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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.

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.