Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan for economic stimulus and pandemic relief has become law, his administration will turn its attention to a multitrillion-dollar plan to rebuild the United States’ ailing infrastructure. Its scope goes far beyond roads and bridges. Viewed in combination with other parts of Biden’s economic agenda, it reflects a new openness on both sides of the aisle to what has traditionally been known as industrial policy. Critics deride industrial policy as protectionist and as the government picking “winners,” but when it comes to clean energy—a top priority for Biden—a push by his administration to build new and innovative clean energy sectors using industrial policy may actually be the greatest contribution it can make to combating climate change.

The push for industrial policy has been particularly strong for clean energy—as a way to combine battling climate change with building strategically important parts of the economy.

There are good reasons for government intervention in the energy market. Energy use and production can impose harm on others, such as through air pollution and carbon emissions. Energy innovation delivers benefits to all of us beyond the economic gains the innovator can capture. Energy infrastructure investment, such as pipelines, transmission lines, and electric vehicle chargers, may be hampered if any one firm’s investments benefit all their competitors or if it risks monopolistic market power of energy delivery mechanisms.

The argument for government’s role in the energy sector is even stronger today. First, the world faces an existential threat from climate change. With time running short to begin sharply curbing emissions, market forces will not deliver the pace of transition needed without robust government intervention. Second, the scale of that transition creates enormous economic opportunity to build new energy sectors. With the economy in a deep hole from the pandemic, leading in these new sectors can spur significant job growth.

Finally, given the strategic importance of energy—critical to every citizens’ economic and physical well-being and safety, as the recent crisis in Texas reminded us—there is a strong national security rationale to develop these technologies and capabilities in the United States. As the energy system transitions to cleaner alternatives, there will be new risks associated with the critical minerals’ supply chains required for renewable energy and batteries, cybersecurity, and global trade chokepoints, which argues for reinforcing the domestic U.S. industrial base in these technologies.

The argument against industrial policy to combat climate change is that the government cannot anticipate which technologies will deliver the cheapest solutions. Yet, as the International Energy Agency explained, most of the key technologies the energy sector needs to reach net-zero emissions are known today. Market forces are still powerful—when properly directed by a carbon price—to give firms and consumers the right incentives to adopt and develop those technologies and to determine which ones emerge as the best solutions in different energy sectors.

There are three reasons a U.S. clean energy industrial policy makes particular sense today. First, the technologies needed for sectors that are hard to decarbonize also offer many of the biggest economic opportunities for growth. According to the International Energy Agency, almost half of the cumulative emission reductions needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 come from technologies that are not yet commercially available.

China already dominates the market for solar panels and batteries, a result of government decisions taken more than a decade ago, so it would be very difficult for the United States to displace China in these technologies, which China already produces very cheaply. By contrast, the United States is well-positioned to build a strong industrial base to produce and export zero-carbon energy in the form of hydrogen and ammonia, fuel cells to produce zero-carbon electricity, or carbon-capture and removal technologies.

Second, these technologies will be needed to decarbonize globally, and by bringing the cost of these technologies down through government investments, Washington can help accelerate their deployment outside the United States as well. In this way, a U.S. industrial policy to promote clean energy can serve not as protectionism but as one of the country’s greatest contributions to global efforts to combat climate change. In the future, roughly 95 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions will come from outside the United States. Yet developing market countries, which are poorer and use much less energy per capita than developed countries do, will not adopt low-carbon solutions unless they are affordable.

Third, industrial policy that drives down the cost of clean energy “green premiums” while also putting U.S. citizens to work can be among the most effective ways to account for the United States’ historic responsibility for the climate change problem. Climate change results from the cumulative total of all carbon emissions over time, and as of 2019, the United States has contributed 25 percent. By contrast, the entire continent of Africa represents only 2 percent. One way to address this inequity is for wealthy countries to send cash to poorer countries. For example, the Biden administration has pledged that the United States will fulfill its 2014 commitment to provide climate-related assistance to poorer countries, of which $2 billion is still outstanding. But making it affordable for developing countries to grow their energy use and prosperity in climate-friendly ways can be a far greater contribution.

At present, U.S. climate policy ambition is being framed around what commitment Biden will make to reduce domestic emissions by 2030. Yet the steps the Biden administration takes to invest in nascent clean energy technologies and research can be even more important to long-term temperature stabilization goals, even if most of the dividends come after 2030 because of the time it takes for hydrogen, long-duration power storage, carbon capture, advanced nuclear power, and other emerging technologies to scale.

Measured only by how much it costs to reduce a ton of carbon emissions, industrial policy that targets specific sectors of the clean energy economy at home may seem misguided. After all, it’s cheaper to import a solar panel from China than to manufacture it domestically. But at a time when the U.S. economy is in a deep hole and clean energy represents a sector of both rapid growth and national security significance, industrial policy is looking more attractive. That is even truer when considering the United States’ responsibility for climate change and what breakthroughs are needed to make it feasible for poorer countries to develop without exacerbating the problem. To rebuild the U.S. economy and demonstrate global climate leadership, clean energy industrial policy is an idea whose time has come.