Everything Trump Touches Dies
Including the fossil fuel industry
Look, I know what you expect on a Friday. You arrive here carrying the psychic residue of another week spent watching civilisation collapse, and I’m expected to convert that dread into therapeutic lulz. Fair enough. We all have our roles in this increasingly undignified American fin de siècle.
I’d like to try something different this week, however. Imma try to convince you that maybe this shit isn’t all bad, that maybe the end of one world as we know it is coming, but something better might be coming on right after that.
I want to make the case that, yes, Everything Trump Touches Dies, but increasingly, that appears to include the fossil fuel industry. Shall we enjoy this deeply stupid miracle while we can?
Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade kinking on fossil fuels. He’d get sooty-faced coal miners on stage at his rallies, handing them all sledgehammers to cave in a Toyota Prius because EVs are go-karts for socialist transkids. Meanwhile, in the luxury boxes, oil billionaires wrote donation cheques big enough to generate their own gravity wells, patiently waiting for RFK Jr to reclassify crude oil as a vegetable. After all, why shouldn’t schoolchildren begin each day with a hearty bowl of West Texas Intermediate? It’s full of energy!
Renewable energy was dismissed as the preserve of the morally vain and physically underwhelming; the energy source of vegans and the geostrategic equivalent of drinking oat milk at a monster truck rally. But of course, that was before Trump cannonballed into History’s Dumbest War, inadvertently doing more for clean energy than every Extinction Rebellion numpty who ever glued themselves to the Mona Lisa.
“Drill, baby, drill” worked beautifully right up until Trump’s own supporters began noticing that the drill bit appeared to be entering through the back of their skulls to frappé whatever remained inside.
Thanks for reminding us, sir, that much of the global economy still runs on giant floating bombs crawling through narrow waterways ringed by medieval death cultists, theocratic dictatorships, straight-up pirates and aspirational warlords. This is somewhat less of a rational energy market than it is a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine powered by Persian mood swings. It is also the point in the discourse where fossil fuel lobbyists and Liberal-National Party politicians (yes, I know they’re the same thing) clear their throats and explain that the obvious solution to oil instability is…er, lots more oil, which is a bit like responding to your meth addiction by hiring on a second dealer for supply chain resilience. And for sure, having an extra meth dealer can help in the short term. This is what Albo’s been doing. Panic-buying supply. Cracking open the strategic reserve and feasting like a jolly possum in an unguarded McDonald’s dumpster.
Is he a can-do PM or a frantic dad at Bunnings Warehouse ten minutes before close of business on Christmas Eve after discovering, quite unexpectedly, that ‘someone’ forgot to check the BBQ gas bottle? I guess that depends on whether, a year or two from now, that bright red neon sign is still flashing over our heads, reading: WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO YOURSELVES?
Because this time we’ve seen the alternative, the whole world has. That’s why China just slapped a bunch of SOLD stickers on their giganormous stockpile of surplus solar panels, grid-scale batteries and Godzilla-sized wind turbines. Trump and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps took the world economy hostage, but forgot there was a clearly marked exit that we could all walk through. Granted, the rush into renewables isn’t going to help Woolies and Coles get their groceries from the warehouse to the store in the next few weeks. You will still soon be paying $14 for a very sad capsicum. That pain is coming. But once the renewable infrastructure is built out, and almost every country in the world bar one very obvious, very stupid standout, is rushing towards that future now, the power arrives every day for free, without requiring escort by an aircraft carrier battlegroup.
Electrification of the economy compounds that advantage. The more that transport and industry move onto electric systems, the fewer parts of your economy remain exposed to fossil fuel disruption. The fossil fuel lobby will insist, with increasing desperation, that electric vehicles aren’t suitable for heavy haulage at scale, but China has already switched over more than half of its truck fleet to electric.
While Donald Trump was putting the American automobile industry on a road to obsolescence and death by repealing Joe Biden’s EV subsidies, China has been leaping ahead. As recently as 2024, EV heavy trucks made up only a bit more than 4 percent of the Chinese market, but as climate analyst Dave Borlace points out, by the month of December 2025 that soared to 54 percent. It’s all thanks to several subsidies for trucking companies to go electric, and a huge government build-out of charging infrastructure.
Photons don’t get hijacked in the Strait of Hormuz and wind turbines gonna turn no matter how long the orange blowhard holds his breath. That doesn’t mean renewables are magical. They still require mining, grids, storage upgrades, permitting reform and governments capable of completing infrastructure projects before the heat death of the universe. But compared to this bullshit, right now?
This is where things get genuinely dangerous for the old fossil fuel order, thanks to the Orange God King. Climate activists have spent thirty years making what is, morally speaking, an airtight case. Unfortunately, moral arguments bounce off governments like marshmallows thrown at a tiger tank. World leaders love a good climate summit. They’ll fly in on private jets, sign a solemn declaration in biodegradable ink, then approve seventeen new coal mines on the way to the afterparty.
Now though? Morality is fungible. Self-interest is not. When voters can’t afford petrol or food, the clean-energy conversation changes overnight to a discussion of sovereignty. Once clean energy gets mapped directly onto personal and national security rather than environmental virtue, the old culture war scripts go up in flames.
Nice work, Mr President.
