I'm walking through a garden centre when I see an owl. It's a garden ornament with oversized eyes. The eyes are LED displays.

I find the button on the base and switch it on. The eyes look left, then right, then roll and blink on repeat. It's kinda neat.

"Can we get one?" I ask my wife.

She looks left, then right, rolls her eyes and blinks.

"Where would we put it?" she asks, which translates as: don't be so stupid.

I say nothing.

I go to switch it off, but notice the small solar panel on its back. It doesn't need batteries. It runs entirely on sunlight. It costs nothing to operate. Still, my instinct is to turn it off. I feel an illogical guilt, as if I'm wasting something. A mythical battery. An imaginary bill.

I leave it on and walk away.

On the way out of the garden centre, I see several people stop and admire it. Its googly eyes blink at them, good advertising. I think they will sell more. I tucked my guilt away.

My whole life, I've been conditioned to save energy.

Just as my dad used to do with my siblings and me, I wander around my house, switching off the lights my kids leave on with the indifference of someone whose name isn't on the bill.

I've also been conditioned to think of the internal combustion engine as better than the alternatives, another illogical belief.

Electric cars are not new. Believe it or not, electric cars came first. Around the turn of the 1900s, electric, steam, and petrol cars competed for the top spot. Fossil-fuel cars won out because of infrastructure and cost. The most decisive factor in their success was the mass production of the Model T Ford, which made them substantially cheaper.

Rory Sutherland, a British advertising guru, has an interesting perspective:

Imagine electric cars had won out and we're all nipping around in clean, quiet cars. A rogue engineer makes an announcement:

I've developed a new way of powering a car. You put a huge tank of flammable liquid in the back, which feeds into cylinders where a series of explosions produce a limited range of torque, so we'll need a thing called a gearbox, which we will need to steep in oil to ensure the car doesn't grind to a halt. We'll also need an air filter, a water filter, and a cooling system, which will make the car vastly more complicated.

Where do we get this inflammable liquid?

We'll need to invest billions to drill for crude oil from deep underground. Then build expensive refineries to turn it into diesel and petrol.

Will it perform better than an electric car?

Well, no, not really.

Is it quieter?

Um, no. It's noisy as hell. Boy-racers will remove the baffles from the exhaust system so that it roars like a lion.

Exhaust system?

Oh, yes. I should have mentioned. It will emit a toxic mixture of gases, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and various poisonous air pollutants, carcinogens and particulates that are toxic to all living matter and cause irreversible damage to our environment, ultimately killing us all.

Is it simpler to make?

Not exactly, there are 250 moving parts in the drivetrain alone.

Okay, what's the upside?

You can refill it really quickly.

Can you refill it at home?

No, you can't refill it at home; you need to go to a petrol station.

Will this petrol station be a small thing at the side of the road?

No, it will need to cover a large area. But you will be able to buy other things there, like pies, sweets and highly processed concoctions that people will guzzle as they drive.

So, who is this car aimed at?

Anyone with loads of money, the bladder of an elephant and a lack of conscience.

No one would take it seriously.

Yet this is the system we built our world around.

The war in Iran has given us a stark reminder of how our reliance on oil and petrol is foolhardy, irrational and unsustainable.

Our energy supply depends on extraction, transport, refining, and distribution across politically unstable regions. Every stage introduces vulnerability. Conflicts cause problems. The closure of a small strait in the Middle East has shown us the fragile nature of the geopolitical climate.

Oil is a diminishing resource. Finite. It goes up in cost and down in availability. While politicians are advocating drill, drill, drill, they are ignoring the inevitable. We have to switch. We have to wean ourselves off the black stuff. It's as obvious as the next high tide.

I don't know why it creates such controversy. We should use oil and gas less. We should find alternatives. We live in a world where we don't see that happening fast enough. Politicians are either too stupid, too shortsighted or too corrupt to care.

Our individual lifestyle choices make little difference to the bigger picture. But that's not the point — the point is, it is going to run out, and on the way there, it will get more expensive. As long as we have politicians who think they know better than science, we are stacking up problems for the future. There will be more wars and greater upheavals.

When wars happen, when Russia invades Ukraine or America, and Israel attacks countries in the Middle East, it affects the entire world. It is devastating. All because we rely on fossil fuels.

Why are we even debating it when it's so blindingly obvious?

We've been locked into the fossil fuel system for 125 years. Imagine if our resources had gone into developing renewable energy. Imagine a century of investment in batteries, solar, and electrification. Quiet systems. Simple machines. Energy that arrives without tankers or pipelines.

That little owl with the googly eyes in the garden centre might have been altogether more impressive — I'm picturing it cutting my grass and pulling out the weeds from my flowerbeds, all powered by the light from the sun.

And I'd probably still go and switch it off before I go to bed.