Thanks, TACO

The Mango Paedo, Donald Trump (aka TACO*), has cut funding for all sorts of renewable stuff. For instance, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against California’s clean car rules, which set limits on tailpipe pollution. This followed the Trump administration’s rollbacks to Biden-era car efficiency standards. TACO also signed an executive order directing the U.S. Department of Defence to purchase electricity from coal-fired power plants. The White House also said they would provide $175m to five coal-fired power plants in West Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Kentucky to keep them online beyond their scheduled retirement dates. The administration has repealed the endangerment finding, the requirement that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must protect people from climate pollution. Established in 2009, it empowered the EPA to regulate six greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. This rollback makes climate denial official US policy¹.

Trump said ending the endangerment finding would do away with an electric vehicle “mandate” put in place by his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. Under Biden, Congress passed a law to expand the nation’s electric vehicle charging network and created tax incentives to lower the cost of EVs, but it did not include any provisions forcing buyers to purchase them². These are just some of the moves Trump has undertaken to prevent US action on climate change.

The idiotic, catastrophic February 28 attacks on Iran by Israel and their proxy, the US armed forces, and the consequent closing of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, have prevented some 20% of the world’s oil getting to market, as well as large proportions of the world’s fertiliser and helium. This idiotic attack has led to the price of crude going through the roof, such that at our local service station, diesel, which fuelled our previous vehicle, is just under $3.00 per litre, whereas before the Mango Paedo was suckered into bombing Iran by Netanyahu, it was about $1.90. This, coupled with the possibility of actually running out of fuel, as some service stations have already done, has led to a dramatic increase in reported interest in battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). The problem is so concerning that National Cabinet has even canvassed the possibility of introducing fuel rationing³.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, we have had a BEV for just over a year and have done one long trip (3,000km) from Canberra to Adelaide and back⁴. But I digress.

While only 2% of cars on the road in Australia are EVs (BEVs and PHEVs), the percentage of new car sales which were BEVs alone in the fourth quarter of 2025 was about 9.25%. The feature of this sales data which struck me was that in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) the proportion of new car sales which were BEVs in the same period was about 21%!⁵

Sales of electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to reach over 640,000 by 2030 across Australia, according to the last forecasts by leading energy analysts BloombergNEF (BNEF). Driven by Australia’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard (NVES) and supported by an increasing variety of models, Australia’s electric vehicle market is set to continue growing over the second half of the decade.

Sales of EVs – by which BNEF means both battery EVs (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) – exceeded approximately 158,000 in 2025 (including ours), up significantly from the 114,000 sold in 2024. BEVs dominated sales, accounting for two-thirds of the total, but PHEVs saw the greatest year-on-year growth, up from 12,598 in 2023 to 23,392 in 2024 and 51,369 in 2025⁶.

So, the Mango Paedo’s military ‘excursion’ into Iran has hastened the change from internal combustion engines to assorted electric vehicles, the opposite of what his fossil fuel supporters and donors would have wanted. That is what happens when you have a moron in charge, who makes decisions based on advice from his sycophants who only tell him what he wants to hear.

*TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. This was a derogatory acronym directed at the US President’s approach to trade policy. It was coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong in a May 2025 opinion piece and referred to the Mango Paedo’s pattern of announcing steep tariffs only to backpedal in the face of market turmoil⁷.

Sources

1. https://www.actonclimate.com/trumptracker/
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg8xjm8932o
3. https://www.afr.com/companies/transport/with-fuel-prices-soaring-it-s-hard-for-ev-owners-to-stay-humble-20260317-p5ofkn
4. https://blotreport.com/2026/03/10/3000-km-in-an-ev/
5. https://www.aaa.asn.au/research-data/electric-vehicle/
6. https://thedriven.io/2026/02/13/electric-vehicle-sales-tipped-to-jump-six-fold-in-australia-by-2030/