China leads — no, make that China dominates — the green technology sector.

That position elicits increasingly loud complaints from competitors around the world. Governments in the U.S. and Europe denounce practices, typically subsidies to domestic manufacturers, that give Chinese companies an advantage in this race and threaten lawsuits and tariffs to level the playing field.

Most concern focuses on the economic dimensions of this competition: the billions of dollars that Chinese companies will earn and the thousands of jobs lost in other countries. There is increasing attention to the environmental consequences of this conflict since raising the price of green tech — the inevitable result of ending those subsidies — will slow the clean tech transition.