuisance lawsuits that as it stands today, somebody will have to pay.

A clash between the state Department of Environmental Quality and an offshore drilling company has escalated to the federal level, with the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross potentially intervening.

Van der Vaart: supporter of Trump, critic of regulation, was in charge during some of the state's most troubled times in modern environmental history. Before Sen. Phil Berger flew to Berlin to attend the Senate Presidents' Forum earlier this month, he had to attend to an important piece of housekeeping.

Spinoff company's bombshell court filings say DuPont used cutthroat methods to dodge costs of cleaning up dangerous chemicals DuPont could have permanently stopped discharging perfluorinated compounds – PFAS – from its Fayetteville Works plant into the Cape Fear River nine years ago, but decided against it in order to foist the liability onto a spinoff company, court documents allege.

Groundwater near a coal ash repository in Chatham County has again tested high for contaminants, prompting state environmental officials to require a full assessment of the site. A former clay mine, Brickhaven lies four miles southeast of Moncure near the Lee County line.