Last summer European leaders began hearing a huge sucking sound. The source of the din? The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a 725-page doorstopper of legislation passed in August to speed up American decarbonisation. Europe’s budding clean-tech industry, they feared, would be hoovered up across the Atlantic by the promise of handouts, which amount to around $400bn over ten years. To stop this from happening, some EU politicians argued, the bloc would have at the very least to match the IRA’s sums.
So far the noise has turned out to be mostly in the politicians’ heads. Worries about a green exodus, bordering on panic in some quarters,
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