American energy innovation’s big moment

T HE OPPORTUNITY to make the covid-19 recovery green has been squandered. A new analysis of over $14trn in pandemic stimulus, injected by 19 countries and the European Union, finds that just 6% went on programmes likely to cut emissions. America did particularly badly: hardly any of its $6trn splurge was climate-friendly. Perhaps the best that can be said for the catastrophe in Ukraine is that the ensuing energy crisis has provided an opportunity to reverse that failure.

The early responses, it is true, have been somewhat discouraging. As European countries cast around for substitutes for Russian oil and gas, short-term fixes are the need of the hour, leading to a higher oil price and probably more oil and gas production. Joe Biden’s administration, which branded itself the greenest ever, is urging producers to drill, baby, drill. Its signature climate policy is meanwhile snarled up in Congress. Mr Biden said as much about diabetes as climate change in his recent state-of-the-union message. Yet there is also cause for hope—in America especially.