Beijing is making great strides to ramp up renewable energy - at least on paper - and recent weeks have been especially encouraging.
Energy policy in China has reached a turning point. Clean energy, recent comments and actions suggest, is moving centre stage in response to shifting national interests and global responsibilities.
China's new target for solar power has global implications for a world struggling with climate change.
Confusion, ambivalence and conflict over the global climate were never so clear as in Warsaw this month. As the caravan of the UN climate change negotiations came to rest in the Polish capital, sponsors assured negotiators that clean coal could power a prosperous future while across the city, the host government coincidentally convened a coal industry summit.
An urgent hunt is under way across Scandinavia for the culprit causing testicular cancer rates 10 times the global mean. Scientists suspect a man-made substance or interaction between substances which disrupts hormones, possibly before birth.
Laos is building the Xayaburi hydroelectric dam to block the Mekong, despite promising its neighbours that share the river it would not. The dam will irreversibly change the nature of the river already under stress from several dams upstream in Yunnan. Cambodia and Vietnam, which lie downstream, pleaded for delay, to no avail, at a recent meeting of the Mekong River Commission, a think tank in all but name.
