Government incompetence over car emissions forecasts

Not only do we have Government and political system incompetence in running the economy, or in making decisions over what to do about MPs expenses (to put it very kindly), we also have official incompetence in pollution forecasting - a very important part environmental decision making.

This report from FT.com shows that the Government's Highway's Agency, part of the Dept of Transport, thought new roads schemes since 2002 would produce an extra 11,240 tonnes of carbon emissions. The actual increase turned out to be 21,870 tonnes - this is clearly a whapping inaccuracy not just an underestimate, given that its almost twice as much!

Conclusion: their method is rubbish and they dont know how to work out what carbon emissions will be. How can we have decent trust in any official estimates of carbon emissions that will result from major developments, local or national, eg road traffic due to expanding Heathrow or building a South Bristol ring road??

The next Speaker of the House of Commons will/wont be...

They wont be giving Yosser Hughes the job no matter how desperate he is. They wont give me the job. The current Speaker Michael Martin has just announced he is leaving the job, obviously he's out (!!). So who will the next Speaker be? The Liberal Democrat's former leader Sir Menzies Campbell MP perhaps? Sir George Young MP from the Tory benches? My MP Kerry McCarthy has mentioned John Bercow...



Its pretty unlikely to be another Labour MP, especially the likes of Dennis Skinner. It wont be anyone with a radical stance eg Nicholas Winterton and others on the radical right wing - unlike Campbell and Young they wont get too much cross-party consensus. It wont be anyone tainted by the expenses scandal - they should be resigning along with Speaker Martin.






Suggestions as to who it wont be/should be (MPs and non-MPs) and who it might be are welcome...