Clean Air Task Force
Works to reduce air pollution, combat climate change and promote clean energy solutions through scientific advocacy, policy reform and technological innovation.
Last updated: 17th December 2024
The Climate Crisis
The latest scientific data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that we need to reduce emissions by 43% by 2030 [1]. This is essential if we are to limit the rise in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century and avoid the worst consequences of climate change, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves, and floods.
Clean Air Task Force’s Work on Mitigating Climate Change
Clean Air Task Force (CATF) is a non-profit climate protection organization that promotes policy and technology changes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, oil and gas production, industry, and transportation. Targeting fossil fuels is exceptionally important to mitigate climate change because fossil fuels still account for over 85% of the world’s primary energy consumption [2].
“We push the change in technologies and policies needed to get to a zero-emissions, high-energy planet at an affordable cost. We imagine a world where the energy needs of all people are met efficiently without damaging the atmosphere.” – Clean Air Task Force
Clean Air Task Force's Impact
Clean Air Task Force is recommended as one of the most effective charities to combat climate change by world-leading climate charity evaluators Giving Green and Founders Pledge. Founders Pledge has recommended CATF as their top climate charity since 2018, and Giving Green has recommended CATF as a top charity since 2020.
Key Accomplishments:
2024, EU Methane Regulation: CATF worked closely with the European Commission, European Parliament, and Member States to ensure the bloc adopted its first major methane regulations. Notably, these new regulations not only apply to oil and gas operations in the EU – but also include a requirement to establish a limit to the level of upstream emissions on imported fossil fuels, ensuring worldwide impact and near-term emissions reductions for this super pollutant.
2022, Inflation reduction Act : CATF advised the U.S. Department of the Treasury on clean energy tax credits included in the inflation reduction Act. This incentivizes the use of carbon capture and storage technologies.
2021, Global Methane Pledge: CATF was instrumental in the Global Methane Pledge, introduced by US President Joe Biden and EU President Ursula von der Leyen in September 2021. This was signed by over 100 countries at COP26. Under this pledge, countries collectively agreed to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.
2020, Bipartisan Energy Act: Helped Secure $125 billion in Federal Funding for Climate Technology
1996, US Power Plan Pollution Campaign: A campaign conceived and co-designed by CATF led to a reduction in emissions from coal-fired power plants in the USA by more than 70%.
CATF’s current donations are exceptionally effective, but will not be enough on their own. To fully meet the climate challenge, we must also make collective and individual efforts to sustainably transform our societies.
Tax Deduction: Maximise the impact of your generosity
Tax deductions in France are currently only available for donations to four of our recommended charities: Against Malaria Foundation, Good Food Institute, Helen Keller International, and Centre pour la Sécurité de l’IA
If you are taxable in France, you will benefit from a tax reduction of 66% of the amount of your donation up to the limit of the tax due or 20% of your taxable income.
In practice, this means that if you were planning to donate €100, you can triple this amount to reach a donation of €300 that you will declare, with a real cost of only €102 after tax reduction. This allows you to multiply the impact of your donation without increasing your planned expenditure.
You can read our full article on tax relief in France for more information.
We are able to offer tax deductibility for this association and all the organisations we recommend through our partners, Effektiv Spenden. If your tax residence is in Switzerland, please make your donations via this link, so that you can receive your tax receipt at the end of the tax year.
We work with partners around the world and can offer tax deductibility in many countries. Please contact us if you would like to make a donation from another country and we will discuss the tax options available to you. If you would like to donate and do not require a tax receipt, you can make a donation via Mieux Donner regardless of your country!
FAQs
Toachieve changes such as those listed above, statistics, workshops, field visits and sometimes scientific or feasibility studies have to be commissioned. All this requires full-time work. You can find out more in our interview with a CATF employee.
