Asia

"Coal-fired power plants have propelled much of China’s economic rise for decades, helping make the nation the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. Even with economic growth slackening, and other energy sources taking hold, new coal plants have been added. Now Beijing is trying to slow things down."

"China's quest to fence off a big chunk of the South China Sea may have just gotten another, powerful boost: plans for a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that could provide huge amounts of electricity for the far-flung atolls and islets."

"Vietnam said on Thursday it was investigating whether pollution is to blame for a spate of mysterious mass fish deaths along the country’s central coast after huge amounts of marine life washed ashore in recent days."

"More than 100 people are feared dead in India in an early-summer heat wave which forced schools to close and halted outdoor work like construction, government officials said on Thursday."

"Nuclear catastrophe is always an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries, albeit in a perverse fashion, are animals,  which tend to flourish in areas humans evacuate. This has certainly been the case for wild boars around Fukushima, which have multiplied so rapidly, they’ve become a problem for neighboring towns."

"President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China said Thursday that they would sign the Paris Agreement on climate change on April 22, the first day the United Nations accord will be open for government signatures."

"Five years ago today a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan unleashed a powerful, 30-foot-high tsunami that swept across the landscape, killing 15,000 people, displacing nearly 400,000 others, and triggering one of the worst nuclear disasters in history — a triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant."

"Japan on Friday marked the fifth anniversary of the 2011 tsunami that killed more than 18,000 people and left a devastated coastline along the country's northeast that has still not been fully rebuilt."

"A court in Japan ordered one of only two nuclear power plants operating in the country to shut down on Wednesday, citing insufficient safety measures put in place after meltdowns at a facility in Fukushima five years ago."

"Greenpeace East Asia said on Wednesday that China had a total of 210 coal power projects in the pipeline"for environmental assessment permitting at the end of 2015, despite overcapacity in the industry and pollution concerns."