George Monbiot, the environmental campaigner, scourge of the automobile industry and champion of not owning cars, has finally bought himself . . . a car.

Notwithstanding pledges to live a green lifestyle and be a model to others, he has given in to temptation and acquired a secondhand Renault. The car industry will be silently celebrating the news. Monbiot has championed an anticar movement that has grown rapidly in influence to the point where many owners now feel guilty about using their cars.

His most recent book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. He once described the pro-car lobby as “antisocial bastards” and has blamed cars for ruining children’s lives. “Our children are growing upsocially stunted: instead of playing together they are playing alone on their computers, partly because the streets are both dangerous and choked with cars.”

In what can only be described as a comprehensive U-turn, Monbiot has chosen a Renault Clio, an economical hatchback but not the most frugal in fuel consumption or carbon emissions. He bought it from a friend for an undisclosed amount. As zealots will be quick to remind him, it emits 115g/km , 10% higher than a Toyota Prius, the petrol-electric hybrid belovedof CO2 of the green movement.

Jeremy Clarkson, Monbiot’s long-standing antagonist, said: “I’m glad he hasn’t gone for a Prius – that would have marked him out as an idiot. I just hope the bonnet doesn’t fly up [Renault Clios have been criticised for faulty bonnet catches] because he’ll be killed – then where would the world be?”

Monbiot says the Clio is the first car he has owned since he sold a Ford Escort in 1989. His move from Oxford to rural Wales with his family in January meant a change of lifestyle, and he discovered he needed personal transport.

“I had cars from 1982 to 1989, then I didn’t have a car until about six weeks ago,” he says. “I’ve had to break a long-time commitment, but the only way to get by, we decided, was to have the occasional use of a car.”

For ordinary motorists struggling with their consciences, Monbiot’s decision will come as no surprise and will prompt the obvious question: if one of the country’s highest-profile green campaigners can’t manage without a car, how can the average commuter?

Monbiot admits he is open to charges of hypocrisy but says people he has so far confessed to have been understanding. “I still feel pretty awful about it,” he admits. “The rule is, if it’s at all possible to travel by any other means, then that’s what we do. The car is a last resort and I haven’t even used a tank of petrol yet.” (The Clio is in fact a diesel.)

Monbiot knows the acquisition will be seen as capitulation but blames shortcomings in the public transport system. “I spoke at the Hay literary festival the other day and we worked out that the only way to get there without spending an entire day travelling was to take the car. I’d much rather do without one but until there are improvements in public transport sometimes you are forced to compromise, especially in such a remote area. What we need in Wales are better rail links.”

In his latest book, Monbiot worked out that the coach was the greenest form of travel, in terms of CO2 emissions per person per kilometre. But does Monbiot use it? No. “Coach travel would be slightly better [than the train] but I will be damned if I’m going round the country in the current system,” he says. “If you’ve got loads of time and very little money – if you’re unemployed, say – the coach is the way to go. But if you need to get anywhere that day, it’s unusable. I would like to see bus lanes on all the motorways and bus stations outside city centres so buses don’t have to battle through the traffic.”

Monbiot, a Guardian columnist, attended Stowe school in Buckinghamshire, followed by Brasenose College, Oxford, before joining the BBC, first in the natural history unit, then as a reporter for the World Service before leaving to write his first book and becoming a leading light in the environmental movement.

He admits to being “a terrible boy racer” in his youth, tearing up country roads in his first car, a Renault 8. “I should have been banned,” he says. “I didn’t have enough sense at the wheel.”

But when he sold his Escort 18 years ago, then aged 26, he was glad to see the back of it. “The whole laddish culture of ‘it’s my car, I’ll drive it wherever I want’, and the idea that anybody who gets in my way is a Lycra-wearing Nazi sandalista from Islington, is such a Neanderthal attitude,” he says – a veiled dig at Clarkson who he has criticised for “championing the unrestrained freedom of the road”.

“There’s no great pleasure in driving in Britain. Congestion makes it miserable. You spend most of the time in traffic.”

Monbiot has also begun campaigning to have speed cameras installed in Machynlleth in west Wales where he lives, citing “problems with boy racers”. He takes the train, ferry, walks or cycles whenever possible, still believes there is no excuse for buying a 4x4, but doesn’t see hybrids as the solution. “A hybrid is good for stop-start city driving but it doesn’t make any difference in the countryside.”

Neither is hydrogen fuel the answer – at least not for cars. “There are storage problems in using hydrogen. Even when very compressed, hydrogen is 10 times less energy-dense than petrol, so you have to carry 10 times as much hydrogen, requiring a tank 10 times larger to get the same range.

“Billions of dollars have been invested into hydrogen but we are still nowhere near cracking the problem.”

He is also an outspoken opponent of biofuels, claiming biodiesel or bioethanol made from crops such as oilseed rape or wheat are a “formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster”, setting up “competition for food between cars and people”.

Instead, Monbiot advocates developing more economical conventional cars and electric cars with a longer range and which are much easier to recharge. He envisages battery stations from which drivers could lease ready-charged batteries, rather than having to find a plug and spend hours waiting for a recharge.

“There is no car in band A of vehicle excise duty available in the UK at the moment,” says Monbiot. “Why not? It is possible to make a car that does 120mpg. The technology is available.”

His intention to move to Wales, reported in The Sunday Times in November, was prompted by his Welsh wife Angharad, who wants their 14-month-old daughter Hanna to grow up as a fellow Welsh speaker. The couple have plans to make their home as environmentally friendly as possible, adding insulation, solar thermal panels for hot water in the summer months, and a wood-burning stove (using sustainable wood) to provide heating and hot water during the winter.

“We are going to take a bog-standard suburban house and turn it into something with eco specs four or five times better than the average,” he says. He has already planted a vegetable plot and hopes to be largely self-sufficient – at least for basic foods – by next year.

Additional reporting: Mark Piesing

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