ARMOND COHEN - Executive Director of Clean Air Task Force

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.

“There's no such thing as completely clean energy. We use that term a lot, but it's not really true. We have low carbon energy, and lower carbon energy, but any kind of industrial system has requirements for materials and processing, and nothing is completely natural in the industrial world. If we can electrify transportation, I think we can clean up the grid, and then I think we can deal with these life cycle issues in a way that's responsible, but it'll never be zero. That's impossible.

Today, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, just in the advocacy and policy space now. And then you look at all the people, the scientists and the engineers and the investors and the business people who are trying to create these new machines and bring down the cost. You're talking tens of millions maybe. And the annual spend on clean energy globally is somewhere in the range I believe of about 400 billion a year. We're getting up there in terms of social effort, and it's hard to believe that with all these options coming onto the scene that we won't solve or get very close to solving this problem during this century. And our philosophy, which makes us a little different from other environmental organizations that work on this, is we think you ought to be pursuing all of those options because you don't know which are going to work out.”

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