Gaslighting: First in a series published in partnership with The Assembly about opposition to a wave of new natural gas pipelines, power plants and storage facilities on the drawing board in North Carolina. 

Listen to an audio version of this story below.

ROUGEMONT, N.C.—Andrea Childers ambled down a moss-covered path with Hubert, the family Corgi, leading the way. She veered onto an old logging road and arrived at the creek, which lies a mile downstream of the Moriah Energy Center site in southeastern Person County. 

This creek was a huge reason why the Childers family bought the property more than 30 years ago. It’s where the Childers sent their young daughters, now 29 and 26, to play and catch crayfish near their rustic home. It’s where she found solace after she miscarried.

Childers brought up photos on her phone taken last January showing a stream so clear it looks like glass. Now the water is brown.

In mid-August, Childers, a retired social studies teacher, her husband, Paul, and Samantha Krop, the Neuse Riverkeeper, led three people from the state Division of Water Resources’ inspection team on a walking tour of the local creeks. Krop had found turbidity levels in those leaving the Moriah Energy Center at 20 times the state standards.

“After a lot of back and forth, the state acknowledged that the sediment was coming from Dominion’s site,” Krop said, referring to the energy center’s owner. “But they said their hands are tied. You can see how we go around and around in circles here.”

“There is no arguing that this is Dominion’s pollution,” Childers said. “This is another lesson in futility.”

A half-mile away, Dominion Energy was toppling trees and blasting bedrock to build the $400 million Moriah Energy Center, where it will store liquified natural gas on 485 acres of forestland.

When finished, the MEC, as it’s known locally, would hold 50 million gallons of LNG in two pressurized tanks at temperatures of 260 degrees below zero. Each tank would be 160 feet tall and 600 feet around, roughly the circumference of a ferris wheel. 

One thousand feet above the Earth a few days later, Krop sits in the passenger seat as a retired lieutenant colonel and volunteer pilot for SouthWings, a conservation group, flies his Cessna over southern Person County.

It’s at the peak of summer, and lush forests cover the landscape in green brocade. Helena Moriah Road, sinuous and narrow, hems in the fields whose ripening rows of corn are ribbed like corduroy.

Suddenly there it is: the future factory for freezing and liquifying natural gas, now a brown scour of rubble and dirt. 

Ascend another 5,000 feet, and the rest of the fossil fuel industry’s expansive buildout would come into view: there’s Hyco Lake in northern Person County, where Duke Energy plans to build two new natural gas-fired power plants to replace the existing ones that burn coal. 

From there, Dominion’s proposed natural gas pipeline, called the T15 Reliability Project, would traverse from the new Duke plants 45 miles west to Eden, in Rockingham County. 

Near Eden, more natural gas would flow through the Southgate portion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. And finally, to the southwest an expansion of a Transco pipeline would cross 28 miles between Rockingham, Guilford, Forsyth and Davidson counties.

Add Duke’s two proposed natural gas plants in Catawba County and four compressor stations, and the result would be hundreds of thousands of tons of new greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere from North Carolina each year.

The natural gas that flows into North Carolina originates at fracking operations in the shale formations of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. At every stop of gas production—from the time the drills bore deep into the earth, to the wellhead, compressor station, liquified natural gas processing plant, transmission line and finally to kitchen stoves—methane gas, 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere, escapes into the air.

As the planet warms and America makes a fitful transition to renewable energy, the fossil fuel build-out in North Carolina mirrors similar industry endeavors across the country. North Carolina ranks fourth in the nation in planned natural gas plants over the next 11 years, according to a Sierra Club analysis of federal and state data. Big build-outs are also occurring in Texas and Indiana.

“I hear about climate change over and over again. God forbid we say why it’s occurring.”

Concerned residents, environmental groups and clean energy advocates want to stop all of these projects. 

They are worried not only about the local impacts on water, air and habitats, but also about greenhouse gas emissions and the global problem of climate change.

“I hear about climate change over and over again,” Childers said later, over a glass of cold lemonade. “God forbid we say why it’s occurring.”

