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King Canute was a good king, according to Wikipedia. He led wisely, bringing peace, wealth and stability to his new realm. He pacified the Church.
 
But he could not command the sea and his attempt to do so is now so clouded in fable, it is difficult to distinguish the facts, if ever there were any.
 
Guy Smith, a farmer in Essex, has his own fable, which he used last week to publicly lambast the RSPB’s plans for Wallasea Island, close to the site of Canute’s battleground victory.
 
The story, published in Farmers Guardian, went that we had bought Wallasea already, that Defra had contributed a mighty £8 million to the purchase and, to top our poisoning of this large area of productive farmland, we’d be bringing malaria too!
 
Quite an achievement in such a short time.
 
Our proposal, to buy Wallasea and turn it into one of the most innovative and forward-looking wildlife reserves there are, was announced last October.
 
The plan was hatched because of the enormous threat being posed by climate change. If it bears life, the scheme will create a coastline of saltmarsh, mudflats and other tidal habitats fit for many declining species, and improve coastal defences for those living inland.
 
These species include redshanks, lapwings and curlew, which could use the site to feed and/or breed. Kentish plovers could be lured back to the UK after a 50-year absence, together with the exotic spoonbill and black-winged stilt, and the knot, a small wading bird named after the King.
 
Specialist plants and saltwater fish could also reappear and the island would become a huge store for carbon.
 
So it’s a great plan. The true cost of the scheme is upward of £12 million, however, and we have received nothing from the government towards that sum.

We are as determined as we can be to see the scheme through but raising that sort of money is highly ambitious and it is far from certain that we will.  

One thing that is certain is that we won't be bringing malaria to the UK. Malaria is a tropical disease and, even with forecast rises in temperature of 3C, conditions will still be closer to those of Southern Europe, where the incidence and transfer of malaria to people is exceptionally rare.

Read more about our Wallasea plans here

And if you too are thrilled by the prospect of stilts, spoonbills and much other wildlife establishing a stronghold in the UK, and wish to contribute, click here

Counties like Norfolk and Lincolnshire boast big and often quite stunning skies. Places like the Camargue in southern France and Extremadura in Spain do so too but also something better – soaring, circling birds of prey suspended from nothing high in the air.
 
Numbers of raptors are much higher in France, Germany and Spain than they are in the UK yet on Saturday, Songbird Survival called for Britain’s native raptors including sparrowhawks and buzzards to be killed because their numbers had risen too high.
 
In a letter to The Times, the organisation said that uncontrolled predation by raptors had become a major cause of garden and farmland bird declines.
 
This is not true and Songbird Survival’s claims are neither backed by accepted research nor an objective view of the health of Britain’s wildlife.
 
The populations of sparrowhawks, buzzards, and marsh harriers and peregrine falcons for that matter, are significantly higher than they were 50 years ago.
 
The outlawing of pesticides like DDT, crackdowns on illegal persecution, the recreation of habitats to replace those lost and, in the case of buzzards, higher numbers of rabbits, have helped these birds recover to something like their natural levels.
 
These birds will not go on rising in number though – buzzard and sparrowhawk populations are already stabilising - and research published last week by the British Trust for Ornithology showed the sparrowhawk population had in fact fallen.
 
The RSPB has written to The Times to put right the claims Songbird Survival has made. Only when its statements are based on science not prejudice and on modern rather than old-fashioned attitudes to wildlife, might it win the credibility it may crave.
 
And only when our skies host the raptors they once did, can we rest in the knowledge that at last these birds are safe.

The Times letter is here

We must all do more to deal with unnecessary demand; scarcity represents the new threat to democracy; now is the time for the comfortable nations to step up and do something about it.

Wise words yesterday from powerful world leaders promising action to relieve food shortages and tackle rising prices.

The first pledge, from UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, trumpeted a Cabinet Office review of food policy, reported widely as a call to cut the food we waste. German Chancellor, Angela Merkel warned that the food crisis would threaten democracy while US President George Bush wanted us to something about hunger in Africa. What, exactly, wasn’t clear.

Food scarcity is an immeasurably serious matter. For some, it is life or death. For others, like us, it means a little extra on the food bill and a little extra thought about what we buy and where we buy it.

How enlightening it would be to hear these leaders say the same of energy which will also soon be in short supply. They could, because their statements would be equally apt. They should, because the way we squander energy is doing just as much damage.

Saving energy by driving and flying less, using waste heat and low energy appliances, and turning gadgets off when they’re not in use, would significantly cut energy consumption and our carbon emissions.

Measures like these would reduce the need for a massive building programme to generate more low-emission energy. They would help ease the pain of rapidly rising energy bills.

The G8 summit in Japan was the perfect forum for politicians to speak out on energy use as bravely as Gordon Brown has done on food. Monday's UK government report on biofuels has put energy use in the world’s spotlight. As President Bush says: now is the time for the well off to act.

