Who’d have thought a fossil-fuel shill like Trump would be the one to spark a green revolution? | George Monbiot

Donald Trump has done more to accelerate the energy transition than anyone else alive. Fossil fuel companies bankrolled his presidential campaign to stop the transition in its tracks. But when you back a volatile narcissist, unable to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, you shouldn’t expect to control the outcome.It’s not that the fossils are suffering yet. As prices have soared since Trump and Netanyahu attacked Iran, oil executives have been selling shares at gobsmacking prices: the CEO of Chevron, for example, has cashed $104m so far this year. Vladimir Putin has also received a massive boost to his Ukraine invasion budget. As promised, Trump has gutted clean energy rules and programmes, green alternatives and environmental science. A fortnight ago, he stated, with the usual quantum of evidence (zero): “The environmentalists, I mean, they are terrorists … I call them environmental terrorists.”But Trump’s illegal war, waged at terrible cost, is also focusing minds in governments around the world. It’s a demonstration not just that the orange emperor cannot be trusted, but also that fossil fuels cannot be trusted. Concentrated in certain regions, in the hands of either unreliable allies, potential opponents or outright enemies, dependent on long supply lines that can easily be disrupted, subject to price volatility that can trigger regime change in almost any country that relies on them, they now look less like a lifeline than a liability.Again, it is true that the short-term response of some governments has been to favour fossil energy, through cutting fuel taxes or raising subsidies to help ease the cost of living crisis. But at the same time, many are now seeking to reduce or break their dependency. The logic of switching to renewables looks ineluctable.This is certainly how their voters see it. The war has triggered a global surge in demand for electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, heat pumps and other fossil-free technologies. Inquiries about buying EVs have risen 23% in the UK since the attack on Iran began, by 50% in Germany and by 160% in France. There’s similar interest in India, south-east Asia and South Korea. Even in the US, where Trump has done everything possible to stymie the technology, there’s 20% more interest than before the war.The same goes for domestic solar panels and heat pumps. People in this country aren’t nearly as ignorant of their own interests as the Mail and the Telegraph like to pretend.Rising enthusiasm for green tech coincides with some remarkable breakthroughs. Battery technology, as the climate advocate Bill McKibben points out, is advancing at astonishing rates, defying even recent predictions. Through grid-scale batteries, we could quickly eliminate the need for fossil fuel plants as the power source of last resort. This would greatly reduce the price of electricity. Solid-state batteries could before long enable the super-fast charging of everything, everywhere, with far longer storage times and (in cars) much greater range. Quantum batteries, now beginning to look like a realistic possibility, could transform the system all over again.We are on the cusp of vast, cascading shifts in energy supply and storage. Any country that fails to respond will remain trapped in the fossil age, facing high bills and insecurity, while others transform their economies. Last week, the Chinese vehicle maker BYD announced plans for a network of super-fast chargers in the UK, which can power up a car battery from 10% to 70% in five minutes. Petrol and diesel automakers developing new models might as well be investing in typewriters and rotary telephones.Governments should seek the electrification of everything that can be electrified, and the retirement of much that cannot. Rather than – as the gasbags insist – trying to extract the last dregs of fossil fuel from moribund North Sea fields, which could supply only a fraction of future demand, while keeping us locked into foreign dependency, the UK should now go all-out for grid batteries, heat pumps and induction hobs.Half-measures offer nothing but delay and wasted costs. It makes no sense to keep selling new hybrid cars after full-fossil vehicles are phased out in 2030. An electric typewriter is still a typewriter.This is also a great time to invest in energy conservation and energy efficiency. One of the remarkable legacies of Anne Hidalgo, former mayor of Paris, has been to enable, through the 15-minute city programme, people to meet their needs more cheaply, more conveniently and with greatly reduced emissions and air pollution. It is one of many examples of how we could do more with less. Instead of seeking to extend the long fossil century, we can, by switching to 21st-century technologies and solutions, not only protect ourselves from price shocks and dictators, but also improve our lives, create jobs and help prevent climate breakdown. But today we scarcely need to point it out, as Trump is making the argument on our behalf.I believe his attack on every possible green measure is motivated as much by billionaire nihilism as by the demands of his sponsors. As a recent post of his suggests, he might actually believe he is divine. How can he prove it to himself? By terminating the lives and living conditions of mortals, either with a stroke of the pen, or with a thunderbolt from a B-1 Lancer bomber plane. Destruction is not just the means to an end. It is also the end.The consequences of his mad-emperor phase ripple outwards. Trump’s support for Viktor Orbán might have contributed to the fall of the Hungarian autocrat’s regime. With it goes a vast infrastructure of funding, channelling the profits from Russian oil into propaganda networks across Europe and the UK. We are just beginning to understand how much of the anti-green campaigning in this country might have been financed this way.Greens who were long dismissed as “idealistic” and “unrealistic” now look like hard-headed pragmatists and true patriots. They are years ahead of their rivals in demanding a transition that makes sense on every level: environmental, economic and political. And unlike the far right, the hard right and much of the rest of the political spectrum, they have not been seduced by the foreign money corrupting our politics.The attack on Iran is not the way any of us wanted this to happen. But the unintended consequences of Trump’s pointless war could help sink Trumpism everywhere – and the corrupt and filthy industry that props it up. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist