Two graduates of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism helped write a book about how shifting politics have affected North Carolina environment and energy policy.
Turning Carolina Red: Reports From the Front of an Energy Culture War represents an innovative way of explaining energy policy in “politically-charged times,” a story with implications for the rest of the country, according to Environment & Energy Publishing.
Among the eight writers who produced the company’s first ebook are MSU graduates Hannah Northey and Amanda Peterka.

The Washington D.C. – based publisher of five daily environmental news services notes that the book combines on-the-ground reporting with political analysis, opening “with the calamitous February 2014 spill of 30,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River outside of Eden, N.C. – and the way that disaster instantly affected the political dynamic in a state that was already in the throes of major ideological change.”
It’s a complex tale, but MSU faculty agree that the publisher had at least two top-notch reporters to tell it.
Northey earned a master’s degree in journalism in 2007 while studying at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. She worked as a graduate assistant and helped build the Meeman Archives of past award-winning environmental journalism. Since leaving MSU, she has reported for the Lansing State Journal, the Ann Arbor News, Associated Press and the Daily News-Record in Virginia.
Northey is now the energy and environment reporter for E&E Publishing’s Greenwire.
She was one of five American journalists who traveled this year to Japan as a fellow with the International Center for Journalists, and she recently secured a fellowship to write about energy and environmental issues in Detroit through the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
Peterka graduated from MSU’s School of Journalism in 2009 and was named the Knight Center’s outstanding undergraduate in environmental journalism. She worked for a year at a local newspaper in New Jersey before moving to Washington, D.C. She began working at E&E Publishing while obtaining a master’s degree in environmental and natural resource policy from George Washington University.
During the past four-plus years at E&E, Peterka has covered agricultural environmental issues, biofuels, energy markets and, most recently, air quality.
E&E Daily Editor Josh Kurtz discusses the book project on video here.
More from the publisher’s description: “…The book visits different corners of the state to tell the story of what the changes Republican rule has meant on the environment and energy policy front: New obstacles for advocates of solar power; state-run center on biofuels research shuttered; popular transit projects in jeopardy of seeing their funding dry up; the possible dismantling of an air monitor across the road from a contentious proposed cement plant, and more. Finally, the book looks at the brewing controversy over the potential of hydraulic fracturing coming to North Carolina – and postulates that the debate over fracking is really just a precursor to a bigger fight to come: Over the possibility of offshore drilling in the future.”
The book is available for 99 cents on Amazon and the E & E website.