OIL & GAS: Memphis, Tennessee, residents speak out against the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plans to build new natural gas facilities in a part of the city long subject to environmental racism that houses existing gas facilities, arsenic pollution from coal ash, an oil refinery and a disproportionate share of active Superfund sites. (WPLN)

EMISSIONS: Texas regulators quietly propose maintaining the state’s target cancer-risk level for air pollution permits, which has been criticized by scientists and health advocates because it fails to account for cumulative air pollution in communities exposed simultaneously to many sources of industrial emissions. (Texas Tribune)

SOLAR: 

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Complaints among communities in Alabama’s “Black Belt” about the state’s wastewater treatment move them to the forefront of a landmark federal environmental justice case that could establish sanitation access as a civil right. (NPR)

STORAGE: Ford’s hesitation to pay top union wages at planned electric vehicle battery plants in union-hostile Kentucky and Tennessee looms over the United Auto Workers’ expanding strike, even as the automaker announces it will give raises to workers at those plants. (Associated Press, TechCrunch)

CLIMATE: 

HYDROGEN: The Biden administration announces the location of seven proposed “hydrogen hubs,” including one in northern Appalachia and one on the Texas Gulf Coast. (The Hill)

CARBON CAPTURE: Louisiana residents raise concern about a company’s plan to build a facility to capture emissions from a coal plant and store them underground in saline formations. (KALB)

NUCLEAR: Georgia Power will pay $413 million to settle a dispute over who should pay for cost overruns for the long-delayed expansion of its nuclear Plant Vogtle. (Associated Press)

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: 

COMMENTARY: West Virginians in favor of solar power should speak out against state utilities’ push to weaken net metering policies, writes a solar advocate. (Charleston Gazette-Mail)

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Mason has worked as a journalist since 2001, covering Appalachian communities and the issues that affect them. He compiles the Southeast Energy News digest. Mason previously worked as a wildlife biologist before moving into journalism by freelancing at Coast Weekly in Monterey, California, before taking an internship in 2001 at High Country News. He wrote for the Enterprise Mountaineer in western North Carolina and the Roanoke Times in western Virginia before going freelance in 2012. His work has appeared in Southerly, Daily Yonder, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, WVPB’s Inside Appalachia and elsewhere. Mason was born and raised in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and now lives with his family and a small herd of goats in Floyd County, Virginia.