Climate down, military R&D up: analysing the Trump effect

European politicians, investors, business leaders and researchers on Wednesday grappled with the disorienting shock of Donald Trump gaining the White House.

Nobody really knows what a Trump administration will be like, and science and tech issues were largely absent from an unorthodox campaign. But just like Brexit, it is sure to bring a whole new bag of uncertainties.  

Science|Business takes an early look at how Trump’s win could affect specific issues ranging from international efforts to tackle climate change and military research investment in Europe.

EU military research

One immediate impact will be to increase political momentum in Europe to spend more on military research.

Trump “made the comment many times that he wants to see more investment in NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organization] by Europe,” said Erika Mann, a former member of the European Parliament and now an adviser to law firm Covington & Burling.

Trump commented earlier in the campaign that if Russia attacked a NATO member, he would consider whether the targeted country had met its defence commitments before providing military aid. The US supplies three-quarters of the NATO budget.

“Now he will put pressure on Europe” to deliver, and he would find support in Europe specifically for R&D in that sector. “I think this is something he would get – certainly, the military would like it,” she said.

The timing is ripe. For the first time in years, there is a strong push in Brussels to step up spending on military research – with €25 million authorised already for a pilot programme on joint R&D in the field. And in the EU’s civilian research programme, Horizon 2020, there’s growing expectations that more of the money will be pushed towards dual-use technologies: drones, cyber-security, satellites, Big Data.

This is driven by growing fears of an emboldened Russia. And with Britain leaving the EU, the biggest obstacle to EU collaboration in military R&D will be gone; hitherto, the UK had steadfastly opposed any attempt to move military activities outside the NATO framework.

Climate change

“Paris is dead,” declared Roger Helmer, a British UKIP member of the European Parliament via Twitter.

Trump’s campaign website makes no mention of environmental issues but he has referred to climate change as a "hoax" by the Chinese to hamper other economies, and earlier this year vowed to cancel US involvement in the Paris Agreement, or COP21, which came into force last week.

The UN deal, hammered out after years of painstaking talks, aims to keep the rise in global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, and "will pursue efforts" to limit the rise to 1.5C.

But the deal is "bad for US business", Trump has said. It prohibits any country to exit for a period of three years, plus a year-long notice period, but the US could simply choose to ignore its targets.

Trump is determined instead to revive the coal industry by cutting regulation and abolish rules put in place to reduce US carbon dioxide emissions, including the Clean Power Plan.

The president-elect said he will cancel all payments to UN climate change programmes. “This could lead other countries to renege on their commitments,” said Hans-Olaf Henkel, a German member of the European Parliament. 

Tech

The greatest uncertainty is how Trump might affect tech industries, on both sides of the Atlantic.

“He has no idea about technology” said Henkel, who is also vice-chair of the Parliament’s tech committee.

Trump has talked about "closing" the Internet as a way to fight ISIS and brushed off the cybersecurity fears over the attacks against the Democratic National Committee, and he compared net neutrality to the Fairness Doctrine.

In an interview for US conservative news website Breitbart, Trump said that he is “concerned about the social breakdown of our culture caused by technology,” and warned about the negative effect of “addiction to electronic devices” and the dangers of unethical use of artificial intelligence.

His views on science and technology have become a reason for concern among technology executives in Silicon Valley.

Earlier this year, top figures, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wrote an open letter to say that “Trump would be a disaster for innovation.” The long list of California-based techies were worried Trump’s immigration policy would hinder the free movement of people and collaboration with the rest of the world.

In Europe, Brussels-based tech associations met the news of Trump’s victory with caution. Digital Europe will not comment on the effects of Trump presidency on the tech sector until “Trump appoints his team and lays out his policy plans regarding tech and trade,” a spokesperson told Science|Business. “We prefer not to comment on what has been said during the election,” the spokesperson said.

“He is not coming from the tech world,” said Mann. “He comes from an older industry, and I don’t see he has much interest in it – and nobody on his team, either. I wonder how quickly he will understand Silicon Valley, new industries like Uber, and the aerospace industry. This is maybe the biggest learning curve for him.”

One Trump idea likely to find support from tech companies is a proposal to lower federal corporate tax, the main tax on businesses, to 15 per cent from the current rate of 35 per cent, which is one of the highest in the world. Trump has also said he would prevent US companies moving their corporate headquarters abroad to avoid US taxes – a proposal already worrying business and political leaders in Dublin.

EU-US relations

Some see a silver lining. James Elles, a former member of the European Parliament and founder of the Transatlantic Policy Network, said Trump’s election might spur an overdue, broader re-think.

For the past few years, focused negotiations on TTIP, the proposed trade deal which could now get canned, have been at the forefront of US-EU relations – and they have become increasingly contentious as opposition to trade deals has risen on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, with Trump’s election, “we’ve got to switch to a strategic overview, and leave the economic ones aside for the moment,” Elles said.

For instance, some Brussels analysts noted, during the campaign China was frequently in Trump’s rhetorical cross-hairs for issues including currency manipulation and intellectual property theft. At one point he proposed a 45 per cent tariff on imports from China. The EU is also concerned about the rising might of China, so there could be grounds for a collaborative approach to EU-US policy in individual sectors such as digital industries, some analysts suggested.