Switching off the Lights - A Rant.

Google, please do not sit in your nice centrally heated, brightly lit offices and ask me to switch off my lights for a token hour to save the planet when I have just spent a chilly Scottish winter switching on the central heating only for a scant two hours a day, in spite of working from home, lighting fires (with smokeless fuel, natch) and running about with extra sweaters, Ayrshire blankets etc, because it now costs £429.00 to fill our smallest sized tank with central heating oil in this country. I drive a small, energy efficient car. I live in a listed building which is as insulated as it is possible to be - but of course replacement windows must be sliding sash, and quite right too, otherwise the council will cut up rough. There is no mains gas to the village, and the bottled sort is even more ruinously expensive to run than oil. We close doors, use shutters to keep the heat in, recycle religiously. But hell mend you when you ask me to make empty gestures.
A much better option would be for everyone to agitate for all new houses to be built with solar panels. This is, on the whole, a very sunny country and the new energy efficient houses on the Isle of Gigha - for example - are both cheap to heat, and almost too warm. Yet in this village alone, we have a small estate of new houses, none of which have solar panels as standard. Installing them later is an expensive business, especially for what essayist Slavenka Drakulic calls the already 'ecological poor'.
If developers could be forced to include them from the off, it would make far more difference to the future inhabitants of the houses than tokenism of this sort. But of course that might eat into their already healthy profits. Grrr.