'It's all f**kin' green, isn't it?'

That was what one senior motor industry executive from the UK said to me at Frankfurt. And he wasn't wrong.

The big story at this year's Frankfurt motor show was the continuing quest by carmakers to be greener than the rest. After years of attempting to outdo each other in the competition to build the best-driving, most powerful machines, the world's car industry is now engaging in a massive pissing contest to see who can churn out the least-polluting, most planet-friendly cars.

Of course, this is a laudable aim, but there's more than the faint whiff of hypocrisy about it. The issue of climate change has been around for over a decade-and-a-half now, but it's only in the last few years that car companies have paid any notice. It took a critical mass of public and media concern over how our weather was going to hell in a handbasket before the carmakers started to show any real interest.

But you wouldn't think that to listen to them. 'We've been committed for many years to reducing emissions...' 'Of course we were the first to take the issue of CO2 emissions seriously...' 'We have been leading the charge to reduce CO2 emissions...'

All bollocks, of course. Just more hot air escaping into our atmosphere.

The blessing is that in a few years it will stop as quickly as it started. We'll all soon start to realise that it's actually our homes, not our cars that are doing most damage to the environment. The government will be forced by the same public and media now castigating those nasty car companies into really doing something about how we generate power cleanly and how we conserve energy by adequately insulating our homes, instead of picking on easy targets.

By which time the new gospel will be how much more technologically advanced the companies are than their competitors. Electric cars, hydrogen power, fuel cells - the new cant will be the same old, same old but on a different theme.

Meanwhile, I'm off to build a bonfire of low-CO2 press packs...