Childers’ short blonde hair frames her large brown eyes, which exude a kindness that can quickly turn to fury. That’s how she looks when she faces the county officials who unanimously voted to rezone the property for the Moriah Energy Center.

“My name is Andrea Childers and I’ve lived in Person County for 31 years.”

This is how Childers introduces herself every time. 

She wants the commissioners to go to bed at night hearing her voice: “It’s the only tool I have.”

‘This Is Where It All Began’

Just over a mile from the Moriah Energy Center site lies Elderberry, a cohousing community. There, the bungalows form a semi-circle along a sandy path and face a central meeting place, the Hive. Residents take yoga classes, host Bastille Day celebrations and attend seminars on topics like “Living Rightly on the Earth.” 

 A small array of solar panels reclines in a field, near a charging station for electric cars.

In the thick August heat, cherry tomatoes dangle from the vines, the figs ripen and the crape myrtle tree greets visitors with pastel pink petals. Residents, all of whom are 55 or older, cross the courtyard, carrying potluck dishes and canisters of compost. 

Theresa Ahrens nods at a Buddhist nun, who passes by, draped in maroon robes.

“People think Elderberry is a weird hippie commune,” Ahrens said. “But it’s just 18 houses and 22 old people who want to live peacefully and in harmony.”

Ahrens and her husband, Don, now in their early 60s, have known each other since they were just 14-year-old kids in Toledo, Ohio. Their best friends, Elissa and Chuck Huffstetler, who grew up in North Carolina, live four doors down. They’ve been married 52 years. 

“We’re like sisters,” Ahrens said, “and our husbands are like brothers. We’re with people we love.”

The foursome laugh easily, with a wry sense of humor that has carried them through hard times.

The Ahrens visited Elderberry a decade ago, when only two or three homes had been built. Maybe someday we’ll live here, Theresa mused. Back in Massachusetts, she was serving as a volunteer coordinator and fundraiser for a hospice organization. Don was working in a nursing home as a physical therapist’s assistant. Then the Covid pandemic hit. Nearly a third of the patients in the nursing home died of the disease.

Elderberry, the Ahrens thought, could be a place of peace.

The Huffstetlers have long felt connected with nature. They met as seniors in high school on the inaugural Earth Day in April 1970. They joined the Back to the Land movement, which values a more sustainable way of life. The couple moved to the North Carolina mountains, lived off the grid, built their own home using salvaged materials, and grew their own food. Elissa gave birth to a son, born at home, and a daughter. 

The Huffstetlers later moved to the Charlotte area, but still volunteered with the Methodist conference each summer to build houses and churches in Guatemala. Elissa helped start a nonprofit in the city of El Sitán to provide scholarships for students.

When the Huffstetlers decided to leave Charlotte they were looking for a sense of community. They settled in Elderberry.

On a recent summer morning, Ahrens and Huffstetler, known by friends as “T and E,” had finished emptying the dishwasher at the Hive after the previous night’s community hot dog party. They reflected on their long fight against the Moriah Energy Center.

“This is where it all began,” Ahrens said, tapping on the dining room table. “I thought it would be three or four months. We didn’t know what we had stepped in.”

In September 2023, Dominion sent a notice to Elderberry notifying them of the plan—just one letter for 18 households. It arrived at the Hive, where someone had thrown it in the trash. Ahrens, thinking it was a bill, retrieved it. 

The Moriah Energy Center was coming, the letter said. But in order for Dominion to build the plant, the company needed the Person County Commissioners to rezone the property from rural conservation to general industrial. 

Ahrens and Huffstetler thought that was impossible. The county’s own zoning ordinance banned the storage of hazardous materials. And if not hazardous, what is 50 million gallons of potentially combustible liquefied natural gas?

Huffstetler sent letters and emails to county commissioners, the utilities commission, state environmental regulators and environmental groups. Ahrens and Huffstetler called every government official they could think of.

They made 1,300 postcards, inviting people to a community meeting. Huffstetler remembers the moment she dropped the cards in the mail slot: “I wondered what we had just done.”

