Europe should not respond to America’s subsidies binge with its own blunders

a way of flustering Europe into bad policies. Search engines are one dispiriting example. As Google and Yahoo dominated the internet in the early 2000s, Jacques Chirac, then president of France, beseeched Europe to “go on the offensive” so that America would not dominate “the power of tomorrow”. With the ’s assent, France poured around €100m (roughly $147m back then) into Quaero, a would-be rival to America’s giants. Predictably the venture was dubbed “Eurogoogle”. Equally predictably, the big firms and public outfits that pocketed the money frittered it all away. Whoever Google’s are today, they are not from Europe. Those curious to find out what happened to Quaero can ask Google, or a chatbot. These days it is green technology that is “the power of tomorrow”, and Europe once again fears America is leaving it in the dust. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (), passed in August, offers at least $400bn of public money over ten years to accelerate the roll-out of renewable energy and electric vehicles. America’s carbon-cutting ambitions were at first lauded by the . But the penny swiftly dropped. The new subsidies come with a protectionist tinge; they are targeted at stuff that is mostly made in America, in a bid to shift supply chains there. Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, fretted that valuable green investment will be “sucked away” from Europe across the Atlantic.