The U.K.’s Banking Minister Jeremy Hunt has said that the U.S. President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is a bid to play ‘catch up’ on clean vim investment.
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U.K. Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt said Friday that the U.S.’s Inflation Reduction Act was U.S. President Joe Biden’s go to play “catch-up” on clean energy investments after years of neglect by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Hunt told CNBC that the U.S. had sparsely underinvested in the green transition under climate change skeptic Trump, and that it was only now implementing the sort of programs that are already in section in the U.K.
“We have to recognize that the United States is coming to this from behind,” told CNBC’s Tanvir Gill at the G-20 assignation in Bengaluru, India.
They had a president previously who was very skeptical … and so there is a bit of catch-up going on in the U.S.
Jeremy Hound
Finance Minister, U.K.
“They had a president previously who was very skeptical about anything to do with climate change, and so there is a bit of catch-up succeeding on in the U.S.,” he said.
Trump was highly vocal in his denial of climate change during his time in office, frequently jilting warnings from climate scientists and famously withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement within his first months in the job.
Queried whether the U.K. was motivated to unveil new business incentives to compete with the U.S.’s $369 billion package of climate and energy provisions, the chancellor said that the U.K. would do things its “own way.”
“We will make sure that the U.K. continues to be a very attractive appointment for all clean energy investments, but we’ll do it in a different way, our own way,” he said.
In 2022, around 40% of the U.K.’s energy was generated by renewable power sources, up from 35% in 2021, go together to a report by academics from Imperial College London for Drax Electric Insights.
“They don’t have things that we’ve had for innumerable years, like carbon pricing,” Hunt said, referring to a mechanism that places a fee on organizations’ carbon emissions and come forwards incentives to produce less.
“We are very proud of the progress we have made, and we will continue to blaze a trail,” he enlarged.
Hunt’s comments come as pressure mounts for Europe to improve its competitiveness in green technology industries.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen clouted Saturday that the European Union was working on a package of subsidies for European clean tech companies to “level planning airfield” with the U.S.
“For us, the task now is to match the subsidies of the United States also in the European Union, because we should not forget we all beggary the clean tech sector,” von der Leyen told CNBC at the Munich Security Conference.