On a warm evening last October, 70 residents filled the meeting room at the Timberlake Community Center. Ahrens started the convening with these words: “We’re here to listen.”

Over the next two hours, residents compiled a list of 250 questions about noise, air quality, the risk of explosion. They wanted to know about truck traffic. The impact on their farms and drinking water wells when Dominion siphoned 360,000 gallons of water from the aquifer for its firefighting tank.

Another 32 million gallons of water would be used to test each of the two tanks for leaks. The water could come from Roxboro City Lake, which is 18 miles away. If it’s shipped by truck, that would require more than 3,400 tankers transported on narrow, winding roads popular with bicyclists. 

They wanted to know more details about Dominion’s pending sale of the site to the Canadian company Enbridge. It is the largest transmitter of crude oil and natural gas in North America and has an uneven safety record.

Most residents who spoke with Ahrens and Huffstetler opposed the project. Several believed that if the company and the county just listened to residents’ concerns, they’d understand. Surely, they wouldn’t build a giant LNG plant near farms and within a half mile of people’s homes.

In hindsight, Ahrens and Huffstetler were naive. “I thought, ‘Of course we can stop this,’” Ahrens said recently. “It’s a democracy.’”

But emails obtained under the state records law show that Dominion, three months earlier in July 2023, was ready to publicly announce the project in tandem with local officials, including Gordon Powell, the county commission chairman, and Phillip Allen, head of the Economic Development Commission. 

“We really appreciate your endorsement,” wrote Rosemary Wyche, a public affairs consultant for Dominion. 

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“This is wonderful as well as exciting news for Person County!!” Allen emailed back, adding: “We welcome this project!!”

“Thank you Phillip,” replied Wyche. “We look forward to building a strong corporate presence.”

LNG Regulation: Rife With Loopholes

Last December, more than 350 people crammed into the Person County auditorium, where opponents of the Moriah Energy Center testified for more than two hours. 

The commissioners took just 20 seconds to unanimously vote to rezone the property.

Andrea Childers began chanting. Others chimed in: “Shame, shame, shame!”

Powell, the county commission chairman, turned to a sheriff’s deputy: “Get them out of here.”

Since then, Dominion has clear-cut 74 acres of the property for the plant itself. The balance of the land property, 411 acres, serves as an “exclusion zone,” a forested safety buffer in case of a major gas leak or fire.

The company doesn’t have to file a risk management plan because LNG plants like the Moriah Energy Center are considered stationary sources, and their safety matters aren’t regulated by the EPA. Instead, they are under the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Katie Moore is an independent air quality researcher. She is in her mid 30s, dark-haired and radiates a quiet warmth. Moore grew up in Durham, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then received a master’s degree in environmental public health from the University of Michigan. She has worked with communities harmed by fossil fuel and petrochemical companies, like neighborhoods in Houston and in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley. 

Now she lives in uptown Roxboro, a dozen miles from the Moriah Energy Center, and is engaged in a long-term battle on behalf of her community.

“The fact that Dominion doesn’t think it needs a risk management plan is very concerning,” Moore said. A stack of paperwork rested on her kitchen table; two cats napped nearby. “Without one, we’re taking them at their word.”

Dominion spokesperson Persida Montanez said the “emergency reporting” that is required is comparable to the EPA’s risk management program. Both require emergency response plans.

But according to the EPA, a risk management program is more comprehensive and “goes beyond emergency planning and reporting.” It includes a hazard assessment, as well as programs for prevention, emergency response and management.

While the county has a temporary emergency communications plan, County Commissioner Powell said, it does not have a specific emergency response plan for the Moriah Energy Center.

Montanez pointed to Dominion’s safety record at its LNG plants in Cary and Magna, Utah, as examples of the company’s ability to “build and operate LNG facilities safely and reliably.”

Yet accidents do happen at LNG plants. Since 2011, 22 incidents have been reported to PHMSA. In 2022, a methane leak caused an explosion at an LNG facility in Freeport, Texas. No one was killed or injured, but the plant didn’t operate for several months. Federal investigators attributed the explosion to human error.

In North Carolina, an LNG plant in Huntersville owned by Piedmont Natural Gas, a Duke Energy subsidiary, contaminated several drinking water wells with benzene and trichloroethylene, or TCE, in 2008. 

State environmental regulators intervened and required the company to excavate more than 7,000 tons of contaminated soil. But state records show the groundwater is still tainted. Neighbors, some of whom lived as close as a quarter-mile away, are now connected to a public water supply.

“It’s concerning,” Moore said. “And if you’re in a community that doesn’t want a facility like this, there’s not a lot of options for you.”

No Impacts to Wetlands or Streams? 

The buffet at the Golden Corral brimmed with steaming vats of sausage, gravy, eggs and grits, flanked by trays of bacon, biscuits and toast. Men and women clad in business attire clustered toward the front of the room, while about 60 people, some with children in tow and wearing jeans, tennis shoes and work boots, sat in booths and at tables.

It was mid-April, and the Roxboro Area Chamber of Commerce was hosting a public information meeting about the Moriah Energy Center. Dominion had deployed a spokesperson, Julia Wright, to give a presentation.

At one point, Wright broached the topic of water.

“There will be minimal or no impacts to wetlands or streams,” Wright said.

An upswell of laughter rippled through the room.

“Not true!” someone said.

For several months local residents and Krop, the Neuse Riverkeeper, had photographed the wedges of sludge entering creeks from breached sediment basins at the Moriah Energy Center property. 

The crowd pelted Dominion with questions.

“No questions,” interrupted Jody Blackwell, the chamber’s board chairman. 

The meeting ended.

All spring, Krop continued to document damage to the waterways downstream of the site. She sampled several creeks and found turbidity levels far above the state maximum. 

High levels of turbidity in waterways can suffocate fish and other aquatic habitats. Contaminants like bacteria and chemicals can hitchhike on the dirt particles, further polluting waterways and drinking water supplies.

On a humid Sunday morning in early June, Krop, several university scientists and a dozen neighbors donned their waders and tiptoed through a clean portion of a stream off Potluck Farm Road. Shadow, a rescue goat who lives on a nearby farm, watched from the bank. 

They peeked under rocks and used small nets to sift the leaves from the crayfish, caddisflies and other indicators of stream health.

“It’s alive,” someone yelled, as they poked a crayfish. 

Originally from Florida, Krop was unfazed by the insects, heat and wet feet. A short, athletic woman with shoulder-length brown hair, Krop is also the director of advocacy at Sound Rivers. She spends her days surveilling the waterways and educating people about the 6,200-square-mile Neuse River basin, whose headwater streams start near the Moriah Energy Center. 

Krop routinely forwards her sampling results to the state Division of Water Resources, which has acknowledged the presence of the sediment. 

Yet the state hasn’t penalized Dominion because of another loophole. As long as the company is complying with its sedimentation and erosion plan, and properly using and maintaining “approved best management practices,” a DWR spokesperson wrote via email, it is not violating state rules.

“We were lulled into a fake sense of security.”

Based on the design of the project, federal officials determined there wouldn’t be “direct impacts” to waterways and wetlands, said Shannon Deaton, chief of the Habitat Conservation Division for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.

The commission conducted a routine survey of nearby Deep Creek in the spring and found “a diverse community of freshwater mussels,” including the endangered Atlantic pigtoe, Deaton said. So far, the commission “has not observed any short-term impacts.”

However, additional sediment to Deep Creek, Deaton cautioned, “especially over time, could be a concern to our agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife, regarding the health of these species.” 

Dominion’s Montanez said the company recently implemented “additional measures above and beyond what’s required to help us with heavy rainfall events in future.”

Montanez didn’t explain why the company is only now installing barriers to keep sediment from the streams, adding only that “we want to be good neighbors.”

Andrea Childers is skeptical. On a recent airless afternoon, she soaked outside her home in a metal stock tank, her version of a swimming pool, among the beehives and blueberry bushes, and a cucumber patch that this year she and her husband, Paul, have surrendered to the slugs. Suddenly, Childers heard a loud boom, boom in the near distance and thought at first that it might have been thunder. But then she realized it was Dominion Energy blasting through rock.

