Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Who would have thought…..

Amazing to find this on an official McDonalds blog:-

  • Accelerating beef production was raising the levels of greenhouse-gas CO2 considerably, through burning of forest and pastureland, for example.
  • Ever-increasing transport needs were also generating more CO2.
  • The ever-more-numerous cows were generating many millions more tons of methane, a greenhouse gas dozens of times more powerful than CO2.
  • The production of animal feed in the Amazon was deforesting one of the primary sources of CO2 absorption.
  • These activities were cueing the simulation of other industries too, leading to more gas production there as well.”

Maybe the USA is waking up at last. The above was part of a speech by Andrew Shimery-Wolf, Director, McDonald’s Interactive and relates to a simulation game McDonalds were playing.

So maybe David Morris and Helen Steel will get a huge payout from McDonalds for forewarning them about all of this in the McLibel case.

UK Government IT spending

Extracted from questions asked by Chris Huhne and published on They work for you
Latest figures 2005

Ministry of Transport £244,500,000
Defence £547,672,000 (operating costs) plus £134,466,000 (additions)
Northern Ireland £10,724,000
Dept Culture Media and Sport £64,600,000
Welsh office £176,161.40 (Thats for less than 3m people ie £60 per person on IT alone!)
International Development have no clue as to what they spend
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) over the last five years is £478,245,262. including £180 million contract with Global Crossing (Note: Global Crossings UK turnover was only £239m)
Duchy of Lancaster £35,756,263
Treasury £3,087,000
Deputy Prime Ministers office £18,108,962
National health service trust expenditure £ 130,037,000 (But apparently the new programme will be £12.4 billion over 10 years, or £206 per person)

That little lot is £1,284,600,277 or about £21 per person in the UK and remember thats just IT expenditure!

And who some of the money went too…
Cabinet Office

Contractor name Total recorded expenditure ‘s (£)
Computacenter 83,969,515
Hewlett-Packard 55,535,729
Atos 40,701,106
Cable and Wireless 26,554,274
Electronic Data Systems 23,952,188

IT expenditure at the Deputy Prime Officer

Chris Huhne recently asked the government for details of IT expenditure at the Deputy Prime Ministers office since 2002 and Department for Communities and Local Government since 2006.
The answer is :-

Financial year Expenditure (£)
2002-03 26,748,425
2003-04 20,913,037
2004-05 16,815,471
2005-06 18,108,962

and this lovely bit “There is no central record of project Executives, their expertise and qualifications;”

So Ellee Mr Milibands £40,000 seems to be chicken feed compared to this lot! Chris has also been after the other departments as well – be interesting to add them all up!