Clean Air Task Force Interview

[00:00:00]

I am here today with Armond Cohen from the Clean Air Task Force, and their task is to reduce climate change by applying an overwhelming amount of force to some of the biggest levers to reduce carbon and other climate warming emissions. And me personally and on the behalf of our organization, great, this column is very excited to speak with Harman because your organization got recommended by the Founders pledge, which we have donated money to as one of the two most effective organizations when it comes to combating climate change. So I’ve been waiting for this interview for days now and I really want to get into understanding what you do and why you are being perceived as such an effective organization. So, Arment, how would you describe your organization to someone that is not familiar with your calls and the challenges that you’re facing?

[00:01:10]

So the way I would describe our organization is that we’re extremely focused on the goal in dealing with climate change and what the goal is actually pretty simple when you really come down to it and people make it very complex, but it’s it’s actually pretty simple. We need to essentially eliminate carbon emissions from the world’s energy system and from our agricultural systems. That sounds big like a big task. And it is. But it’s and it’s somewhat complex. But if we try and solve that problem and say that we’re actually trying to limit the amount of emissions that comes out of the machines that we use to power our society and to grow our food, you actually can break it down into pieces. And that’s what we try and do is take a very practical approach. Look at the electric power sector. Look at the transportation sector. Look at the industrial sector. Look at the building sector and the agricultural sector. And say within each of those sectors, what are the kinds of technologies that we need that could do everything we need to do, grow our food, keep our houses warm, provide our goods without generating carbon emissions that blanket the earth and heat up the earth. And we need to find the problem that way, rather than the goal of climate change, is to fix all of society’s problems or to reduce poverty or to create jobs, all of which are our important and good goals, which many people in the climate policy area are pursuing as well. But if you if you focus specifically on the task, the physical task of just reducing the emissions, then you begin to get into a question about that’s much more definable.

[00:03:17]

It’s not about fixing the entire world, which we’d love all love to do, of course, but but fixing a part of it and the part of it that we want to fix is actually a definable part that relates to a limited number of machines on the planet. For example, there are 5000 essentially power plants on on earth. If we can take those five thousand units of which maybe half are producing the carbon and you say what can we replace them with over the next 30 years at some reasonable cost? Then the problem becomes much more manageable. And so what we do is look at where the emissions are. There is a famous joke when someone asked one of the great American bank robber, Willie Sutton, why he robbed banks. He said, well, that’s because that’s where the money is and where we go, where the emissions are, and we try and stay laser focused on that. So that’s that’s really I think what makes us a bit different is very focused on technology, very focused on the biggest chunks of emissions, getting the greatest leverage out of focusing on on technological pivots that could provide all these services without without the carbon emissions. That’s that’s what we do at about 25 people. We’ve got folks who are expert technologists, business developers, financial experts, as well as public campaigners and advocates who are good at drafting legislation and that sort of thing. So all of that is really, though, focused. Very much on this question of taking the carbon emitting technology we have on the planet and swapping out swapping it out for something that’s 100 percent clean.

[00:05:10]

I love the goal that you are striving against. So it seems like you’re doing some different things in your organization. So you’re talking about. Replacing machines with better technology is the organization focused on inventing that technology or building that technology or changing policy so that an already existing technologies getting was used and accessible? What is the main thing you’re focusing on?

[00:05:38]

Well, that’s that’s a great observation that we we actually pull a number of different levers. So I think that there are at least three levers that we try and pull. One is getting the technology to the point where it’s actually commercially ready. The second is making sure that that technology has a market and is taken up. And then the third thing that we do with our lawyers more and our campaigner’s is we try and bring pressure that the dirty technology gets retired or taken off line. And so those are the three buckets of work in the first bucket. We do a great deal of work with technology, inventors, investors and the supply chains of the energy industry to come up with better technology. We do a lot of work. We certainly don’t invent technology, but we do spot it promising companies. We sometimes bring companies together that we think have complementary technologies that could be, in fact, more effective together than apart. We help develop business models. I’ll give you a very specific example. The current global nuclear industry has really is not positioned at all to to be contributing to climate change management. The business model is based on a really almost as almost a century old model of very large plants built one at a time. Usually all different from each other. This leads to very high cost and a very slow deployment.

[00:07:22]

So, for example, we were working with both the industry and with with regulators to have a completely different business model for it, for nuclear energy, which would involve basically a mass manufactured standardized product, much like airframes like Airbus or Ember Air Airframe when it came out, an airplane, an airplane design. So we don’t have we don’t have 5000 different commercial airline designs. We have about 20 or 30. And they are mass produced. Thousands of them roll off the assembly line each year. And so, you know, if you get it, if you buy a Airbus A380, you know what you’re getting. That’s not the way it is with nuclear energy. You actually order a bespoke, you know, custom product. That’s a very slow process. It takes time to design a custom product and then you’re building it from scratch. Essentially, these are still built almost like they’re all construction projects. If you think about that differently, there’s a very different business model that you could imagine, which is building hundreds of units in factories small enough to barge, to site or to put on flatbed trucks or trains bolting them to the ground. When you get there and having a standardized design so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time, it’s it’s more of an assembly process than a than a construction process.

[00:09:00]

It’s an interesting take on new power plants. So mad, right? I’m concerned about the audience. My is how safe is this? I just saw Chernobyl too serious myself. What other risk for accidents with modern nuclear plants?

[00:09:17]

There’s always some kind of accident risk. And one of the things about the advanced technologies is that they will not have the same risk profile. I should say, as the existing plants that were involved in Chernobyl or Fukushima or Three-Mile Island, the reason that nuclear power has had three accidents, which, by the way, although the people who were immediately in the units suffered very significant health effects, or in the case of the workers at Chernobyl died, there is a whole other conversation we have to have about the actual risks of radiation and the long term risks which are not well understood. But putting that aside, the the key to the next generation of nuclear is basically not to cool these plants with water. And that’s the common problem with those three accidents, is that we tried to control the reaction of coal. The reaction with. Water. The problem with water is that it boils off at a relatively low temperature and once the water boils off, in this case the fuel is uncovered and you get a runaway reaction. The advanced nuclear plants do not use water. They use coolant that are capable of withstanding much higher temperatures. That so that there and they are designed so that as the heat of the reaction increases, the reaction actually shuts itself down. So so it can’t it can’t get to an unsafe limit because it’s got a self limiting process and it’s not using. It’s not really on water. It’s using something like sodium or or molten salt or led, which are which are going to withstand much higher temperatures.

[00:11:11]

So very interesting. I’m sorry for cutting you off in a debate. I just want to get to more topics in here. So I think the idea of mass producing nuclear power plants. That sounds very interesting to me. And it’s an idea I never heard of before. So I would suggest analysts to those curious to go to the Clean Air Task Force website and read more about this nuclear program. I guess you have information on that. So I want to switch topic a little bit. And that is what do you think? Because in Europe here, some people don’t really believe in climate change. Some people that I know thinks that we are certainly doomed. Is there something you have from your perspective about climate change? Does the average European citizen might not be aware of it in terms of the science?

[00:12:00]

Well, I think that the I think that the thing that we have to admit is that we are entering a very unknown period in human history. We are putting more emissions into the atmosphere than we ever have.

[00:12:14]

Half of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human beings that is there now was emitted after 1990.

[00:12:24]

Think about that. How half of the carbon soon.

[00:12:28]

Yeah. That’s you know, we’re talking basically in the last. That’s essentially the last 30 years. We’ve we’ve we’ve put that much carbon in the atmosphere as we did in the entire period from the industrial revolution up to 1990. What that means is that we are pushing the planet into completely unknown territory.

[00:12:51]

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than it has ever been in human existence. Now, once you get to that point and you acknowledge that, you also have to acknowledge that since we’ve never been here, we don’t exactly know exactly what’s going to happen. We don’t know how fast the change is going to occur. We do have evidence that change is occurring right now around us. This last year was the third highest temperature on record in human history for the planet. And it’s that the other two were in the last 10 years. So there appears to be a trend, at least within our ability to measure. So I don’t think that we can turn aside and say, well, there’s uncertainty about this pace, therefore we shouldn’t do anything. We all of our science and all of our modelling suggests that we are potentially on the bridge of some very, very, very catastrophic change. But we just don’t know.

