Clean Air Task Force's Climate Research & Advocacy program promotes technical and policy change for the climate by developing pragmatic pathways to a zero-carbon energy system across electricity, transport, and industry sectors.
Harmful emissions are causing our planet to undergo an unprecedented and rapid change. More than 70% of the emissions that cause global warming come from our energy system. Every year, the global energy system produces almost 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions — pushing our planet toward irreversible climate tipping points. As emerging economies develop and their energy needs increase, that number will only increase unless we make dramatic changes to the way we power our world.
CATF is working to rapidly reduce emissions while advancing durable climate solutions to ensure a net-zero emissions, high-energy planet at an affordable cost. It exists to identify reality-based bottlenecks and blindspots in global climate policy, reframe the challenge and solution options, and build unconventional alliances to implement them. CATF aims to create a world in which our population can meet its energy needs without harming the environment.
In support of that vision, CATF:
The impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge conducted an evaluation highlighting that CATF is among the most cost-effective organisations working on climate change. Founders Pledge’s report found that:
Additionally, CATF is one of Giving Green's 2023 recommendations, and has been a recommendation of Giving Green since 2020. Readers can learn more about this in their deep dive report on CATF and their broader deep dive reports on geothermal energy and decarbonising aviation and maritime shipping.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: