When David Cameron stuck a micro wind turbine on the roof of his west London pad, he struck an overdue blow for the "show me" world.
Needless to say, his breezy little number has inevitably been dismissed as gesture politics. And as both gestures and generation technologies go, a pretty micro one at that.
But for anyone desperate to see change taking shape, rather than being stuck on the screen, it was a gesture worth making. Why? Because you can actually see the damn thing. Unlike a policy or a promise or a grant form, it's there doing something. (In this case, spinning around prettily, if not quite as effectually as ardent fans of micro-generation, myself included, would like to think.)
This matters, because despite soaring fuel prices and a splurge of media coverage on greening your home, we're still a long way from the zero-emission-house-as-standard that we keep being told should, and could, be the norm.
The government could help move things on by pulling together all the disparate - and to the householder, muddled - grants and subsidies for energy efficiency and micro-generation into a straightforward one-stop, sexy little package. One call to make, one form to fill. That could unlock a good deal more public enthusiasm for simple "win-wins" than has been the case to date.
But it still won’t set pulses racing unless the whole shebang can be brought to life – whether it’s a solar panel, sheep’s wool insulation or just some widget that stops your fridge getting too cold. And the morass of grant forms and acronyms would be so much easier to navigate if, instead of a dry website, there was some friendly bloke sat next to you who knew all about it and would guide you through.
So how do we do it? Ask yourself. What do we (the nation, if not the readers of this magazine) really love doing? (Apart from the obvious.)
Getting in our cars and going down to IKEA.
So there’s the answer: a great big sprawling Eco-IKEA, the mother of all one-stop shops, for anything and everything to do with energy and the home. A place where we can see the stuff, ask the questions, get the help and buy the kit.
Imagine: over there, every micro-generation gizmo known to man, along with simple advice as to how to afford and install it. Further down the aisle, all the energy efficiency kit, ditto. Round the corner, past the organic burgers and the Fairtrade fruit, you could sign up to a green electricity tariff, or join a car club. Maybe offset your carbon; book an energy audit; have your hand held as you apply for an insulation grant – and then top it all off with a water butt.
Let’s have a few full-scale model houses in there, too. A show home where you can walk in, sit down, and smell the sheep’s wool. Feel the sun streaming through the argon-filled double glazing, realizing for the first time, maybe, what it’s like to be out of the draught on a chill, sunny, winter’s day. And hear for yourself just how silently or otherwise those micro turbines spin…
And if you, like the rest of humanity, find the whole thing hopelessly confusing, there’d be friendly “tour guides” to take you through the options – in guaranteed plain English, not eco-wonk-speak.
It might be a pipe dream. It might cost a bomb. But then, unlike many a wonderful and worthy eco-experience or education centre, it might not have to be wholly dependent on lottery dosh or Euro-grants. If there’s as big a market in this as the color supplements suggest, then those shed loads of stuff could just make shed loads of money.
And nothing would come in a flat pack. Promise.
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Martin Wright is editor of Green Futures magazine. This column first appeared in the May/June 2006 edition of that publication.