I4CE’s French Landscape of Climate Finance supporting French-German comparison of financing the energy transition

The adoption by the US of the Inflation Reduction Act gave new life to the global cleantech race. The EU must now learn three lessons from it, writes Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, the EU Programme director at the Institute for Climate Economics – I4CE. As anyone who has marvelled at professional cyclists vying for position knows, the decisions competitors take challenges the strategy of those following close behind. Since August 2022, when the US Congress adopted a public climate investment plan of $400-800 billion as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), it’s safe to say the global cleantech race has moved up a gear.

For years, the European Union assumed it would lead the cleantech race because it was the only one running in it. Mistakenly so. With the Inflation Reduction Act, the US quickly catches up. This brief argues that the best EU policy answer to the IRA is an EU long‑term climate investment plan. As the political appetite for such a plan is currently limited, the European Commission should use the political momentum to propose a targeted investment plan that focuses on the development, scale-up, manufacturing and deployment of clean technologies in the EU. It identifies three first bricks that can already be laid out to build this plan.

2022, France is paying dearly for a dependence on fossil fuels maintained by a chronic lack of investment in the decarbonisation of the economy. This edition of the Landscape of climate finance in France makes a detailed analysis of these critical expenditures by households, companies and public authorities, in the retrofitting of buildings, the purchase of electric vehicles, and renewable energies, as well as in rail, cycling and urban public transport infrastructures. Encouragingly, climate investments have increased significantly in the past year, driven, among other factors, by favourable regulations and by state support under the recovery plan. But this growth remains fragile, and analysis of several transition scenarios shows that climate investments need to increase further in order to stay on track to carbon neutrality and to ensure a lasting reduction in France’s dependence on fossil fuels.