Europe has spent decades perfecting a particular kind of power: writing rules that others eventually adopt—on chemicals, privacy, product standards, and carbon. This week, it tried something more muscular and more market-facing: using public money to create “lead markets” for low-carbon materials and European-made clean tech.
On March 4, the European Commission unveiled the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA)—a legislative proposal that reads like a memo from an anxious boardroom: Europe’s manufacturing base is shrinking, its clean-tech supply chains are heavily exposed, and the cost of industrial decarbonization is rising just as geopolitical risk is rewriting the price of energy,
