‘Between Tokyo and London, the guilt hit like a punch in the stomach’

What a perfect mess. Did you hear the one about the engine-obsessed editor of a car magazine who developed an environmental conscience? Hilarious.

Late last year, halfway home on a flight from Tokyo to London, I woke up and slid open the blind. I don’t know exactly where we were but it was beautiful; in a pinky-orange haze, a frozen and unblemished wilderness. From where I was sitting there wasn’t a single visible clue that the human race existed. The guilt hit like a punch in the stomach: me, up here, merrily contributing to the thawing and irreversible loss of environments like this one. At least this time I hadn’t caught flights with the sole purpose of driving a new car so that I might write about it. In Tokyo, I just looked at some new cars and wrote about them: better. Better?

I have a couple of friends who are climate change deniers; the lucky tinkers. They ascribe to the notion that this Earth and its unique, life-compatible atmosphere would be warming anyway, without our help. It’s cyclical, they argue, just as some Jamie Oliver repeats are more watchable than others.

The arguments rage; of course they do. Just ask Greta and Donald, who spent very little of the recent World Economic Forum in Davos getting hammered together in hotel bars and laughing until their ribs hurt. Far from it, in fact. But what matters is that I’ve decided it’s happening, that it’s anthropogenic, and that if the industrial revolution and a few subsequent decades of warming by a degree normally associated with the passing of entire centuries are entirely coincidental, well then phew.

In a survey ahead of December’s election, the environment as a voting issue headed immigration, education, pensions and welfare: 21 per cent of those surveyed mentioned the environment as one of the biggest issues facing Britain, up from two per cent in 2012. And while most of us – me included – have scoffed when Tesla’s defended its sometimes ropey financials with the argument that it’s driven not by money but by a desire to wean the world off engines, well, it’s working: the EVs are coming. (At least it’s working if you buy the idea that, if not better for the planet right now, EVs are at least a step in the right direction.)

But back to the perfect mess. At the moment I’m desperately trying to carbon-offset a

V12 Aston and 20 flights a year by cycling to work three days a week and paying more for green home energy. As I see it, for people like us – souls obsessed with speed, with control, with engineering, and with the eternal thrill of powered mobility – there are two choices: conscious compromise, while hoping technology might soon make our existing addictions Thunberg-compatible; or cold turkey (I’ve a friend, once addicted to fast motorcycles and with a job following MotoGP around the world, who’s since renounced cars, bikes and planes). Since waking up on that flight home, the third option – sticking my head in the sand – feels increasingly untenable.

How about you? Pondering the same conflict, and thinking perhaps of stay-cations and an electric car to balance the Cayman? I’d be very interested to know.

Enjoy the issue.