“We were lulled into a fake sense of security,” Childers said later. “We thought we’d live out in the woods. We won’t bother anyone and no one will bother us.”

Dominion’s Case for LNG

Hager’s Mountain in northern Person County is at least 300 million years old, its quartz outcrop protruding like a canine tooth. The 2,800-acre Mayo Lake, the vineyards and forests and billowing hills: What Person County lacks in economic drivers fueling nearby Durham and Raleigh—life sciences, biotech and major universities—it makes up for in natural beauty.  

Three-quarters of Person County’s 392 square miles is rural. And it’s the rural character that county commissioners defended two years ago when they passed an ordinance prohibiting solar farms of more than 100 acres.

But county commissioners had no such hesitation in rezoning land for the Moriah Energy Center. Elected officials and economic development advocates have long tied the county’s economic prospects to the fossil fuel industry. 

The Moriah Energy Center is expected to generate $800,000 in annual tax revenue for Person County over 25 years. That’s equivalent to about 1 percent of the county’s annual budget. 

The center would create 12 jobs, none of which are guaranteed to go to local residents.

The Moriah Energy Center is a “peak-shaving” facility. During periods of high demand, such as on cold winter days, Dominion says it will tap into the tanks, vaporize the gas and ship it through existing pipelines on the property and onward to businesses and homes.

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Once the LNG is released from the Moriah Energy Center’s tanks, it would flow through the Dominion system. The company serves only a small portion of Person County, and the gas is most needed in Wake, Durham and other fast-growing counties, a region where the company says it is adding 15,000 new customers per year.

Dominion explained to the state Utilities Commission that the Moriah Energy Center is essential to averting another crisis like the one that occurred during Winter Storm Elliott in 2022. A severe cold snap on Christmas Eve froze equipment at power plants. Natural gas limped through the pipelines because of low pressure. The Eastern Interconnection Grid was on the verge of collapse. 

In November 2023, a report published by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. concluded that the recurring failures make clear that America’s natural gas infrastructure and electric grid continue to be severely challenged during extreme cold weather events.

Rose Jackson, Dominion’s director of fuel commodities, told the state Utilities Commission last year that the company was “unable to deliver quantities of peaking supply and off-system storage as planned,” and had to tap into a smaller LNG plant in Cary.

It’s become more difficult to acquire gas during peak demand, Jackson said. “There’s more competition” for the gas, “which is one of the reasons we want our own LNG facility.”

Hope Taylor is the executive director of the advocacy group Clean Water for North Carolina and lives in nearby Granville County, where she raises dairy goats. After a career in biomedical research, she has worked with community organizers to defeat, delay or mitigate environmentally harmful projects: 

Coal ash ponds. Fracking. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which Dominion and Duke canceled in 2020. Now she’s focused on the natural gas industry in North Carolina.

“It’s part of a major natural gas strategy that will directly and indirectly worsen climate impacts.”

Taylor told state officials at a public hearing that the Moriah Energy Center is “driven by economic interests,” rather than by reliability issues or inadequate gas supplies.

When a utility builds new infrastructure—a power plant, pipeline or LNG facility—it can charge its customers for those construction costs, as well as a guaranteed profit margin, with state utilities commission approval. The more money utilities spend on big projects, the more money they make as they reap financial returns on their investments.

“It’s part of a major natural gas strategy that will directly and indirectly worsen climate impacts,” including failing to meet the state’s reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions, Taylor said. “The Moriah Energy Center is unfit to meet the purpose of reliability and presents unjustifiable risks to the community forced to host it.”

Dominion’s Montanez said in response that the Moriah Energy Center “is a commonsense storage solution that is in the best interest of the customers.”

The Air Pollution Permit

In August, amber rays of evening sunlight streamed through the long windows at Mt. Tirzah United Methodist Church, a white, one-story sanctuary that sits in front of a cemetery near Rougemont. In the foyer, residents sold T-shirts, emblazoned with “No MEC” and an illustration of a Neuse River waterdog. A local farmer brought a flat of free tomatoes. 

