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.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

It is very exciting because we are living through this kind of energy renaissance and it's a matter of just scaling up and doing it within the time that we have. It's nice to see the way cities are moving forward. It's hard to move a huge country like America all at once, but the way cities are really driving a lot of this change. The IPCC sees cities as being living labs and the main drivers of creativity and innovation. They consume 75% of the world's natural resources and over 70% of global carbon and dioxide emissions, but a lot of us living in cities, we're wondering what is the future of transportation, food, resource and waste management? What is the future going to look like?

ARMOND COHEN

It's all part of the same kind of mindset of trying to live lighter on the planet. We all know that cities are much lower energy consumers per capita. That is to say, city dwellers use much less energy than other people because of the density of housing, the transport is easier...So densification of human development is a huge climate benefit, and making cities more attractive and livable is a critical part of the equation.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I've seen a lot of discourse about electric cars, and I know that they don't emit carbon, but hey do have lithium batteries which take eons to biodegrade. So what are your thoughts on electric car use, weighing the no carbon emissions versus the non-biodegradable batteries?

COHEN

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.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Me and my peers kind of feel helpless in a lot of this because the climate crisis, there's so much to do and we can do so little. So what would your advice be to young people like myself? What can we do and what should we do to help move this along?

COHEN

The good thing about technology is it can move very fast. And so my advice would be if you're interested in this topic, if you have a mathematical, scientific, or business orientation, or you just like solving problems, you're that kind of person, get trained to really be part of the technological business revolution that's going on right now. Join up with companies that are doing clean energy work or work for an electric utility that's got the right commitment. If you're a policy person who doesn't like mucking around with numbers, then train yourself to understand the complexities of this and go into government or work in non-governmental organizations like mine and bring your brain to the table.

If you look at universities' engineering programs, civil engineering, chemical, mechanical, and electrical, or you look at city planning departments around the world, and you open any catalog of any major university, within all those disciplines, there's going to be a major climate focus. It's like a unifying theme. So I'm seeing young people coming out of their training with a sense that their mission is within those areas, but there's no separating that in their minds from the need to control emissions on the planet and to get to a more livable climate. So, what I'm seeing is this massive amount of social energy and intellectual energy.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You're involved in influencing public policy and in energizing funding directed towards plugging methane leaks. It must be unsettling for you to see reports like what was recently published in The Guardian which revealed that there are a thousand super emitting methane leaks in 2022 triggering climate tipping points. So as much as we're advancing, we have to plug this in some ways. That’s also compounded by agriculture and livestock.

COHEN

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.

ONE PLANET PODCAST · THE CREATIVE PROCESS

And I like that you're quite realistic. Not everyone is going to have those deep behavioral changes or can afford to do that. We can get a hundred percent renewable, and I know that we can get there, it's a matter of time, but a lot of our predictions are based on countries around the world having energy poverty and continuing at the same rate. And of course we know that that's just not the case. There's acceleration. We've seen that with China, and we're seeing that with other parts of the world. So how can we fill that gap and make it affordable? Because these renewable energies are expensive, at least initially in the creation of infrastructure.

COHEN

We have to be realistic about how big this problem is and how to solve it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is kind of the world authority on climate science as well as solutions, they do these studies and they say, well, how would we get to zero emissions by mid-century? And a recent paper came out from a group of researchers in India that pointed out that all of the scenarios that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses to show a pathway to zero assume that South Asia and Africa remain extremely energy poor. They consume per capita only a very small fraction of what the rich world does. And interestingly, that's in 2050, they predict that's the case. And in fact, in some cases, people consume less per capita. So, one has to ask how realistic that is. That may make the models balance, and maybe the models on paper will work, but what does that mean for people in the developing world?

600 million people in Africa right now have no access to electricity. Several billion more people around the world have access to electricity, but it's intermittent and very poor quality. And electricity, it's basically modern life, right? And then you think about, well, what would be required to just get Nigeria, let's say, up to the level of consumption? So those are the kinds of questions when people in the Global North, say a big part of the answer is using less energy. At a recent conference of the parties, we had an Africa panel and I think it was the minister from Jamaica who said, "Everyone is talking about the energy transition, but we need some energy first before we can transition." I think that's the boundary condition of this whole problem.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Bianca Weber with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Bianca Weber.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).