[00:13:47]

And and I think the folks who exploit that uncertainty by saying, well, we don’t know, so we can’t act are wrong. We act all the time to take measures to insure against catastrophe. We don’t know that we’re going to have a car accident in five weeks, but we take out insurance in order in case we do so. Or we we we buy a safer car because we might have such an accident. And that’s it’s it’s the same logic here. We have no, we were not we are not experts on climate science, but we do follow it.

[00:14:21]

And we we take the uncertainty as a reason to act, not as a reason not to act.

[00:14:29]

That makes a lot of sense. So what is the biggest success you have had so far with a clean air task force? What are you most proud of?

[00:14:41]

I think are actually our greatest success, I think has been getting people focused on the size of the problem, which is that you basically have to replace the entire planet’s energy infrastructure in the next 30 to 40 years. Understanding how big that problem is and why you would want to use all the technologies you have available. And from that, once you people understand the size of the problem, the difficulty of just using one or two technologies to do all of this, then what follows from that are investments and. Business models and policies that try and maximize our chance of success. So to be very concrete about it, I think there’s a lot. There are a lot of folks who work on climate who would say, well, the answer to climate change is clearly just more solar panels and wind farms and a little bit of energy storage, battery storage, so that when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, we can store the excess energy.

[00:15:48]

That’s it. If you talk to 90 percent of the climate campaigners out there, they would say that’s that’s our way forward to cure the problem.

[00:15:57]

The problem with that approach and this is what we spend a lot of time explaining, is that, first of all, electricity, which is where wind and solar has its applications, is only about a third of the carbon problem. The other two thirds is transportation and industry. And there are fuels used in those sectors that you cannot easily replaced with electricity. So if even if you solved the power grid problem and got zero carbon emissions on the power grid, you would still have two thirds of the problem to address. The second problem is that even within the power grid, it is extremely expensive to run a modern power grid on a source that varies by season. The sun obviously sets every night, but there are also seasons and living where you do it. You’re well aware of this. There are seasons where the level of sun over multi-week and even month periods is very low. Look, the same pattern occurs with wind to really ride out those very low times of production. One would need such an enormous amount of storage and so overbilled the solar and wind capacity that the cost would run you in American dollars would running you into the tens of trillions of dollars which are built on.

[00:17:22]

By contrast, if you had on your power grid sources that work 24/7 and you’re lucky in in in Sweden that you have you have a nuclear base, you have a very large hydroelectric base. You also have wind energy. You can you can ride through. And as a result, Sweden’s grid is one of the lowest carbon power grids in the world because you have those resources. Now, is that to say that you couldn’t do more with wind or solar? No, you could. But the most important impact I think we’ve had is to get people to understand that if you have a diversity of resources, some of which ride with wind and sun, some of which are always there, you have a much greater chance of eliminating carbon emissions from the grid than if you just stick to one one view.

[00:18:15]

It’s it’s hard.

[00:18:16]

It’s a lot of sense. I’m sorry for interrupting you. We kind of have to start going up this episode soon. So making people be more aware that it needs to be a diverse enough solution to this big and complex problem.

[00:18:30]

Yes. And then from that, once people understand that, then you can unlock the policies. And we talked about the other buckets which are getting policies to eliminate existing carbon resources. And we do a lot of that. I mean, we we we try and come up with policies to squeeze the existing carbon emitting plants out of the system, but also making sure that there is a way to get these new technologies into the market.

[00:18:57]

Got it. So what can someone do if they want to support your cause? If you could say that in one minute.

[00:19:03]

Sure. Well, we are a very small organization, very effective. We’re about 7 billion dollars us a year in terms of we punch way above our weight. So a direct donation on our website will help.

[00:19:17]

And that’s what we need is we is the support to do our work because we’re independent. Some of the traditional philanthropies don’t understand what we do. They don’t understand this technology piece very well. We’re not we’re not a sexy organization with lots of cool visuals. And, you know, we only rarely do podcasts. So the that the support that you give us will go a very, very long way. But we don’t aspire to be a much bigger organization. We are the kind of support that we would get from your listeners would help us maintain that level and be very nimble. One of our philosophies is don’t get too big, because when you get big, then you end up worrying about how to preserve yourself rather than how to get the job done.

[00:20:08]

Got it. So I urge you, go to Clean Air Task Force to see T A F you s and make a donation on Armont. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak. Yes.

[00:20:20]

Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation. Take care, too. Bye bye.