Soon after taking office, French President Emmanuel Macron made headlines and also a few enemies when he announced his ‘Make the Planet Great Again’ initiative. The initiative, which was obviously seen as a slight against US President Donald Trump and his plan to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, was designed to invite American climate scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs to move to France in order to continue their important work in a more conducive climate. As part of the program, France’s government pledged to offer $69 million in grants, funding and support to selected applicants that qualify, and it seems that the program has already been hugely successful after receiving more than 11,000 applications in less than 2.5 months.
Macron originally announced his plans to support American climate scientists during his campaign. However, it wasn’t until June 1 that the ‘Make the Planet Great Again’ initiative was officially launched. Within a few hours of Donald Trump’s announcement that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, Macron’s camp released a video condemning Trump’s decision and seemingly using Trump’s own ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan to highlight the importance of continuing to fund climate science.
The fact that so many scientists have already applied to be part of the initiative and take advantage of France’s generous research grants means that the US now risks being left behind. Scientific research and educational grants are notoriously hard to come by in the United States, and based on the current administration’s apparent resistance to studying climate change, these grants will likely be even harder to get now. This is what makes Macron’s initiative such a huge deal, as it could potentially result in the US losing many of its best and brightest scientific minds.
One of the main reasons that the US has continued to be the world leader in science, medicine and technology is that the country heavily recruits the best and brightest minds from all over the world. American universities always have a large percentage of foreign students, and many of these students end up staying in the country after they graduate. The result is that the US is a major source of so-called brain drain for other countries, many of which continuously lose their best scientific minds to America. However, the ‘Make the Planet Great Again’ initiative threatens to change things and could mean that the United States will start to experience its own brain drain problems. In this sense, Europe could soon overtake the United States as the world’s leader in science.
