SO far, it looks like I’ve evaded the responsibility of learning to drive. My biographical excuse is that I’m left-handed, and I had superstitious grannies who forced me to write with my right. So when it came to the “go left or right” call, instructor after instructor (and myself) was terrified out of their wits. A few times, my indecision was nearly final.

Living in cities with buses, trains, tubes (and taxis, in a panic) got me through the school run years, without having to figure out what a clutch actually does.

Post-caring duties, the social pressure was building on me to insert the keys again.

Then praise be! The prospect of the self-driving car arose to save me. In recent years, that hope seems to have faded – a combination of unforeseen technical difficulties, and insurers being nervy about who or what is responsible for the inevitable crashes. Their robot intelligence seems unable to react well to important challenges (say, a child chasing a bouncing ball across the road).

I had such sci-fi dreams! Sipping Jack and Coke, reading A Thousand Plateaus and swivelling slowly in a velour seat, while my Perspex-bubble-roofed car swooshes down the M8, self-driving to my destination … all dashed. Never mind.

In any case, there are more serious matters to contend with than my autotopian dreams. A report in New Scientist magazine this week makes a very strong case: governments and authorities on these islands should consider banning adverts for polluting, high-carbon products.

The National: Cigarette packaging now has to be blank in the UKCigarette packaging now has to be blank in the UK

The precedent is the now near-total health ban on cigarette ads in the UK. And the prime target of the study – commissioned by the campaign groups Greenpeace and the New Weather Institute – are ads for SUVs (sports utility vehicles).

SUVs were second in their contribution to increased global carbon dioxide emissions, from 2010 to 2018 – amazingly, more than heavy industry, trucks, aviation and shipping (an SUV’s large size makes it less efficient with fuel). In the decade leading up to 2020, SUVs went from one in 10 of new car sales to more than four in 10.

The report makes an estimate of Return on Advertising Spend (or ROAS – that is, how many extra sales come from ad spend, a number ad agencies have but won’t divulge). Nevertheless, the authors speculate on the increase in demand that car (and airline) adverts produced in 2019.

Based on a ratio of effectiveness (from 2:1 upwards), they claim that these ads have been responsible for between 202 million and 606 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in that single year. To put that in scale, the first number is the same amount as the Netherlands’ full emissions that year – the second one nearly two times that of Spain.

Brutal stuff. However, the report shows that the pressure to remove these ads are coming from above and below. The last IPCC report focussed on behaviour change, zooming in on tighter regulation of ads, which have a “major influence on mitigative capacity”.

But the Greenpeace report also ran a consumer poll in which 45% wanted to restrict ads for highly-polluting cars (69% of these respondents also agreed that the term “climate emergency” was the most relevant to the times).

Action against them is also happening municipally. Amsterdam and five other Dutch cities don’t allow public ads for fossil fuel products. Liverpool, Norwich and North Somerset, and some other UK councils, have done the same.

As a major car manufacturer, France has surprisingly taken the initiative on toxic car ads. As in the final days of cigarette promotion, government regulators are forcing billboards and displays to print car-critical statements. “On a daily basis, take public transport”, or “consider carpooling”, or “for short journeys, walking or bicycling is preferable.”

If advertisers don’t feature the hashtag #SeDéplacerMoinsPolluer prominently in their copy (meaning “move and pollute less”) they’ll be fined up to €50,000 – per advert.

The New Weather Institute suggest that measures like this would be an easy win for UK governments to implement. I think they need a little more precision about what counts as a fossil fuel horror.

I looked at the top 10 vehicles on sale in the UK, so far this year. There are two explicit SUVs there, each of them hybrids, combining electric and fuel engines. (I assume, as far as the 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars goes, these will also fall foul of the law). In sixth and seventh place are two fully-electric Tesla models. The best seller, the Vauxhall Corsa, is exclusively fossil-fuel driven – as are some of the rest on the list.

It doesn’t quite seem clear to me what cars would make the cut, and which wouldn’t. There’s another matter, standing behind any consideration of their design and efficiency. In gross volume, that’s over 80,439 chunks of metal, glass and software/hardware sold, in two months.

Maybe it’s clearer to non-drivers, who somewhat recoil at the sheer bulk of a car in their life. But isn’t this just a hugely wasteful process, at every level? Do we need to produce this many cars, considering the massively toxic inputs that go into their basic manufacture? (And that certainly includes fully electric vehicles.)

The emissions graph has to drop nearly vertically from 2020 to 2050. So don’t we have to address something deeper than “better” cars – and criticise the atomisation and individualism of car driving itself?

This is where advertising, its practitioners and funders, have to shuffle into the dock. I found a web site curating current car adverts in the UK. It’s a desultory, even cheesy experience – a tawdry exploitation of our longing for agency.

Various musicians strum and arpeggiate away on the sound-tracks, every genre from indie-schmindie to electronica to swing, desperately scrabbling to seize your mood-state.

Many of the drives are through oddly empty streets, highways and country roads. This is directly the opposite of the commuter snarl that most drivers will experience in their vehicles.

The idealistic sentiments and slogans are terrible, and worse, unearned. “Movement That Inspires”, “Feel More In Every Moment”, “Go Your Own Way”, even “Revolution” (a fully electric car, of course, with a young girl teaching her baby sister about the future). And at the centre, the solo driver in his/her ecstasy of smugness, fascias laid out before them like consoles on a spaceship.

As the French know – and deep down, everyone else does – we have to profoundly shift our patterns of mobility. From private to public transport, from behind the wheel to pedals and handlebars, from fantasising about “movement” in a metal shell, to bodily movement in pedestrian-centric towns and cities.

I obviously don’t deny that car mobility can be absolutely vital, and that rural and urban areas have different needs. We could easily imagine collective modes of providing that access – car pools, co-operatively run and publicly subsidised Uber-like services, and beyond – which should be given support to grow.

But we have to change tastes and values, so that these alternatives can grow. In principle I approve of regulating car adverts on health grounds – we suffer 8.7 million premature deaths a year from air pollution by fossil fuels. I respectfully suggest, however, that we consumers mindfully examine our own automobile desires.

I’m lucky: I’m a born klutz. So I could never buy into driving culture. But carmageddon will play its part in the general ruin – if we don’t check the rear-view mirror carefully enough.