What European business makes of the green-subsidy race

European leaders began hearing a huge sucking sound. The source of the din? The Inflation Reduction Act (), a 725-page law 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 happening, some politicians argued, the bloc would have at the very least to match the ’s sums.So far the noise has turned out to be mostly in the politicians’ heads. Worries about a green exodus have subsided. When the continent’s heads of government gathered recently in Brussels, they did not shower billions of euros more on the —which are already comparable to the in their generosity. Nor did they (for now) further water down rules against state aid, which would have encouraged member states keen to splurge. Instead, they focused on making the system for doling out the cash more efficient.