What European business makes of the green-subsidy race

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…