Save local pool, fight climate change

With all the ongoing talk nationally about the Stern Report and the need to fight
climate change my thoughts turned to how we need to make the right
decisions about keeping local facilities (which help us to fight climate change
by reducing our need to travel by car). One campaign I'm involved with is
is trying to save my local swimming pool (Jubilee) from closure. I've found it easy to collect
around 400+ signatures to date on a petition and I know others are also
collecting and so the final total will be very large. I've copied below my letters
to my local councillor and the local paper on this issue.

Original Letter:
The decision to close Jubilee Swimming Pool in Knowle is a mistake. Not
only that, Knowle Councillor Gary Hopkins has broken his election pledge
to 'fight any plans to close Jubilee Pool' on his election address. He now
thinks there is 'no realistic alternative' having agreed to the closure
plan as a member of Bristol's Cabinet. I wonder how the voters of Knowle
feel about being let down like this?

Not long ago £200,000 was spent on refurbishing Jubilee Pool ! It is a
well used and valued local facility. To remove it reduces the quality of
life in Knowle. The availability of goods, services and facilities locally
is a key feature of the quality of life and the capacity to live
sustainably.

Swimmers in Knowle would have to travel further to swim after the closure,
adding to air pollution and climate change. The closure may put people off
going for swim, a very healthy physical activity, and it may be those who
find it most awkward to travel further that are most put off, such as the
elderly or families with young children.

When Councillor Hopkins originally made his pledge to fight plans to close
the pool I was pleased to see someone standing up for locally available
facilities and so now feel very let down. I believe he has not fought very
hard to persuade his Lib-Dem colleagues to take a more rounded, balanced,
less purely financial, greener and more democratic decision.

I would like to see them reverse this decision and go back to the idea of
reviewing the situation once the new leisure centre at Hengrove Park
opens. Furthermore, the review should not only be a financial audit but
should also be a social and environmental audit, examining the total
impact of closure and of alternatives to it. This should be combined with
completely open discussions on what it would take to keep Jubilee Pool
open with all its users and other interested parties locally. I believe
someone who really believed in fighting for local facilities would have
strongly argued for this with Bristol's cabinet.
____________________________________________________________________________________

Second letter:
Many thanks to the Bristol Evening Post for printing my letter about the decision to close Jubilee Pool, Councillor Gary Hopkins broken election pledge and the reply I obtained from him. Its good to debate these things in the open. I must say that I feel very dissatified and in fact quite insulted by his reply though.
I wonder if he communicates with all the people that he represents in Knowle this way? When a person who lives in his ward takes an active personal interest in a local issue is it really relevant that they were not present at the Cabinet meeting where the decision was taken? Is it really relevant that they have not previously had contact with him about the issue. I am politically active but did not write to him in this capacity at all!

Its convenient for Councillor Hopkins to blame others for a decision he and his colleagues have taken. Politics based on accusation and counter accusation is common everywhere, not least in Bristol, but it puts people off and causes politics to come into disrepute. Its gets us nowhere if parties simply blame the previous lot.

He talks of 'Hengrove or nothing' when referring to finance availability. Rather than give up and saying there is no alternative I believe it is well worth continuing to try and continuing to talk to people - a lot can change in four years.

He says he has fought for Jubilee Pool but this fighting it seems has now ended. £200,000 has been spent on a pool that he and his colleagues have now decided must close. I'm sure people were led to believe that when such money was spent it was because the facility had a decent future! It seems like economic madness to me to spend and then close.

He even casts some doubt on whether the Hengove complex will be built, saying 'when (or more rightly if) the Hengove complex is built'. If there is any doubt about Hengorve then why decide to close Jubilee now? I'm afraid I cant follow the logic here and certainly am not aware of any doubts about Hengrove!

Councillor Hopkins is right to say that Jubilee may have closed without the previous campaign to keep it open, in which he played a role. He goes on to make a good case for the pool, talking of it being easily walked to and accessed by public transport - this is the kind of facility we need to keep, but he has given up on it. With a little creativity there may be small scope to improve the Jubilee site in some way.

He said 'unlike the Labour Party we did not lie to people'. I dont find accusations of lies very productive. Though straight talking and rational debate is fine it is an indication of the state of big party politics that they all seem to talk of each other as liars like this.

I cant say I am keen on building a new pool when we already have one that has had a lot of money spent on it. The prospect of a new pool in Knowle would be just that, a prospect - it may or may not happen and the plans for it may or may not be acceptable. What is certain is that a swimming facility now exists here!

