ARMOND COHEN - Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force

From One Planet Podcast · Climate Change, Politics, Sustainability, Environmental Solutions, Renewable Energy, Activism, Biodiver Creative Process Original Series

Armond Cohen is Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force, which he has led since its formation in 1996. In addition to leading CATF, Armond is directly involved in CATF research and advocacy on the topic of requirements to deeply decarbonize global energy systems. Prior to his work with CATF, Armond founded and led the Conservation Law Foundation’s Energy Project starting in 1983, focusing on energy efficiency, utility resource planning, and electric industry structure. Armond has published numerous articles on climate change, energy system transformation, and air pollution; he speaks, writes, and testifies frequently on these topics. He is a board member of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and an honors graduate of Harvard Law School and Brown University.

“This raises a larger point that, even as we move to advanced technology, there's still this problem that 80% of the world's energy today is coming from fossil fuels from oil, gas, and coal. So what do you do in the meantime? Because every molecule we put into the atmosphere of carbon is going to be around for another 50 or 100 years. The warming impact will be with us. So turning the spigot down, so to speak, really quickly is also important. The long-range is important, but what do we do in the meantime while we're still very fossil fuel dependent?

And then capturing as much carbon as we can, while we're developing renewable strategies. In the meantime, let's take the industrial facilities that are the big emitters, the steel plants, the cement plants, and the plastics plants. Let's put some carbon capture on the back end where we can. it's not cheap, but it is doable and it's doable fairly quickly.

It's a hard thing for people to accept that you have to be doing some damage control, even as you're working on long-term solutions. But I'm afraid that it's a complex and big problem. So we have to think of it as first aid before you do the surgery.”

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