If you listen closely you can just hear it. Like the rumble of an approaching storm, the opening salvos in a war for survival have just been fired. Under attack is motorsport – from Formula 1 to go-karts – and the enemy is the environment.

For now, it is an occasional opinion piece in an influential newspaper or a gentle questioning on a TV show. But, with climbing oil prices and the signs of climate change becoming ever more undeniable, the voices of opposition are getting ever louder.

A couple of weekends ago, I planted 300 trees on my property and then came in to watch the V8 Supercars and the French Grand Prix. Strangely, I wasn’t strangled to death by my own sense of irony, but the dichotomy didn’t go unnoticed. The rhetoric and the constant chorus of doomsayers are starting to gain some traction (pardon the pun).

Men with anachronistic ponytails, thoughtful beards and corduroy jackets with elbow patches are teaming with free-spirited youngsters wearing rasta hats and hemp clothes to battle all that they perceive to be environmentally damaging. Their message is starting to get through and governments are taking notice.

But these are the same well-meaning people who terrorised the Australian government into refusing to look at using the world’s largest uranium deposit to provide our own energy needs, despite the obvious greenhouse benefits. Simplistic and populist solutions are not going to solve the problem.

Make no mistake, I am not for a single moment a climate change denier. Global warming is real, it is man-made and it is the biggest threat that the planet faces. It is a problem that will require drastic and prolonged action and will cause serious upheaval and pain for those affected - that is to say, everyone.

Cynics will claim that farting cows produce more greenhouse gases than the entire transport sector – let alone motorsport – and that global warming is therefore a natural phenomenon. Perhaps they should ask themselves who owns the cows and where the beef comes from for their Big Macs. Such spurious arguments do nothing to dilute the effects of climate change.

It is, however, equally impossible to produce a rational argument in favour of motorsport. To claim that it is important because things like crumple zones, traction control and seatbelts were all racing developments is to argue that war is essential because it gave us satellite navigation.

But then, so many things that are central to modern society are illogical and unsupportable. Opera, Calvin Klein, Hollywood blockbusters, television, mountain climbing, horse racing – none of them is absolutely necessary. Why have chateaubriand with dauphinoise potatoes when mung-beans and fire-roasted squirrel would do?

Give the enviro-fascists their way and we’d be living in a global version of North Korea.

Climate change is such a massive and intractable problem that it is difficult to know where to start. When faced with dilemmas of this nature, governments invariably resort to symbolic gestures rather than make difficult decisions that will get them unelected; and therein lies the danger.

Heaven help us if governments start ratcheting up environmental controls on motorsport. I would no more want to watch Toyota Prius racing than see the Olympic 100m sprint contested by fat people. Motor racing is about speed, noise and engine fumes. Take those things away and the sport is doomed – and so, I suspect, is the planet, because we’ve decided to take the easy way out.