Everyone has their pet hates; I just seem to have more of them than other people, and they spread in this holiday season like miner worms in the Christmas holly (I’m not being pejorative; I’m only quoting from my gardening encyclopedia.)

White shoes, the Fraser Institute, plastic flowerpots, eels, Rupert Murdoch, calling it “biosolids” instead of “sludge” or “shameless attempt to use old sewage,” any white-collar worker who claims to toil “on the front lines” as opposed to saying his job compels him to meet humans, calling a liar an “intentional misrepresenter” and, this year as every year, anything written by Martin Amis, all these things give me reason to live and rant.

And then came the SUV, my contempt for which has crested this month because I am out shopping so much, and now trumps all other irritants.

I loathe SUVs. That does not mean I loathe all those who drive them. If you have more than two children and own a working farm with the unplowed country roads that entails, you are entitled. Revenue Canada probably audits farmers without SUVs. I understand. If you work in the front lines of the logging industry, i.e., you meet a lot of trees and make your own roads, yes, you are within your rights.

As for the rest of you . . .

I really do despise the selfish fools who drive them in the city. Perhaps you feel you need these “Yank tanks” or “Chelsea tractors,” as they are known in Britain, “paramilitaries for soccer moms,” in the United States, or “big box of uglies,” as they are known to me, but why?

You are a shattered personality and what restores your self-esteem is to have bigger tires, seats, cup holders and possibly even bigger car keys as you tower over everybody else on the road. The reason you never notice me mouthing at you at a stoplight (“Your truck is stupid”) or my giving you the finger is that you are always on your cellphone, doubtless calling your therapist to ask why nobody likes you.

It just might be because you blow 40 per cent more gas into the atmosphere than anyone else, even though building a fuel-efficient ugly truck is well within the capability of any automaker, as Linda McQuaig makes clear in her great book It’s the Crude, Dude, which I think rivals Naomi Klein’s No Logo and Naomi Wolf’s Fire with Fire for changing the way we live now.

Four big wheels bad, I say. Buy an Echo or a Smart Car. I care a great deal about aesthetics (which is why I keep my eyes closed as I cab around downtown Toronto and its “wow” new buildings.) If you care about aesthetics, you would never buy a giant truck on steroids. You would buy an elegant vehicle. They exist.

SUV drivers own a huge, hick, lumbering, gas-wasting abomination, which I was happy to see when I grew up in Kapuskasing, but I am less pleased to encounter when trying to park at a city hospital. Happily, I know that SUV drivers are more likely to be in the hospital, since they crash more often than drivers of normal vehicles. The key to avoiding crashes is nimbleness. SUVs are like Etch-a-Sketches. They only do straight lines. Furthermore, they roll over more easily and tend to kill their drivers. I wonder what the cellphone therapist says at a time like that.

Sadly, if an SUV driver hits your child in your sane-sized car, he is more likely to kill your child because he is driving a battering ram.

Everything SUVs touch suffers: other cars, other people and the air. The atmosphere suffers not just from that tangy ozone-depleting do-you-smell-gas effect, but from the dust storms created worldwide by 4 x 4s.

It used to be that vehicles stayed on roads. But 4 x 4s go off-road, often for no reason beyond guys showing off. Africa’s deserts are coated with very thin layers of algae, lichen and clay, the Guardian reports. That is all that prevents soil erosion. This is why uncultivated land must be left alone or anchored in some way. But increasingly it is being invaded by 4 x 4s. Scientists report that there has been a 10-fold increase in dust storms worldwide in the past 50 years. Those dust storms cause asthma and they release disease-causing spores and fungi.

Think of SUVs as gigantic cigarettes that give all the emphysema and none of the pleasure. They need a giant health warning, with huge stickers of cancerated lungs and what happens to the human skull when the big lunk rolls over.

One more thing: If the woman in your life buys you Hummer aftershave, the one in the splayed bottle built with road clearance in the middle, she is making fun of you. Soon, she will leave you and find a normal man.

As I drive, I peer in the giant SUV cab and establish its bona fides, of which invariably there are none. “Justify your SUV,” I sneer, Madonna-like. I check out the back cavern. If there isn’t a load of 2-by-4s, eight bags of compost, a powered post-hole digger and 16 steel fence footings, that’s it.

“Did you know that people climbing into SUVs look like Spider-Man? They’re sweating, they’re flailing, and the date is over before it began, trust me.”

I am, of course, talking to myself. You can’t converse with an office tower on jumbo wheels, a dirty, grey, child’s toy.

Next year, please sell your SUV. The world will be shared by those who take transit and those who drive Smart Cars overdosing on parking spaces. “I can’t choose,” they’ll shriek at the therapist on their cell. Hush, she’ll tell them. “If you’re going to have problems, this is the problem to have.”