The trouble with bog roll is that it always, eventually, runs out.

Even if, like me, you buy the stuff in commercial cash ‘n’ carry hospital-size catering packs, there will still come a dreadful day when you sit there being mocked by the last naked cardboard tube in its faux Art Deco holder.

Still, there’s always more bog roll in the shop. But let’s imagine for a moment that bog roll was a finite global commodity. Then I suppose we would start using it more sparingly, even when there was a teetering twelve pack on the top shelf of the airing cupboard. But it would still run out eventually.

Now to a genuinely finite commodity – oil. It sat in the ground doing absolutely nothing and being of no use to anyone for millions and millions of years, but the instant we started using it, it started running out. And, as with beer, the more of it we have, the more of it we want, which simply means it will run out sooner. This, I think, is the real issue facing the future of the car.

So for the sake of the car and whatever replaces it, and indeed for all other forms of transport, finding a genuine alternative is surely the priority. There is one on the horizon in the form of the so-called ‘hydrogen infrastructure’, a technical reality but an apparently logistical insuperable. With a hydrogen fuel-cell system, a car can be driven by an electric motor supplied by its own on-board power station, and the same power station could be used to supply a whole street of houses when the car is parked. This is surely worthy of more work.

Meanwhile, too many people imagine that the future of the electric car lies in some small plastic shitbox that has to be recharged from a plug in the garage, consuming electricity that has largely been produced by burning fossil fuel. And that, remember, is running out.

All of this, however, is subsumed by a rather misleading obsession with ‘green motoring’. The issue is believed to be emissions, so car makers (or, more accurately, car buyers, since the motor industry is merely a business and therefore fickle) believe that saving fuel is the key. But as we have seen, saving it will only delay, and very slightly, the day when the bog roll runs out.

It strikes me that eking out our oil reserves is dangerous. Anyone who has been to the summit of Mount Kyoto knows that when you burn it, it produces nasty gasses that destroy our minds and lay waste to our harvests. So why do we want this stuff around to blight the lives of our grandchildren? Let’s all buy old Rolls Royces and American muscle cars and get the stuff burnt off quickly, before it does any more damage.

As far as I can make out, there are no truly green cars. In fact, as long as we are relying on fossil fuels, there is no green activity available to us. Even environmentalists are not very green, because they continue to produce facile reports on how much CO2 is saved by turning the telly off, wasting tons of paper in the process.

I don’t see that the hybrid car, in which the petrol or diesel engine is complimented by a constantly recharged electric drive, is really very green. I know Hollywood has embraced it wholeheartedly in the tedious shape of the Toyota Prius, but what the hell does Gwyneth Paltrow really know about the atmosphere? All environmental activity is ultimately subservient to the vagaries of politics and fashion, which pretty much guarantee that it will be unscientific.

The hybrid drive system is merely a means of improving, a bit, the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Electricity is not an energy resource, it is merely a means of energy transfer. The Prius still uses petrol and it will still run out. In any case, Toyota and GM are building extremely powerful hybrid cars with huge V6 and V8 engines, and while they might be using less fuel than they would otherwise, they’re still using it up and at quite a rate.

The plug-in electric car is said by some to be the answer, because the electricity can always be produced by ‘alternative’ means. But these alternative means are notoriously hopeless and I for one do not want to end up living in a forest of windmills just so I can drive around in a G-Wizz.

Biofuel is seen as another saviour. It’s actually been around for decades in places like Brazil, but there is a problem. Huge tracts of land are needed to grow enough grain to make the stuff, and while there’s plenty of that in Brazil, in places such as Britain land is far too valuable and wanted for golf courses. Apart from anything else, too much of this stuff is made from rape seed oil, and the yellow rape crop is the wrong colour for this country and smells funny. I don’t want to live in a psychedelic 60s album cover just so I can drive around in a car with exhaust that smells like a kebab shop.

You can mix alternative fuel with regular fuel, and Ferrari of all people are doing just this in a new version of the F430 supercar. But only 15 per cent of the fuel is fashionable ethanol, and the rest is still petrol. So it’s still using more petrol that a Fiat Panda and doesn’t seat as many people, so the suggestion that Ferrari will somehow save the earth is ridiculous.

And so it goes on. The most environmental initiative the world could take would be to divert all the money being wasted on this sort of thing and using it to fund a search for the genuine fuel of the future. The more I find out about it, the more I’m convinced by the argument for hydrogen. Great work is being done here – not least by the motor industry, since it’s ultimately in their interests – but the more we do, the better.

Meanwhile, our bog roll is still running out. You can try to make it last longer, you can change your diet and forgo the pleasure of an indulgent and nicely folded velvet pad of the stuff. But one day you’ll be really short of it and then your finger will go through.

And you know where you’ll be then.

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