Aspects relating to the environment, and more particularly climate change, are increasingly holding the stage when it comes to the way the media processes information. Of course, the link between climate change and winters without snow, so-called exceptional flooding, devastating hurricanes or summer heatwaves is perfect material for the headlines of dailies and weeklies. But, what’s more, the concept of global warming is systematically in the headlines because it has become a major stake for society, the environment and the economy. Thus, the written press is calling upon its readers to be conscious of this problem but also to play an active role in this domain. Subsequently, the press tends to call upon us – to its credit – in relation to “good practices” to stop us from wasting energy, and proposes alternatives, which, in general, are not very restrictive. Often, the choice of a “clean” car appears to be an alternative. But compared with the car industry, is the written press coherent with what it puts on paper and the actions it promotes through the adverts it authorises for publication? Therefore, the objective of this paper is to provide an answer to the following three questions: 1] What is the position of car advertising in the written press? 2] What level of emissions are promoted in this advertising in relation to the objectives to be achieved? 3] What could be the solutions to this problem? A detailed analysis of car advertising was carried out in 2006 in four bodies of the Belgian French-speaking written press. The results of this study show that advertising boasts of cars which, in terms of CO2 emissions per kilometre, are from another age, and clearly contradict the values recommended in the in-depth articles written by the journalists of this type of media.