"We need to do more and we need to do it now," Darling said presenting his first budget. "There will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act.

But he delayed a planned rise in duty on road fuel, backed further airport expansion -- aviation is the fastest growing source of climate changing carbon emissions -- and simply announced a fresh consultation on boosting renewable energy.

"Darling's safe pair of hands have dropped the ball on climate change," said Greenpeace director John Sauven.

WWF's chief climate campaigner Keith Allott said: "This budget contains some small potentially welcome tinkering but no big vision and no sense that this will do anything to put Britain onto a low-carbon trajectory."

Friends of the Earth chief Tony Juniper was equally scathing.

"This was billed as the greenest budget ever. But we didn't get anything like what is necessary to tackle what is the greatest challenge the world faces," he said.

Darling, whose room for manoeuvre has been restricted by a faltering economy and struggling government finances, said Britain wanted all future allocations of carbon emission permits to power generators to be auctioned.

The current phase of European Union emission permits for the power generators were all allocated free, handing them billions of pounds in profits as they passed on the notional cost of the permits in higher energy costs to consumers.

Darling also repeated the government's wish that aviation be included in the next phase of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme.

In any case neither decision is up to the British government alone but must be agreed by all EU member states and at the same time Darling said the government backed the planned expansion of London's Heathrow and Stansted airports.

"Despite all the pre-budget spinning from Treasury this was not a green budget and fell painfully short of what was required," said Russell Marsh of the Green Alliance lobby group.

"The chancellor says that our greatest obligation to future generations must be to tackle potentially catastrophic climate change, but there is nothing in this budget to indicate that he means it. This was just tinkering at the edges."

(Editing by Mike Peacock)

(c) Reuters 2008. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

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REUTERS

FEATURE - Myanmar's Nutty Scheme To Solve Energy Crisis

HQTRMNB]

By Ed Cropley

PYAW GAN - They may look leafless and lifeless, but Kyaw Sinnt is certain his nut-trees are the key to Myanmar's chronic energy shortage.

Others are less sure, saying the junta's plan to turn the country into a giant plantation of biofuel-producing "physic nuts" is yet another example of the ill-conceived central planning that has crippled a once-promising economy.

"I think it's a great idea. Everybody can take part and it's good for the environment," Kyaw Sinnt said, standing next to a small patch of the stick-like shrubs in Pyaw Gan, a bamboo hut village typical of the parched "Dry Zone" southwest of Mandalay.

Fortunately for Pyaw Gan's residents, the plants, also known as jatropha, are drought-resistant, and energy experts consider them a very promising source of biofuel since they do not oust food crops such as sugar or corn.

Clearly the former Burma's ruling generals think so too.

In the middle of 2006, the State Peace and Development Council, as the junta prefers to be known, decreed that every farmer with an acre of land had to plant 200 physic nut seeds around the perimeter of their plots.

Even though farmers had to buy the seeds themselves from the government for 800 kyat ($0.60) -- about half a day's wages for a manual labourer -- the scheme caught on.

Now, jatropha groves can be seen across the country, from deserted roadsides in the central plains to deforested hills near the Chinese border and in window-boxes in the heart of Yangon, the commercial capital.

CRUSH, POUR, DRIVE?

A year ago, a senior Energy Ministry official was telling oil industry bigwigs in Singapore that 7 million acres (2.8 million hectares) of plantation would be "in full swing" by mid-2007 and that biodiesel exports would follow quickly.

This would represent a major turnaround for a country that had to import $600 million of oil products in 2006 and which was forced to slash diesel subsidies last August, triggering the biggest anti-regime protests in 19 years.

The only problem is that nobody knows whether the generals have kept their side of the bargain and built the refining plants necessary to turn the nuts into biodiesel.

Several big conglomerates with close ties to the regime have announced plans to get involved, but it is impossible to say how close to actually producing biodiesel they might be.

Analysts believe the answer is "not very", using as evidence a suggestion from one government minister that people simply grind the nuts in their own homes and then pour the resultant oily residue straight into their fuel tanks.

"How these jatropha acreages will be converted into biodiesel has not yet been determined, since Burma lacks anything like the capacity to refine physic nuts into useable fuel," Sean Turnell of Australia's Macquarie University said.

"The whole episode is illustrative of a more profound and pervasive system of centralised and often irrational decision making that lies at the heart of Burmese agriculture," he said.

BLACK ARTS AT WORK?

There certainly doesn't seem to be anything remotely like a processing plant anywhere near Pyaw Gan, which is unreachable by vehicle during the wet season.

"It's a complete waste of time," said one businessman in the town of Nyaung U, 30 km (20 miles) away who did not wish to be named for fear of recrimination.

"There is no processing plant, and if there was, it would cost four times as much as normal diesel. It's all for show -- just like our wonderful new irrigation channels that never have any water because they never turn the pumps on," he said.

Doubting the junta's stated motive, ordinary Burmese have come up with their own theories for the nut drive.

The most popular, but not necessarily the most credible, is that it is all a word-play plan by the superstitious generals to negate the spiritual power of their arch enemy, detained opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

In Burmese, physic nuts are roughly pronounced 'chay soo', which is very close to an inversion of Suu Kyi's shortened name, pronounced 'soo chee'.

Not that anybody in Pyaw Gan cares. They only words of English they know are "Hello", "David Beckham" and "biodiesel".