Inside, Moore, the air quality researcher, led residents as they prepared their talking points for an upcoming public hearing on the facility’s air permit. If they can’t overturn the zoning decision by suing the county commissioners, they hope to prevail upon state regulators to deny or at least strengthen the air permit.

Dominion estimates the plant will emit more than 64,800 tons of greenhouse gases. Ninety-five tons of carbon monoxide. Fifty-nine tons of volatile organic compounds, including formaldehyde, a carcinogen. Forty tons of other harmful pollutants.

Every year.

These projections are based on Dominion’s own modeling and could be inaccurate. Several other LNG plants, such as one in Freeport, Texas, have underestimated their emissions by as much as 20 times.

State regulations allow the company to self-report the actual amounts. Even then, Dominion would rarely have to disclose them.

Shawn Taylor, spokesman for the Division of Air Quality, said LNG facilities that hold the type of permit Dominion is seeking—a synthetic minor—don’t have to submit an emissions inventory to the state until the permit permanently expires or when it’s renewed. 

By installing additional emissions controls, Dominion wants to avoid the Moriah Energy Center being designated as a major pollution source, an expensive and time-consuming process.

However, the estimated amount of carbon monoxide emissions comes close: If the Moriah Energy Center were to emit 100 tons over 12 consecutive months, that would be enough to push it into major source territory.

When Dominion finally does submit its emissions inventory, the company won’t have to list its greenhouse gas emissions to the Division of Air Quality because state rules don’t require LNG plants to report them.

Federal rules would require Dominion to report its greenhouse gas emissions to the EPA, based on current estimates.

Montanez said Dominion MEC was “intentionally designed to minimize emissions to the greatest extent possible in accordance with related permits.” But based on current estimates, if the Moriah Energy Center operates for 30 years, as expected, it will have emitted nearly 2 million tons of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of burning 2 billion pounds of coal. Meanwhile, Dominion says it wants to achieve net-zero emissions for methane and carbon dioxide by mid-century.

The Hearing

Two weeks after the community meeting at Mt. Tirzah United Methodist, the Division of Air Quality, reportedly unable to find a meeting space in Person County, held the public hearing two counties and 25 miles away at Vance-Granville Community College. 

A half dozen state officials took notes as 39 people spoke. Everyone, except for a person who worked in the natural gas industry, pleaded with state regulators to require Dominion to pay for independent, third-party air monitoring, especially for formaldehyde, both before the facility starts and afterward. 

“These chemicals cause cancer,” said Jill Hoffman, whose property is 1,800 feet from the site. She has a doctorate in toxicology and worked at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, where she studied how chemicals damage DNA and cause liver cancer. “Knowing what is in our air is important. This is the fox watching the henhouse.” 

Formaldehyde is a carcinogen, according to the EPA, and is produced when natural gas is flared. Dominion’s own modeling shows that formaldehyde emissions from the Moriah Energy Center would reach 77 percent of the state’s acceptable ambient levels, leaving very little room for error.

“Put yourself in our shoes and what we’ve been through,” said Alan Booker, who is 76 and lives in Rougemont. “Consider the political and industrial goliaths versus us, the taxpaying individuals. We are being bludgeoned by the dynamics. We are living with our hearts in our mouths.” 

“You who are working at DAQ have loved ones and family,” Ahrens said. “We are concentrating on differences now. Let’s focus on what connects us: breathing clean air and drinking clean water. DAQ, you can be the hero of this story. You can make us safe for generations. We are counting on you.” 

Gathering Storm

Autumn is approaching. The sycamores, maples and oaks bare their boughs, leaving the loblolly pines in charge. Farmers in Person County will pick their soybeans and wind down their harvest of tobacco and corn. 

Construction of the Moriah Energy Center will continue, with its beeping and blasting. Barring the unexpected, it could begin operating as early as 2027. While residents feel largely resigned to its inevitability, they still hope their comments can alter how the facility is built, under what conditions, and by whom. 

This fall the Division of Air Quality is expected to decide whether to grant Dominion’s air permit. Rarely does the division deny permit applications outright, but it has occasionally strengthened them based on public comments.

