It looked like the start of a transatlantic trade war over climate policy.
As U.S. President Joe Biden hosted his French counterpart in Washington on Dec. 1, not long after finalizing a $369 billion green tax-break bonanza, there was a rupture in the usual diplomatic cooperation on global warming. Just a day earlier, and in front of U.S. lawmakers, French President Emmanuel Macron criticized protectionist features of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that would be "super aggressive” toward European businesses.
Some of those European companies — first in private and later in public — have since then started making noise about the wave of American money.