Axing his own country’s subsidies for ethanol, a highly polluting corn-based biofuel, and scrapping Europe-wide targets for increasing the use of fuels like ethanol, would be great places to start.

Not doing this is ignoring the cause of climate change. The alternative is water wars and mass migration which will threaten democracy, and extensive droughts and devastating floods, which will quickly erode the comfort of those who once were comfortable enough to act.

Where were you in December 15 2007? Where were you in August 7 1991, March 21 2004 or January 3 1997?

Were you in Brazil, chopping down insect-ridden rainforest, or were you using your mechanical digger to slice off the dank, soggy top of an empty and desolate Estonian peat bog?

Were you clearing a dry and dusty Paraguayan savannah of the most stubborn of scrub or were you celebrating the decision to scrap set-aside and heading down to your local farm to plough it all up?

If you were doing any of those things before January 1, 2008, you could be in for a biofuels bonanza because biofuels produced from habitats destroyed before that date could soon be motoring to a fuel station near you.

They will be richly embossed in all shades of green, their environmental credentials trumpeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Put them in your tank and you can drive all the miles you like and be pleased as pie to be helping the world cut carbon emissions, slow global warming and save the planet all in one.

This is the blissful picture being painted by bureaucrats in Brussels extending one arm of the EU’s plan to cut the continent’s greenhouse gases.

The trouble is their efforts are looking increasingly one-legged because biofuels being sold by law in the UK and elsewhere could be raising not lowering the emissions responsible for climate change.

Rainforest, peat bogs, savannah and grasslands all store carbon and chopping them down or digging them up releases that carbon into the air.

Chemicals sprayed on the energy crops that replace them, and the transport of those crops to processing plants and beyond, increase the emissions for which biofuels are to blame.

That means petrol and diesel could be less polluting than biofuels being sold on forecourts today. At it means that when 10 per cent of Europe’s transport fuel comes from biofuel – the target planned by the EU –  that problem is going to get far, far worse.

But wait! The EU’s 61-page renewable energy directive includes includes numerous safeguards to guarantee our biofuels are truly green. The problem is they do no such thing. They are weak, limited and only effective from this year. Incredible, given that deforestation for palm oil – used for energy as well as food and cosmetics - started in Malaysia, the world’s biggest producer, more than 90 years ago.

As things stand, those selling biofuels in Europe will have to cut emissions by only 35 per cent. That figure is too low; 60 per cent should be the reduction manufacturers must prove.

Secondly, too few places will be protected. The Eifel region of western Germany is one area under siege; grasslands designated under a long-standing EU law have already been ploughed up for biofuels, and while forests and wetlands will have some protection, the areas in between will not.

That means the Cerrado scrubland straddling the Brazil/Paraguay border and hosting innumerable wildlife of all shapes and sizes, is left out. Already it is being taken for energy crops.

Finally and most damning, the EU has shifted the cut-off date for acceptable biofuel production from 1990 – the date agreed by Kyoto treaty negotiators to protect rainforests – to January 1, 2008.

So, if you spent last new year’s eve digging, draining, slashing or burning your conscience can be clear. And if you want to continue pocketing some of the EU-sponsored biofuels bonanza, just be a little more selective over the sites you choose to destroy.

It’s the semi-final stage of one of the world’s most prestigious competitions. One plucky Scot has failed to make it but the Big Two remain and, should they clear their final hurdles, are sure to give us one showpiece of a final.

Unusually for them, the royal family won’t present the trophy this year. In fact, there won’t be a trophy at all and there may not be much point in winning. But the glow of a good deed done will not be dimmed. And there’s always another year (or 12) for those with potential still to fulfil.

E.ON, BP, Scottish Power and Peel Power are the four companies left in the government-sponsored race to make possible carbon capture and storage (CCS) - the underground storage of carbon emissions from coal.

Ministers’ delay has forced BP to drop plans for CCS trials at Peterhead in north-east Scotland but the company is staying the course and may have another site in mind.

This is all very worthy until you remember that eight coal-fired power stations will be built long before Britain has any means of storing the pollution those new plants will cause because Business Secretary John Hutton’s carbon storage competition will not reach its zenith until 2020, Britain’s target date for CCS technology to be ready.

Other countries have banned construction of coal-powered electricity plants until they can stop their emissions going into the atmosphere but Mr Hutton is asking only that new British plants be ‘carbon capture ready’ which is not the same as capturing that carbon.

The UK government has a new grand plan for boosting renewable energy generation but using more clean energy won’t cut emissions if more dirty energy is generated as well, and coal is the dirtiest fuel there is.

It would be typically British to hold a competition in which the taking part was more important than the victory. That will not do. Climate change is too important to dodge that nasty thing called winning and that means ditching coal unless and until it is clean.

Read more about the coal-fired threat here http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/details.asp?id=tcm:9-179457

http://www.rspb.org.uk/news/details.asp?id=tcm:9-185174