Last week a commons select committee reported that if we're serious about tackling climate change then it could be time to give up driving. Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
White van man and his brothers and sisters in petrol were not happy. If the racket on the internet and radio talk shows is any guide, they will only surrender their steering wheels when someone prizes their cold, dead arm away from the open driver's side window.
Their anger is based in the fact that the private motor car has been sold to them as an icon of personal freedom for more than a century. The nagging question is though, have they and the rest of us been sold a massive and poorly house-trained pup?
My hometown of Stoke-on-Trent is a, mostly, linear city made up of six individual towns, it should be the ideal setting for a first-rate public transport system. What it's got though is an embarrassingly awful one, faced with that it is hardly surprising that driving looks like the best option nine times out of ten.
In many ways though it really isn't. Over its short history the private motor car has filled the atmosphere with pollution, caused us to cover ever more land with tarmac and contributed to rising levels of obesity.
In addition to all that having to own a car has saddled families that are struggling to make ends meet with another expense.
The truth is we might well all be a lot happier, healthier and maybe richer too if we consigned the privately-owned car to a museum. In which case why don't we?
There, as Shakespeare might have put it lies the rub!
Part of the problem is that we haven't yet properly grasped either the size of climate emergency waiting in the wings, or the radical measures needed to deal with it. Rather like the residents of Pompeii we keep telling ourselves that even though the volcano is smoking it hasn't erupted before, so it won't erupt now. Things didn't end well for them; they won't for us either.
There is also a staggering lack of imagination on the part of local and national government. Building a decent public transport system is undeniably costly in the short term and usually requires a significant leap of faith.
In a political culture where playing it safe is the order of the day and the accountants tend to hold the whip hand progress is often sluggish at best and sometimes nonexistent.
A sizable slice of blame has, alas, to rest with my own team, the environmental movement. Too often we talk in terms of what people mustn't do, demanding that the dress code for the promised land requires we all wear a hair shirt.
The fantasy world of autonomous ‘pods’ that replace the petrol hungry tin box on the average suburban drive might always be slightly out of reach. Even if it did come about knowing this country’s talent for making chaos out of the mundane it would only be a matter of time before the whole system was brought down by the wrong kind of snow or leaves on the line.
The truth is that though things are looking had humans have the intelligence and the resilience to turn the situation around. We are more than capable of creating a society that is greener fairer and better for everyone.
As it happens, I don't own a car; but it I did that is the sort of world I'd happily give it up to build.
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