Macron trumps Trump with “Make Climate Great Again” campaign

By Laurence Coustal
29 September 2017
(AFP News) – French President Emmanuel Macron’s 30-million-euro “Make Climate Great Again” campaign has narrowed a list of candidate scientists from abroad from thousands to 90, nearly half from the US, a French official said Friday.Macron made the offer to fund and host foreign climate experts in early June after US President Donald Trump announced the United States would pull out of the 196-nation Paris Agreement, which pledges to cap global warming.Trump also asked Congress to slash climate-research budgets across multiple federal agencies, including the Departments of Energy, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).If enacted, the cuts would total billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.”As a climate scientist, I am extremely preoccupied by all the news I’m hearing about the White House budget, which clearly targets environmental and climate science,” said Valerie Masson Delmotte, research director at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission.Tens of thousands of scientists took to the streets of Washington D.C. in April to protest.”The decision by the president of the United States is disappointing,” Macron said at the time.”You will find in France a second homeland,” he added in launching his appeal, clearly directed to US scientists. [more]

Macron trumps Trump with ‘Make Climate Great Again’ campaign