I've publicly and regularly called for the protection and indeed enhancement of local facilities in South Bristol for around twenty years, though have had no direct recent involvement over Jubilee until now. As a regular pool user and Knowle resident I was very pleased to see the previous defence of the pool by Councillor Hopkins others - I want that to continue, though I note that he did not comment at all on the substantial point in my original letter. This is that 'I would like to see them reverse this decision and go back to the idea of reviewing the situation once the new leisure centre at Hengrove Park opens. Furthermore, the review should not only be a financial audit but should also be a social and environmental audit, examining the total impact of closure and of alternatives to it. This should be combined with completely open discussions on what it would take to keep Jubilee Pool open with all its users and other interested parties locally'.

Is he not willing to tell me if he agrees with me about the process that should be used to assess the situation and make the decision about the pools future?

Climate change action and costs

Government policies on climate change do not go far enough or fast
enough, just as past 'actions' have
been insufficient, slow or non-existent. UK carbon emissions are 2% higher
now than when Tony Blair came to power in 1997 (Govt's own figures!), despite the apparent
concern !

Successive govts have neglected real action on climate, and now
look where we are, with the Stern Report stating with authority that
climate change could cost trillions of pounds. The upward carbon pollution
trend needs to peak within ten to fifteen years if we are to keep temperature
rise to 2 degrees in the next 50 or 100 years, according to the climate
models.

Taking action in the early 80's or 90's when Greens (including me) were calling for it
would have been both easier and cheaper than it now will be, though acting
now is much cheaper and easier than taking no
action and suffering even more climate change! The chances of success for
any action on climate would also have been higher if we had acted earlier.

The Stern Report has underestimated the extent of economic change needed
to really tackle climate change. We are a factor of ten away from being
sustainable in resource and energy terms and need to establish a new
approach to socio-economics which seems to me to say that we need to gear
much more than 1% of GDP to the task!

Action needs to range across all areas involving the consumption of fossil
fuels at some point in the chain of economic events - these days this
means.....just about everything! Globalisation of trade is of course
rapidly raising carbon emissions levels....Also whilst the Stern Report's
primary focus is the economic impacts of climate change - I think it is
worth remembering the huge social and environmental impacts indicated in his report too! Frankly
its not so much the cost of climate change as the impacts on people and
the natural world that have always concerned me, though you cant of course
separate these off from economics as they are interdependent.

Without an economy which is reconciled with the environment we wont and
cant tackle climate change effectively. Stern and the Government are wrong
if they are saying that we can grow as in the past, but just pay a climate
change bill and carry on.

How green is Bristol?

I very much like the idea of Bristol leading the way and becoming model 'green city' as outlined by City Council Leader Barbara Janke ('Let's be the best eco city', Bristol Evening Post, 28 October) but what stands in the way of this genuinely becoming the case more than anything is the massive environmental impacts of the city itself ! Economic activity in Bristol is fighting against our environment, as is well illustrated by our traffic congestion and air pollution problems existing alongside a poor quality and expensive public transport system.

There are, as she points out, many excellent organisations based here working on making the world greener - she names the Soil Association, Sustrans, Bristol Zoo and environmental businesses, to which I would add the Schumacher Lectures, @Bristol, the city farms, the CREATE Centre and the BBC Natural History Unit and great organic and local food suppliers like the Better Food Company. I've no doubt that there are many others.

However, what is vital is to keep a sense of context and scale here. Take the city's carbon emissions as one indicator of green-ness. The council itself has estimated that Bristol emits nearly 6 tonnes of carbon per person each year. A sustainable carbon emissions level is more like 1 tonne per person each year!

The 'best eco city' would not be a factor of five or six times away from sustainable carbon emissions, to say the least. We continue to be a very long way from being green as a city because national and local government policies are either too little too late or lacking in coherence and consistency between social, economic and environmental policies.

To make real progress towards being a truly green city needs a thorough and radical approach, and so the 'green city' needs a strong group of Green councillors to help to take us there.

Reduce, reuse, recycle, recover - in this order !!

As well as experiencing Bristol's fairly new recycling/composting system with its brown bins...I'm working on a waste management policy at the moment. Actually recycling is far from the top of the list as far as being environmentally friendly is concerned.

