Tagged: Environment

Part One: Old Salem. Just as our country was being forged in the halls of the Continental Congress and birthed in the Revolutionary war, a group of hardy Moravian immigrants was building a settlement in the Piedmont of North Carolina. The town of Salem sprang up and still remains just outside of Winston-Salem. Today it is a living museum, a window into some of the earliest founders of our state. We’ll visit with the President of Old Salem Inc., a company devoted to the settlement and to educating North Carolinians and other visitors on life in colonial North Carolina. Follow us back in time when Charlotte Talks.

The head of a panel writing rules for natural gas fracking in North Carolina says state standards should prevail over local rules when it comes to regulating the practice.  The remarks by Jim Womack came as a study group of the North Carolina Mining and Energy Commission met Friday in Pittsboro.

Womack, the commission chair and a Lee County commissioner, said local governments should have to make a case for why their rules should be more stringent than any state standards,  The Fayetteville Observer reports.

When we think of climate change, we often think the consequences are far off. But doctors and scientists believe it is harming our health now and it will only get worse. Some of the climate's harmful effects to our health can be obvious - extreme weather events and increased temperatures. But many are less so, think asthma and allergies, even food and water borne diseases, on up to cardiovascular disease, stroke and cancer. How does climate impact our health and what can we do about it? We'll talk with people involved in educating the public about the risks of the changing climate to our health, including from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We have discussed global warming and how we can reduce our carbon footprint several times on this show but we generally focused on the debate about whether climate change is real and man-made. Our guest today, film director Peter Byck, decided to forget the debate. He simply traveled the country to meet people who were actively reducing their carbon footprint whether they believed in global warming or not. These people just think it’'s smarter to use less energy or to create it more efficiently. Byck sees these innovators and entrepreneurs as part of “Carbon Nation” and he made a film by the same name. He'’ll join us when Charlotte Talks.