Maybe... but most efforts over the last decades to this end have been slow and hard. The alternative thesis is leadership by example. Putting these at odds has

Maybe... but most efforts over the last decades to this end have been slow and hard. The alternative thesis is leadership by example. Putting these at odds has been a recipe for stalling, and both the US & China are examples of this. On that note, I think we should be using carbon reduction leadership more directly to generate industrial advantages within the EU. There are (should be) obvious advantages in getting to the future first. A lot of recent capital investment in green tech (eg tesla, panasonic, the chinese panel industry) were directly or indirectly supported by signals of long term demand (eg end dates for ICE vehicles) from european polities. EG: Telsa's investment case (besides the L5 autonomy case) is basically formed around a predicted adoption curve for electric vehicles. (Market Share)X(Market Size) for any given T. Long term investments need confident predictions of long term market size. Same for solar panels, battery tech, etc. Most of the footnotes supporting these predictions came from EU (member) politics. Not quite government guaranteed demand, but collectively credible nonetheless. There should be more effort to get this happening locally. The UK is no longer EU, but it's a nice legible example so let's use it. Scotland, and now the UK as a whole have been declaring that ICE vehicles will be banned by 2030. Whether that "ban" will really be a ban will be determined later, but that still puts one hell of a footnote on your market size predictions for 2030... directly translatable into hard capital investment. The EU (+UK) is big enough that a good chunk of this investment can be captured within it. There are costs to carbon reduction locally. Environmental benefits are more global. We should be capturing more of the economic benefits locally to even it out.