Environment

The World Trade Organization has set up a panel to probe China's rare-earth export policies, a widely expected move following requests by the U.S., the European Union and Japan, the trade body said in a report on its website Tuesday.The trade...

For a capital city unusual, and perhaps unique, in being situated neither on a coastline nor along the banks of a big river, Beijing has been under water a lot of late. Violent summer rainstorms flooded the city in June of last year, overwhelming...

Xinhua reported on Monday morning that the death toll after torrential rains pounded Beijing on Saturday had climbed to 37. The report said that “Among the victims, 25 were drowned, six were killed in house collapses, one...

An effort by one city (the world’s 19th most populous metropolitan area, with 12.5 million people) led to emissions reductions that, if made permanent and multiplied by 360, would be enough to avoid the concentrations of greenhouse gases that could...

The Chinese capital's heaviest rainstorm in six decades killed at least 37 people, flooded streets and stranded 80,000 people at the main airport, state media and the government said on Sunday.

The average Chinese person's carbon footprint is now almost on a par with the average European's, figures released on Wednesday reveal. China became the largest national emitter of CO2 in 2006, though its emissions per person have always...

That explosive increase in coal use came not from the developed world, where demand is plateauing, but from the developing world, where the fuel remains the cheapest, most reliable source of electricity. This year, the market in globally traded coal...

Even as the Weibo account of the U.S. consulate in Shanghai was shut down, the fight for blue skies has continued to gain momentum. There’s the China Air Daily website, which posts pictures and air quality data in cities across the country. But lest...

Hurtling beneath the ground, there are sturdy new subways coursing through every major urban center of China like an electric current of modernity. The country's rapid urbanization in a matter of mere decades has produced engineering marvels...

It was with a mix of trepidation and anticipation that I read Dambisa Moyo’s newly-released book, “Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What it Means for the World”: trepidation because my colleague Michael Levi and I are currently...

LOCAL legend has it that the beauty of the grasslands in Xilin Gol, a prefecture in eastern Inner Mongolia, so captivated the 13th-century warrior Genghis Khan that he planned to settle down there once his battles were over. He might be less...

The report said that 30 percent of rivers in eastern Guangdong are polluted, threatening the health of people who live along their banks. Guangdong, with a population of 104 million people, has China’s largest economy and is one of the world’s...

China has long been known as a place where the world’s dirtiest mines and factories can operate with impunity. Those days may not be over, but a growing environmental movement is beginning to make the most polluting projects much harder to build and...

China said Tuesday that it would prohibit official banquets from serving shark fin soup, a pricey and popular delicacy blamed for a sharp decline in global shark populations.

A municipal government in southwestern China has suspended at least temporarily the construction of a metals factory after bloody street protests on Monday, in the latest sign of the growing strength of the country’s environmental movement.

China’s environmental story is full of contradictions. What does one make of a country where the government severely limits the freedom of NGOs, yet has some of the most thorough environmental laws and most sustainably-minded leadership in the world...

Beijing's Food Safety Administration said Thursday that it accused Wal-Mart of violating food-safety standards in March by selling sesame oil exceeding standard amounts of benzopyrene and squid containing hazardous levels of cadmium. The agency...

To understand this industrial Chinese city's past, begin with the smoldering crater on the south side of town, an open-pit coal mine as wide as Manhattan and deeper than the height of the Chrysler Building. Known as Haizhou, or "Sea State...

Let’s go ahead and state the obvious: It will be impossible to hash out any sort of global agreement on climate change if we can’t even agree on how much carbon-dioxide different countries are actually putting into the air.Yet the data on...

High above one of the world's busiest and most congested city streets, urban apiarist Michael Leung runs his crusade for conscious local food, documented in Virgile Simon Bertrand’s inspiring photographs. Leung founded HK Honey as a way of...

This is another fascinating installment in the exercise of Chinese "soft power." For my Big Theory on the nature of Chinese soft power, see this essay and this book. For a few previous installments in the Soft-Power Watch, see this, this,...

China told foreign embassies Tuesday to stop publishing their own reports on air quality in the country, escalating its objections to a popular U.S. Embassy Twitter feed that tracks pollution in smoggy Beijing. Only the Chinese government is...

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist told Reuters.

“Sandstorms can actually be called ‘coal dust storms’,” says current Greenpeace Climate and Energy Campaigner Sun Qingwei, previously a government scientist based in the western province of Gansu.

When ecologist Xie Yan heard about the Natural Heritage Conservation Act, she knew she had to kill it. So she wrote a letter. The open letter, posted on February 5 to Xie’s blog, became the focus of a story the next day at one of China’s most...

The Obama Administration’s preliminary decision to impose a 31 per cent tariff on solar panels imported from China is short sighted. The move could cause a trade war, hurt the US economy, jeopardize US security interests, and put the world further...

Ruihua Old Popsicle, which sells around 50,000 units per day for 1 yuan each, mostly in tourist sites, contains bacteria 1,767 times higher than that stipulated in the national standards for cold beverages, according to the Beijing News.

While the margins are not as high as those seen in many previous U.S.-China antidumping cases (electrical blankets, steel grating), they are certainly much higher than Chinese manufacturers would have hoped for.