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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.

2/ In the beginning it was pure provision. Clean power cost more than coal and gas, and the benefit—a stable climate—belonged to everyone and no one. So policy covered the gap and fought over who paid. Germany's feed-in tariff put the cost on household bills for twenty years.

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.

6/ The cost collapse drove it. Battery packs cost 93% less than in 2010. Solar is a similar story. In China an EV now costs no more to build than a gas car. Subsidies are vanishing: Germany ended its surcharge in 2022, China its feed-in tariff in 2025.