it's important to understand how the IRA came about. Like in Europe, it's often read as a kind of

demonstration of the potent sovereignty of the American state, whereas in fact it's the opposite,

right? It was a cliffhanger. It was a nightmare. It literally broke people's hearts. It is in

itself, you know, just think about the name. Like it's that because it was a deal with some of the

most conservative elements of the Democratic Party.

It's literally a deal dictated by Joe Manchin, the senator for the proud state of West Virginia,

which has a population smaller than Brooklyn, and a life expectancy shorter than North Korea.

That is the politician who made this.

And the Biden people have done an incredible job of spinning it subsequently,

because they were arm's length. They went at total arms length because Joe Manchin was so unpredictable.

The president got his fingers burnt earlier in the year, early in 2020, when he tried to broker a deal,

and Manchin just screwed him over. And so the White House said, we don't want anything more to do

with this. Early July last year, this was dead. And the Democrats in the US were preparing themselves to recognize that after the Obama presidency and the Clinton presidency, they too would not pass any climate legislation. And then Manchin came back to the table with Schumer. And it was done as a congressional deal with all of this extraordinary stuff bolted in that was

incredibly embarrassing for the administration, the Buy America stuff, which was, you know,

two fingers to the Europeans and the South Koreans. All of that was stuff which the Biden

and people then spent months trying to iron out again. And it's this piece of legislation,

modest as it is, 500 billion grand total,

380 or so for climate, you know, a fraction of what was originally intended in build back

better, let alone the Green New Deal, which had this huge armature of an American welfare state

that was finally going to be all of that stripped out. And it's basically this conservative,

even quite fiscally conservative in its

blueprint nationalist industrial policy, which, however, the climate teams worked really hard on this

...