By the end of the year the state Utilities Commission is scheduled to rule on Dominion’s proposed sale of Public Service of North Carolina to Enbridge. If the deal is approved, Enbridge would take over construction and operation of the Moriah Energy Center. Once complete, Enbridge could also petition the utilities commission to raise customer rates to help pay for the construction. 

And in November, a judge will hear the county’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by several residents against the commissioners over the rezoning decision. The residents allege the commissioners violated their own zoning ordinance by allowing hazardous materials to be located on the Moriah Energy Center property, and failed to comply with public notice requirements.

The past year has been a new and sometimes daunting challenge for Andrea Childers, Theresa Ahrens and Elissa Huffstettler. Though they’d all chosen their own fiercely independent paths in life, environmental activism—and certainly taking on big, powerful companies—was new to them. 

They’d never galvanized an intergenerational movement of people who, until this year, had never spoken at a public hearing, never written a letter to the editor, never signed a petition. But with help from environmental groups, they’d done all that, and they weren’t finished.

One afternoon in August, Ahrens and Huffstetler took a break from preparing for the couples’ camping trip to Canada. They rested in rocking chairs outside, sacks of groceries slumped at their feet.

“It’s been a good journey for me,” Huffstetler said. “It’s been good to see young women live and breathe what they do.” 

Ahrens has become more jaded, but in some ways, also felt uplifted. “I’ve met the most amazing people,” she said. 

Moore, the air quality researcher more acquainted with the activist’s life, was headed to Houston for a week, where she would help communities discover what pollutants lurk in the Texas air. When she returns to Person County, she’ll prepare for another round of community organizing around the proposed pipelines and the natural gas plants. 

“It feels like the more we express our concerns, the more pushback we get,” she said, backlit by the sun diffusing through her kitchen windows. “It’s really painful to experience, to go through nine months of the process, to be strung along. It’s so emotional.”

The Person County Commissioners will continue to meet, although with a different lineup. Gordon Powell is retiring; Charlie Palmer lost his bid for re-election.

“It feels like the more we express our concerns, the more pushback we get.”

Regardless, Childers will be there, with a familiar refrain: “My name is Andrea Childers and I’ve lived in Person County for 31 years.”

Come November, it will be 32.

But perhaps not 33. She and Paul are thinking of selling their home. Maybe buy an RV, load up Hubert and the cat, Izzy , and travel.

Leave behind the mess on Helena Moriah Road, but also the cucumber patch and the blueberry bushes. And the creek, which over time might heal itself and again run so clear that it looks like glass. 

A Democratic group has released new audio of North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is running for governor, saying that he wants to get abortion restrictions down to “zero” weeks. 

In the audio, which the group said was recorded on Sept. 3 at a Robinson campaign event in Troy, N.C., a woman asked Robinson about his stance on abortion and why he was supporting North Carolina’s current 12-week ban on the procedure. 

Robinson replied by saying, “That 12 weeks, exceptions for rape and incest … I’m not going to say it’s reasonable. But my faith allows me to live with that, because that’s where the consensus is. Do I want to continue to lower it? You better know it. I would love to get down to six weeks. And I’d like to get down to zero. I would like to push it back as far as we could and eliminate as many abortions as we can.”

“We can’t do it all at once,” he added. “The Democrats started off with Roe v. Wade, then moved to ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ Then they got to where? Nine months in the womb. They did that over 50 years. … And we can do it.”

The recording, which was shared with NBC News, was published by the Mark Robinson War Room, a project of the North Carolina Democratic Leadership Committee, which is backed by the Democratic Governors Association. The group said it was established for the “sole purpose of holding Lt. Governor Mark Robinson accountable for his toxic record and dangerous agenda for North Carolina.” Robinson is running against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

Publicly, Robinson has stood behind allowing current restrictions in North Carolina to stand. The lieutenant governor acknowledged in a TV ad earlier this year that his wife had an abortion 30 years ago and offered support for the current abortion restrictions in North Carolina, which limit the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.

