Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, Friday, October 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead)

I went to bed on Tuesday night with trepidation in my heart. Yes the polls predicted a blue wave of Democrat wins in the US mid-terms, but the one thing we know about Donald Trump is he always outperforms the polls. Until now. I woke at about 3:45am, just in time to hear Texas – the Big Oil state itself – flip blue. Trump had finally run out of road.

And of course the biggest mistake he made was to bomb Iran last February. The Iranians have long perfected the art of not only surviving rogue state status, but revelling in it – making their enemies’ lives a misery. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and later the Red Sea disruption and damage to the east west pipeline, sent global oil and gas prices soaring. This immediately translated into price hikes for almost everything else everywhere else, including the average American’s grocery trolley.

We are often told to exploit UK fossil fuels in the name of energy security and price control. But the sight of the US President, leader of the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas, going cap in hand to buy diesel from Vladimir Putin, was one to behold. It’s a global market, and when one major supply route catches a cold, no-one is immune from the contagion. Arguably, Trump’s gleeful dismantling of Joe Biden’s green energy boosting Inflation Reduction Act has made the US particularly vulnerable to fossil fuel disruption: for example it sits down at no 36 in the world ranking of EV market share in 2025 with just 10% (by contrast, the UK is at no 14 with 33%).

There was another, less commented upon, energy aspect to the elections. The Democrats tapped into the growing public disquiet about the growing proliferation of data centres, whose huge power demands (to the extent they are sized in mega/gigawatts, as opposed to mega/gigaflops – ie input not output) have been blamed for driving up local electricity prices. How this new political front plays out in the US and globally could shape our energy systems for decades to come.

Surveying the post-election wreckage of the MAGA movement, Vice-President JD Vance called for the war on Iran to end, triggering a steep drop in oil prices (albeit to a level still 50% higher than a year ago). How and when the US disentangles itself from this mess of Trump’s own making remains to be seen. But for Donald “drill, baby, drill!” Trump to be humbled by the cost of fossil fuels was some kind of poetic justice.