Blog: One of the most contentious issues of our lifetimes is going to be global warming, writes Motoring Editor Sharon Walters.

There are still many camps that refuse to believe that it is happening at all and declare that what we are seeing is the Earth changing as part of a natural cycle of events.

Now I have no intention whatsoever of getting embroiled in the whys and wherefores of this debate, but I am going to comment on what I believe is an absolute certainty: petrol and diesel for our cars is going to get more expensive and our ability to go where we want when we want may be severely compromised because of affordability.

Oil companies have for many years have, thanks to their powerful lobbying machines, spoken to governments all over the world and it is also no secret that here in the UK successive governments have used the motorist as a cash cow when their fiscal policies have gone the same way as the Titanic.

A recent study by the AA has shown that fuel consumption has reduced by 15 per cent since the credit crunch in 2008 and the Treasury is estimated to have lost around £1 billion in fuel duty over the first six months of 2011. So you can bet that some mandarin in Whitehall (who probably doesn’t own a car) is already looking to plunder the motorist’s purse to recoup this.

A quick trawl of the internet seems to suggest that cars worldwide are responsible for approximately 10 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Now if you were to go to a CEO of any company and ask him or her for a load of money to tackle a problem that constituted, at best, 10 per cent of the whole issue I would suggest you would be told to go away and come back with a better proposal.

Indeed if you look at one of the business process models called 6sigma, the idea of going for what is termed ‘low hanging fruit’ i.e. something you can do quickly and easily to make a difference, still doesn’t appear to make sense.

So why all the furore over alternative fuels?

The world is changing and with the industrialisation of countries like China and India set to accelerate, one of the issues is how we are going to power it all.

Certainly, relying on fossil fuel seems to be short-sighted so the ongoing research can only help. But is hydrogen the answer to all our fossil fuel burning prayers? I’m not sure.

Hydrogen seems to offer a limitless source of energy with virtually no emissions and I’m sure that if this was scaled up to power station size production the world would definitely see a reduction in greenhouse gases, but it seems to me that producing hydrogen in the first place is requires a massive amount of energy with the resultant greenhouse gases.

As far as cars go hydrogen is still in its infancy and there is still no evidence that if it becomes popular it won’t be taxed to the hilt, like current fuels, which may mean that the affordability of getting about in the future may not reduce, but we do need to let technologies like this to develop to their full potential before kicking them in to the long grass.

Who knows, one breakthrough may transform all of our lives forever.