But Robinson is advocating for measures that go further. He made similar comments at a campaign event in February, saying, “We’ve got it down to 12 weeks, the next goal is to get it down to six, and then just keep moving from there,” referring to abortion, a local Fox News affiliate reported.

In the audio shared with NBC News, Robinson also told the woman that he has not changed his stance on abortion “at all” and that “there’s no reason why an abortion should happen ever.”

“I’m 100% for life, and that’s how I think it should be. If I’m a pastor in the pulpit, that’s what I’m preaching. If I’m counseling someone, a young lady, a couple, that’s what I’m telling them. I’m telling them, ‘Choose life for your child,’” he added. 

Robinson then explained that he was not a pastor, and that as an elected official he needed to work with the consensus.

“Now a lot of people say, ‘Well, that’s changing your position. That’s giving up your conviction.’ Not it’s not,” Robinson said. “You got to be an elected official. You have to be mature enough in your faith to watch people do things that you disagree with and allow them to do it because we don’t live in a theocracy. If we have politicians who start running the country like they run their church, then we end up like Iran. That’s not how this country was formed.”

Stein has been an outspoken supporter of abortion rights and has vowed to defend access to the procedure. 

When asked about the comments Robinson made about taking abortions down to “zero,” Mike Lonergan, the communications director for Robinson’s campaign, sent a written statement. 

“Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is pro-life because of the painful and difficult experience he and his wife had, and his faith,” Lonergan said in the statement. “By supporting taxpayer-funded, late-term abortion on demand, Kamala Harris and Josh Stein are extreme and out of step with North Carolina voters. They are using the same playbook that failed here in 2022, and it’ll fail again in 2024.” 

“The legislature has already spoken on this issue,” Lonergan added. “As governor, Mark Robinson will work to make North Carolina a destination for life by building a culture that does more to support women and families, including bolstering adoption, as well as foster and childcare.”

The North Carolina State Board of Education has taken a significant step forward by advancing a proposal to permit public school students in grades six through twelve to profit from their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL). This initiative follows a lawsuit initiated by the mother of Faizon Brandon, a top high school football recruit.

A stark disparity exists: while private school athletes in North Carolina can capitalize on NIL opportunities, their public school counterparts have been left without such options. This inequity is particularly pronounced given that around 40 states have already enacted various NIL regulations for grade-school athletes. The proposed rules aim to rectify this imbalance, allowing public school athletes the opportunity for equitable compensation through public appearances, autograph signings, social media endorsements, and hosting sports camps.

Braly Keller, Director of NIL with Opendorse, anticipates a significant uptick in NIL deals following the proposed rule change. “I certainly think whenever there’s a rule change, we see an immediate influx of deals. Someone wants to race to be the first athlete in the state to have done an NIL deal,” said Keller. He points out that North Carolina ranks among the top 15 states nationally for NIL spending, which accounts for approximately 5% of the overall market. This influx of opportunities could provide financial benefits to the athletes and enhance their visibility and marketability early on.

However, the proposed rules have a structured framework to guide young athletes through this new landscape. Students and their parents must complete an NIL education course and submit forms for each NIL deal to school administrators. This regulatory oversight is intended to ensure that athletes remain focused on their sports while navigating the complexities of financial opportunities. Former NCAA Division I basketball player Jared Grady emphasizes the necessity of maintaining that focus: “High-school athletes, middle-school athletes, they’re young. And making big-time decisions when it comes to money, it can definitely deter their ultimate goal to actually be something more, whether that’s inside basketball, outside basketball, college (or) pro.”

The proposed rules also incorporate specific limitations on endorsements, prohibiting athletes from promoting alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, controlled substances, vaping products, gambling, weapons, and adult services. These restrictions are designed to safeguard young athletes from potential pitfalls while allowing them to explore legitimate avenues for monetization.

As the proposed rules enter a public comment period from October until early December, anticipation builds for a final vote expected in January. If approved, these rules could take effect on July 1, 2025, marking a pivotal moment for high school athletes in North Carolina. The ability to monetize their talents could not only provide financial support but also empower young athletes to take control of their futures in a way that has previously been denied to them.