As the gloom of the British winter recedes, the most fantastic programme of historic events awaits us in 2008. To quote the Great Supermac, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’

Financial pundits reporting from the Detroit Auto Show can scare us with stuff about sub-prime mortgage meltdown and looming industrial stagnation in the developed world. Maybe they’re right, but confidence remains high in historic motor sport, and quite right too.

Yes, our sport is in rude health, but we must open our eyes to a looming, tricky situation. The cause of it is disputed but global warming really is happening and we must be prepared to act rationally and present our sport in an accurate light. The trouble is that this is an emotive subject. There is a dangerous hint of worldwide panic in the air, understandably perhaps, but history suggests panic helps nobody. In such a situation, people on all sides take dogmatic positions and lose all sense of reason.

When I wrote about renewable fuels a while back, all I said was that they won’t be a problem for historic racing engines. Should bioethanol, made from crops, be forced upon us, preparation specialists will cope easily. I said no more than that.

The reaction to this was very strange. I began to be offered ‘green’ cars to test, cars converted to run on bioethanol. My head is not in the sand here: I just ask, what’s planet-friendly about that? Bioethanol fuels are renewable but they are not green. If we want to make historic motor sport green, I still say we should look seriously at methane gas, as produced by Organic Power Ltd. It’s renewable and apparently clean.

Unfortunately, people are confusing climate change with a very threatening energy-supply crisis. The latter, some say, is worse than we think. All these bioethanol fuels mean is that, when the oil wells finally run out, we do have the ability to create a limited amount of fuel from crops. That’s controversial enough in itself, but don’t forget that the emissions from vehicles powered by such fuels seem to differ little from those given out by traditional engines. Other solutions lie ahead on that score.

The mad rush to put up inland wind farms illustrates this confusion perfectly. A majority of the public has been duped into believing that these monstrosities will help us. As they creep onto the horizon, people can see that ‘something is being done’. Done about what, I ask? Is it climate change? Is it the energy crisis? Is it both? People are very confused. We must not be.

Wind farms are expensive to put up and maintain, destroy wildlife, require hideous quantities of concrete to stop them falling over and, at the best of times, the inland ones produce a piddling supply of electricity at twice the cost per unit of old-fashioned power stations. What’s more, the flow of electricity stops as soon as the wind drops. Without a real power station to back wind farms up, if we depended on them for our electricity the lights wouldn’t even come on most of the time. In short, they will neither supply a fraction of the energy we need nor will they bring about any noticeable reduction in global warming.

Some people talk as if they would like to save the planet by banning lorries and, presumably, switching goods deliveries to pedal-powered rickshaws. Most of us would starve. Like any responsible person I care deeply about this planet, and it dismays me that alarm over such matters has reduced so many people to talking nonsense or sticking their heads in the sand.

Let’s put this ludicrous debate aside for the moment. We must do some practical thinking now, while our world of historic motor sport is healthier than ever. Before long, it seems, all new cars will produce zero emissions. That must be a good thing. Most of us believe that.

Meanwhile, historic motor sport is a kind of moving museum of the glorious past. Our deep wish is to see that spirit thrive in generations to come. Sure, we’ll have to fit in with a changing world, but we must also get the message across that emissions from historic cars of all kinds are utterly irrelevant to global warming and equally irrelevant to the energy crisis.

It is possible that the heritage we revere might be forgotten but I haven’t lost hope over that. My personal nostalgia encompasses such sights from around 40 years ago as Jim Clark charging to pole for the German Grand Prix on the old Nürburgring, Jim Hall’s dramatic Chaparral in the BOAC 500 at Brands, Ford versus Ferrari at Le Mans, Roger Clark flat out in an Escort through a forest and even, by early black-and-white satellite link to a Hammersmith cinema, the Brits storming around Indianapolis. Think of Hunt versus Lauda, the guts of Nigel Mansell, the almost supernatural touch of Ayrton Senna – all are sacred legends of our sport.

Such thoughts prompted me years ago to delve into earlier days so deeply that I now feel I was almost there when that battered Bentley survived the White House pile-up to win Le Mans, the Silver Arrows went to Donington, John Cobb was at Brooklands and Fangio came from nowhere to win the 1957 German GP. Such inspiring thoughts, carried by us all, should be passed on to fire the imaginations of those too young to have any knowledge of them.

Historic motor sport is there for us all to enjoy now, in 2008, reflecting over a century of fantastic human achievement and adventure. It is a splendid, harmless reminder of a great past. I look forward to meeting old friends and kicking off the new season properly at Race Retro, the excellent historic motor sport show at Stoneleigh on March 14-16.