Post

1/ The purpose of green industrial policy has inverted. It used to pay for a public good: clean energy that cost more, benefiting everyone. Now it captures advantages a country keeps for itself. That shift, from a shared cost to a prize seized, is the story of the transition.

3/ Then it became a way to build coalitions. The transition kills fossil-fuel jobs, so governments used industrial policy to create new ones and build a constituency. The US IRA did this: its factory incentives put plants, and jobs, into Republican districts.

4/ The logic showed when Republicans moved to cut the law in 2025. They kept the manufacturing credits—the ones building factories in their districts—and gutted the deployment subsidies, which had no such constituency. The factories had defenders. The subsidies didn't.

5/ Eventually, the purpose inverted outright. Four things converged: clean energy got cheap, China got dominant, oil turned volatile again, and Covid exposed how fragile supply chains were. Together they turned clean energy from a public good to fund into an advantage to seize.