In terms of technology, CATF pushes forward a broad portfolio, including
- Advanced nuclear power
- Super-hot rock geothermal energy
- Hydrogen
- Carbon capture
- Nuclear fusion
- Low-carbon transport
On the policy front, efforts are also being made in the following areas:
- Access to energy
- Infrastructure management
- Limiting emissions from power stations
- Land systems (i.e biomass or carbon removal)
We recommend charities that
Focus on final outcomes:
Charities that prioritise the final outcome of their action and not indicators of impact. When talking about impact, it is essential to focus on the desired final outcome, such as improved opportunities and quality of life, rather than focusing on intermediate outcomes such as the number of books distributed.
Measure their impact
It’s surprising how few charities measure their impact. Our top recommended charities use scientific methods to evaluate the results of their actions, ensuring that their interventions produce the desired effects.
Are cost-effective
They save or improve the most lives per euro donated to them. Eg) our top recommended global health charities can save a life for as little as 3,000 euros, our top climate charities can avoid one ton of carbon emissions for just 1 euro and our top animal welfare charities can spare thousands of animals from factory farming for the same price of saving one animal in a refuge.
Are independently evaluated
All of our top charities are independently evaluated by world leading charity evaluators. See more information below.
We do NOT recommend charities based on their:
Location
A life is valuable whether it is based in France or the developing world.
Tax deductibility
Our top recommended charities are all tax deductible in Switzerland, but not in France. This is because French tax law dictates that a charity must operate from France in order to be tax deductible. We always prioritise the impact of a charity over its tax deductible status.
Overhead costs
Some of our charities such as Against Malaria Foundation have very low overhead costs, and some such as Clean Air Task Force – have much higher overhead costs. To explain why we don’t take overhead costs into account in our recommendations, imagine two charities:
- Charity A spends 10,000 euros a month on it’s operations and saves 1 life
- Charity B spends 20,000 euros a month on it’s operations and saves 6 lives
In the above examples Charity A saves 1 life for every 10,000 spent on it, whereas Charity B saves 1 life for every 3,300 euros spent on it. In this example – it’s clear to see that it’s not overhead costs that are important – but in fact the ratio of overhead costs to the desired impact. Research suggests that there is not much of a correlation at all between overhead and effectiveness.
Our recommendations are based on the research of independent experts
Finding the best aid organisations isn’t that easy. That’s why we work closely with experts who have been conducting extensive and in-depth research on the subject for many years. These experts are completely independent and work at the cutting edge of charity evaluation in their respective cause areas. They conduct rigorous tests on hundreds of charities to find out as precisely as possible how much good their programs achieve per euro spent. By comparing the cost effectiveness of so many charities, they are able to short list the most effective charities to donate to in order for your donations to have the biggest impact.
The charity evaluators whose research we primarily rely on are:
GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT: GiveWell
GiveWell is the world’s leading research organisation that studies global health and development charities.
‘We search for the charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar. Our goal is to produce the world’s top research on where to give. Free, for everyone. We recommend a small number of charities that do an incredible amount of good’ (GiveWell)
GiveWell was founded in 2007 by Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, two former hedge fund employees. They wanted to do as much good as possible with their donations and found that there was little solid information available on how to do this. GiveWell invests more than 40,000 hours of research each year and has raised more than €1 billion for high-impact charities, saving an estimated 150,000 lives.
ANIMAL WELFARE: EA Animal Welfare Funds
The EA Animal Welfare Fund was rated as the top animal charity evaluator by GWWC’s ‘evaluating the evaluators project’ in 2024. They are therefore the primary charity evaluator we defer to in order to choose our top animal charities. We meet with them every few months to get up to date recommendations. They conduct thorough research into various animal welfare organisations to find those that help the most animals per dollar.
CLIMATE CHANGE: Giving Green
Giving Green is a nonprofit organisation that spends thousands of hours each year reviewing studies and climate charities to find the most cost effective interventions to combat climate change. From this research, they publish their top recommendations each year. Their team is made up of climate scientists, economists and impact evaluation experts with decades of experience working at the intersection of evidence-based policy and the environment. We meet regularly with Giving Green to discuss our climate recommendations and run climate workshops in collaboration with eachother.
