Category: RT Newswire

USE ME! Essentially, this is a catch all for everything. This is probably the ONLY category where things that are not directly related to Rising Tide affiliates/allies should go. For example if a coal company goes out of business (and we didn’t directly cause it) it should probably only go here.

Tropical Cyclone Punds Mayanmar; Over 350 Dead

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-Over 350 dead as cyclone pounds Myanmar
Sun May 4, 2008 4:00pm EDT 
Cyclone devastates Myanmar

Myanmar damage will take days to assess: U.N.
3:48am EDT By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) – A cyclone killed more than 350 people in military-ruled Myanmar, ripping through Yangon and the Irrawaddy delta where it flattened at least two towns, officials and state media said on Sunday.

The death toll is likely to climb as the authorities manage to contact outlying islands and villages that felt the full force of Cyclone Nagris, a Category 3 storm packing winds of 120 miles per hour when it hit early on Saturday.

State television, which was still off air in Yangon more than 36 hours after Nagris slammed into the city of 5 million, reported 20,000 homes destroyed on one island alone, a government official in the remote capital, Naypyidaw, said.

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Canada: Small Energy Plants Key to Efficiency

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Small ethanol plants key to efficiency: Canada
Fri May 2, 2008 5:48pm EDT By Randall Palmer

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Building more and smaller ethanol plants could help overcome concerns that production of the biofuel consumes more in energy than it provides, Canadian Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said on Friday.

One of the reasons so much energy is used to make ethanol is that trucks travel long distances carrying corn, chaff or other plant material to ethanol plants.

“Smaller and locally owned I think are the right way to go,” Ritz said as he kicked off debate in the House of Commons on the final stage of a bill that would ensure that gasoline contains 5 percent ethanol by 2010.

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UN Urges Biofuel Investment Halt

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UN urges biofuel investment halt 
 
Palm oil is one of the biofuel crops stirring controversy.

The UN’s new top adviser on food has urged a freeze on biofuel investment, saying the blind pursuit of the policy is “irresponsible”.

Olivier de Schutter also wants curbs on investors whose speculation is, he says, driving food prices higher.

UN officials liken the rise in food prices to a silent tsunami, threatening 100 million of the world’s poorest.

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Climate Change Warming Arctic, Cooling Antarctic

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Climate change warms Arctic, cools Antarctica
Fri May 2, 2008 5:07pm EDT  By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Arctic and Antarctica are poles apart when it comes to the effects of human-fueled climate change, scientists said on Friday: in the north, it is melting sea ice, but in the south, it powers winds that chill things down.

The North and South poles are both subject to solar radiation and rising levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases, the researchers said in a telephone briefing. But Antarctica is also affected by an ozone hole hovering high above it during the austral summer.

“All the evidence points toward human-made effects playing a major role in the changes that we see at both poles and evidence that contradicts this is very hard to find,” said Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

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