First they came for the free plastic carrier bags. We applauded. Then they came for the cheap taxi rides back to the ’burbs. We yelled, “Bravo!” Now they have come for the wood-burning stoves. At last, the metropolitan elite is moved to say: “No. Enough. Not in my back flue.”

Sadiq Khan, who we thought was our friend, has written to Michael Gove (of all people). He is asking for increased powers to tackle air pollution in London. Which is fine. Air pollution in London is very bad. Those poor children in their pollution hot-spot playgrounds. Except that among the miscreant habits in his sights, Khan has included the use of wood-burning stoves.

That’s right. Our wood-burning stoves. The wood-burning stoves we installed just five years ago, partly because we were told this was environmentally friendly and partly because Victorian houses were designed around a fireplace focal-point and, really, all that 1970s boarding-up was an appalling lapse in taste. Yes, some of us opted straightforwardly for the open fire, a little guilty about the absence of fuel efficiency. It’s expensive, installing a wood-burning stove, after all. And, occasionally, you’re entitled to wonder, surely: “What difference to the tragedy of global warming at this frighteningly rapid pace will my own one little indulgence make?”

Also, it is very nice to sit on our Oka sofas, gazing at our William Scott prints, giving our Danish pottery the occasional pat, yet feeling close to nature, primal even, as the flames flicker over our faces, just as they have always done, ever since the fire lighter was invented.

Who could begrudge us a little touch of elemental power, trapped behind glass within the sanctuary of our own homes? Who could deny us the satisfied feeling that honest labour has been honestly done, when we say to the log-delivery man: “Over there, please”? Sadiq Khan. That’s who. The man whose lasting memorial is now set to be 1.5 million wood-burning stoves filled with wrinkled conkers, dust and the ashes of southern bourgeois dreams. Is this really what the mayor of London wants?

Khan, no doubt, blames particulates. They are an easy scapegoat. Earlier in the year, research was published in the New Scientist, suggesting that “pollution nanoparticles may enter your blood and cause disease”. The idea is that the tiny particles enter the bloodstream, lodge in arterial fatty plaques and exacerbate heart conditions. A lot. There’s also reason to believe that they can enter the brain, causing dementia, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In other words, particulates are likely to be an even more pervasive problem than gaseous air-pollution.

As for hygge, the Danish idea of cosy comfort that has swept Britain in recent years, who is thinking about our hygge in all of this? We are extremely fond of the idea that our wood-burning stoves are benign. How could this disaster have befallen us. Who is to blame?

Previously, anti-pollution campaigners have focused on violations of nitrogen dioxide levels. The campaign group ClientEarth has for years been challenging the government to take greater action against urban pollution, and with great success. ClientEarth has a bug-bear about diesel, another supposedly environmentally friendly alternative that turned out not to be. But who has diesel as part of their gracious living matrix anyway? Sweaty old diesel users have only got themselves to blame. How could they ever have believed that diesel was a clean fuel? Some people don’t have the sense they were born with.

Except, of course, that the whole wood-burning myth comes under this category too. In order to embrace the harmless naked flame idea, one had merely blithely to suppress common sense. Global anti-poverty and justice campaigners, for example, have been highlighting the damage to health caused to women who cook over open fires for decades. Cooking on an open fire has been likened to smoking 400 cigarettes an hour and is linked, research suggests, to four million premature deaths each year.

How anyone ever believed that directing all this filth into the air outside our homes made all that danger go away is the actual mystery here. Yet, I know for a fact that a prominent green used to pride himself on dragging wheelie bins full of discarded wood back home to provide ethically warming recycled fuel, and advised others to follow suit. The madness.

I’m totally guilty myself of the magical thinking that allows us to believe that the things that we want for ourselves are harmless, even moral. I got my chimneys relined some years ago, so that I could get away a bit from the evil grasp of the energy companies while simultaneously making sense of my handsome black slate fireplaces.

It finally got through to me, earlier in the year, that fires were part of the problem in London and being pious about not driving wasn’t going to cut it any more. I decided that I’d use up the fuel I still had, then stop. I’ve only lit two fires since that time, and I’m seriously considering hoarding the stuff that is left for special occasions. I have Yule Logs to last until 2021.

• Deborah Orr is a Guardian columnist