Dear Simon - copied to Cabinet
I am so sorry to have to be a wet blanket on the day that, after 60 years, my home town since Jan 1976, finally gets a much needed, updated, energy efficient, swimming pool.
The problem is this. You all joined everyone else in piously declaring a climate emergency in 2020 and then doing nothing (hypocrisy charge from people like me). In fact, you are continuing with business as usual with our totally unsustainable lifestyle wholly dependent on finite fossil fuels. Living unnaturally on a natural planet and living infinitely on a finite planet. Extremely foolish and dangerous.
Running a swimming pool, I'm told, is very heavy on energy and thus heavy also on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. It is urgent that we all cut our use of fossil fuels, as my wife and I have done both at home and me, with my driving drastically reduced. Yet, your council moved the second newest leisure centre a distance of, precisely 1 Km when it could have been retrofitted to make it more energy efficient. No wonder my council tax has gone up 30% over the last three or four years, I think! I'm sure it was £100 at the end of last decade, if I remember correctly and it is now £136 by direct debit every month for ten months.
This climate catastrophe that is unfolding before us means we all have to make sacrifices in order to win the bigger prize of living much more simply, sustainably, in tune with nature and, with the realities of resource shortages. And to postpone extinction (the planet's sixth).
Having paid £200 per year since 2013 when I retired in order to swim three times a week, I will be boycotting the swimming pool for the rest of my life and will confine my physical exercise to walking and cycling and using the bus, train, tram as much as possible - running or smartly walking to catch the bus!
What you must do now is to reduce the temperature of the pool water, as Germany has done with so many of its swimming pools. Definitely, cool showers, too - seriously. Like Germany. Find out the temperature they now use.
The emergency means, of course, you have to stop even more destruction of the UK's only and last railway "of national strategic significance" by scrapping immoral and idiotic Phase 2 Metro and all the other Metro extensions - £15 BILLION to 2040 for 150 miles, 8 lines and 380 tram stops!! Remember, when you have a nationally important railway in use at the NE end and at the SW end, all you have to do, Mr Regeneration is to put commuter, regional and freight TRAINS back on the middle section in the Black Country without them. Very simple and blindingly obvious from a man who failed the 11+ and went to a secondary mod!
Best wishes
Tim
PS bonus
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