UK Sits Out Dispute Between US and EU on Green Energy Subsidies

  • Jeremy Hunt says subsidies aren’t best way to meet net zero
  • UK’s two most prominent green companies are both struggling

Offshore wind turbines at the Scroby Sands Wind Farm near Great Yarmouth, UK.

Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
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Britain has no plans to respond to US and European Union subsidies for green industries because the country “has nothing to subsidize,” a leading environmental economist said.

Matthew Agarwala, economist at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, said the UK’s failure to develop a domestic manufacturing base for environmental technologies has left it in a reasonably safe place in the dispute between Washington and Brussels over clean-energy subsidies.