This article develops emerging critical approaches to global environmental politics by starting with the question, posed by Julian Saurin: ‘If degrading practices occur as a matter of routine, how do we account for this?’. Through an analysis of the global political economy of the car, it shows that widespread social practices which systemically produce global environmental change are simultaneously deeply embedded in the reproduction of global power structures. It focuses on three interconnected aspects of this global political economy—the role of the car industry in processes of globalization, its role in reproducing capital accumulation in the twentieth century, and the promotion of the car over its alternatives by states.