After the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, French president Emmanuel Macron made the world’s climate scientists an offer to work in France. That offer came in the form of a grant with a cheeky name — “Make Our Planet Great Again.”The grant has since been awarded to dozens of scientists — many of them, based in the United States. Ben Sanderson is one of those grant recipients. He had been living and working in the U.S. for nearly a decade when the 2016 election results caught him by surprise.“I think it's a strange time for climate science in the U.S.,” Sanderson told VICE News. “People are a little bit wary of proposing research which would be deemed to be political.”And so, Sanderson, along with his wife and young son, packed up their lives and moved to Toulouse, France. There, Sanderson will work at a French research institute for the next five years.Meanwhile, some researchers still working in the U.S. are worried that a Trump-era brain drain could stunt America’s role in the field. As climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told VICE News, “…we could end up losing a large number of key people that would really help to advance the research.”This segment originally aired December 5, 2018 on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
FYI.
This story is over 5 years old.
Climate scientists are leaving the U.S. to “Make Our Planet Great Again”
This U.S.-based climate scientist is preparing to move to France to continue his work —as one of the dozens of recipients of France's "Make Our Planet Great Again" grant.