The different options for dealing with waste issues are considered as a waste management hierarchy. The first priority is waste reduction or minimisation. After reduction comes the reuse of objects so that they do not enter the waste stream: for example the refilling of bottles. It is not until one gets down to the third level in the hierarchy that one gets to recovery, which includes materials recycling, composting and the recovery of energy from waste by a whole range of methods (some more environmentally friendly than others). Waste disposal is at the bottom of the hierarchy and includes final disposal to landfill and the incineration of waste without recovering the energy.

Our society is upside down as far as what we do with our waste is concerned because the option we use most is at the bottom of the list of environmental priorities! Thus greens are campaigning hard to emphasise the need for reduction and for reuse as our top priorities. There does of course also need to be a shift to recycling and composting but there are certainly dangers in thinking that these alone are the complete solution to all our waste and environmental problems because they are not - as their position in the waste management hierarchy illustrates.

Without significant reductions in waste we will still have to deal with very large amounts of material in a fuel and money intensive way. For example, currently Bristol sends compostable material all the way to Dorset in large lorries because it has not yet developed a composting facility locally. In one sense moving to more recycling is a relatively 'easy' step to take, despite all the teething problems, inconvenience and costs of new systems. What would really tackle our waste and pollution problems is a very significant shift to producing minimal waste and designing for reuse, repair and long life products. This is a much more difficult step to take in the sense of the scale of change because it ultimately implies restructuring our economy so that instead of being geared to mass consumption it is geared to conserving our real wealth. Thus being green is as much about a new economics as it is about the environment.

Conservatives - truly Green????

The Conservatives launched a document about tax policy today and all I've seen about it on the news tells me that they are still the same old party - and they have massively long way to go before they are green to say the least!

Conservative Party leader David Cameron has some real problems with his party. Comments from Conservative Candidate for NE Somerset Jacob Rees-Mogg, who seems to think that people who have been to Oxford or Cambridge have an inherent, natural right to run the country unlike us "potted plants" as he called us, illustrate this perfectly (Bristol Evening Post front page report, 'Which would you rather run the country', October 5th). Mr Moggs education at Eton and Oxford did not give him the sense to stop him putting his foot in it did it!

Cameron's warm words about being green and wanting to tackle climate change for instance are nothing but hot air until he backs them up with a wide range of good, detailed, coherent and consistent policies on the matter. Furthermore, even if David Cameron himself turns out be be genuine in his support for green policies (and that is still a very big if) he has a very, very long way to go before his party genuinely goes with him. My experience of Conservative candidates over twenty years of contesting elections at various levels is that they regard environmental policies as inherently bad for business, an unjustified burden on taxpayers or even some sort of radical left wing, or even worse European Union, conspiracy, instead of the good sense and care for the future that they really are!

Beware of David Cameron's attempts to rebrand his party. It surely takes more than a new oak tree logo, pictures of leaves and blue sky liberally spread around your conference - and a green tie - to make you green! This particular leopard has not changed its spots and so if people want green politics they should look to the real thing - the Green Party itself.

Priorities should be health, education and environment!

The government just doesn't seem to have its spending priorities right. One day I read about the future of wardens looking after the elderly in sheltered flats across Bristol being threatened by govt funding cuts of up to £9 million (Care Wardens Job Axe Fears, Bristol Evening Post, 10 October). The next day I read about Bristol facing a GP crisis in five years if we continue to train doctors at the same rate (Family Doctors in Crisis, Bristol Evening Post, 11 October) and also the denial of drugs costing as little as £2.50 per day to those suffering from Alzheimar's (How can they deny people this drug?, Bristol Evening Post, 11 October). These are all areas where one would think caring people would prioritise spending, along with education.

Given spending priorities like these I just dont understand why the government has committed itself to spending, not millions, but billions on a replacement for Trident nuclear missiles by saying it will retain Britain's nuclear so-called deterrent. What is more we have always been told that nuclear weapons work because they will never be used (the mutually assured destruction argument)!!

Tony Blair stood outside 10 Downing Street the other day and made a statement rightly criticising North Korea for exploding a test nuclear weapon, saying that they had spent vast sums whilst their people were poor and sometimes starving. Why doesn't he then follow the same logic, get his spending priorities right and direct money to where it is needed, such as the examples I have given or perhaps additional flood defences for Weston-Super-Mare or for investing in a creating a green future for todays young people and their children?

It seems to me a double immorality to spend money on threatening mass destruction with new nuclear weapons and at the same time denying people decent health, education, environmental and social care spending.