Other evaluators
Although we primarily defer to GiveWell, Giving Green and EA Animal Welfare Fund, we also read the research of other top charity evaluators including LongView Philanthropy, Founders Pledge and Animal Charity Evaluators to ensure we are not overly-reliant on any one source of research. When choosing our top charities we prefer organisations whose effectiveness is corroborated by multiple independent evaluators.
We process donations free of charge, which means we do not keep any of your donation for ourselves. However, the payment methods credit card, PayPal and SEPA direct debit incur fees from the payment services we work with. These fees are deducted from your donation. The amount is calculated as follows for donations within France:
Transfer : Free of charge within the SEPA payment area
Transfer via Donorbox: 2.55% + 0.25 €
Credit card : 2.95% + 0.25 € (for European cards)
PayPal : 3,15 % + 0,25 €
For donations of > 1,000 euros, we recommend a free bank transfer. PayPal and credit cards are not recommended for large amounts due to the costs.
Fees would also be incurred for a direct donation to the respective organisations. We have already negotiated with all payment providers and received particularly favourable conditions for non-profit organisations. We have specially advantageous conversion fees compared to traditional bank.
We also finance ourselves through donations, but completely independently.
If you would like to discuss the best way to donate through us, please get in touch.
Your donation is paid directly to the organisations you support, and only transaction costs apply. Mieux Donner does not deduct any amounts for its own operations.
[1] World’s primary energy consumption (Our world in Data) [Accessed 07/11/2024].
[2] Rationale for our estimation of 1 ton of carbon mitigated per euro donated to Clean Air Task Force (CATF).
While it’s difficult to put a number on tons of carbon avoided as a result of policy work, the most rigorous available evaluation of CATF gives us confidence that 1 ton of carbon avoided per euro spent is conservative, and not an overestimation of their impact.
Here’s our rational for CATF’s impact estimation:
(Note: We use a conservative conversion rate of 1 USD: 1 EURO in our impact calculations).
Founders Pledge, a leading evaluator of climate charities, conducted an in-depth analysis of CATF. Their evaluation estimated the cost of CO2e reduction at $0.10-$1. For full assumptions and reasoning behind why $1 per ton is considered conservative and acceptable as a figure, refer to page 116 onward of their report.The following is taken from page 119 of the report:
“While this estimate will clearly be wrong, the assumptions are chosen such that it is likely that this estimate is too conservative — it could easily be the case that the actual cost-effectiveness is 10x or 100x of that estimate, while it seems significantly less likely that the estimate is too optimistic. Of course, not every project of CATF is as impactful as their work on 45Q, we should not take the conservative estimate of this work as the conservative guess of their work in general. Rather, it makes sense to assume that the average project is 10x less cost-effective than this project, resulting in a cost of USD 1/tCO2e as a conservative guess.”
Although the Founders Pledge report dates back to November 2021, CATF has continued to drive significant policy successes since then, such as the EU methane regulation and the Inflation Reduction Act. These achievements demonstrate a sustained impact, leading us to believe that CATF’s effectiveness remains consistent with the findings of the Founders Pledge report—if not even greater, given the substantial scale of these two policies.
CATF is one of Giving Green’s top charity recommendations for for 2025. The bench mark for their top charities is 1 ton of carbon avoided per 1 USD donated.
The estimation of one ton per dollar is shared by our German colleagues, Effektiv Spenden, the most successful and well regarded effective giving initiative in mainland Europe. (They have internal researchers who independently verify impact estimates for charities.)
[3] Not the end of the world, Hannah Ritchie (2024)
Each round trip transatlantic flight emits an average of 1.6 tons of CO2 equivalent therefore one way emits 0.8 tons of carbon.
Other climate charities we recommend
Good Food Institute
In 2024 GFI’s success included a $100 million partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund, halal recognition for cultivated meat in Singapore, and a new office in Japan. Ongoing efforts focus on public funding, national support, and overturning cultivated meat bans.