Once upon a time, not too long ago, a human flipped a switch. The switch of a new machine, which made new things. And if there's something humans love, it's new things. Faster things. Bigger things. Better things.
So we flipped the switch again. And then again. And then we pressed a button, and turned a knob, and flipped another switch. And so we went.
Until, one day, we realized our obsession with progress had been misguided all along. The consumerist system we were brought up in, which trained us to believe that everything had a price tag, ironically forgot to teach us that unbridled growth came with a cost too.
But when we came to grips with reality, it was already too late.
We breezed through all the tipping points. The permafrost melted and ancient viruses emerged from it. Trees stopped absorbing carbon and entire natural ecosystems collapsed. Our crops turned into dust and the ground sunk beneath our feet.
Civilization drowned and gasped for a breath of fresh air. But there was none left. So, as the sun of humanity begun to set, we asked ourselves: "What if we had flipped a different kind of switch?"
What you've read just now were the closing lines of the final chapter of humankind: our epilogue.
Throughout millennia, evolution has hardwired us to create new things. That's why we flip switches all the time. What might not be so evident is that we've consequently been programmed to be idealistic and innovative.
And it shows: we've recently conceived a new kind of switch—one that, instead of producing new things, is giving us the chance to turn the epilogue of humanity into a prologue.
A switch that plants trees, or one that preserves our natural ecosystems, or one that absorbs greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Or better yet, one that does all at once.
This switch is called carbon offsetting.
For the past few years, several companies have sprung up to offer subscription plans to fund projects that avoid or remove carbon emissions, allowing people to "offset" their carbon footprint while taking a platform fee as an intermediary between project developers and consumers. We've figured out a way to commercialize the act of saving our planet. See that? "Commercialize". Is that the only way we know to push forward as a species?
While our obsession with creating things is closely tied to our biology, the need to commercialize everything exactly as we do now is not.
Our current economic model is fairly recent, and, back when they conceived it, its architects didn't have a plan for the world as it is today. Their primary concern was for the plane of economic growth to keep flying higher and higher, assuming that everything else would fall into place if we got the economics right. We now know that this fails to take into account our planet's natural limits while also assuming prosperity to be primarily material, which it isn't. We boarded this plane long ago, without really knowing how to land it. Are we doomed to fly off into the Sun? Are we the species-wide equivalent to Icarus?
Maybe so. But, again, we're idealistic and innovative. We don't conform. We break norms. We believe there's a better way to do things, and we want to figure out how to land the plane.
So that's what we're doing. We're going back to the drawing board, rethinking everything. No notes. No blueprints. No map to find our way back.
Cosora is the first offset plan that's free: our platform fee is exactly 0%, so all the money you contribute goes directly to the project developers responsible for reversing climate change.
You might ask: how then will we make money? How will we keep this thing going?
Well, we'll figure something out. Something that feels right. For now, adding a paywall to the last chance we have to save our home planet just doesn't sit right with us.
We're not building another switch. We're building the right one: one to land the plane and save our planet in the process.
Building the right "switch" sounds like the obvious thing to do. Who claims they're building the wrong one, anyway? The thing about right and wrong, as always, is that they're subjective terms.
In our field—climate action; carbon offsetting in particular—right and wrong don't refer to the objective or ambition one pursues. Our goal is shared, after all: we're all fighting the same fight together.
When we talk about right and wrong, we mean the method. Specifically, the offset method. To understand why we believe ours is the right one, we first need to go over a bit of history on how carbon offsets came to be.
Carbon credits—the "certificates" that validate the avoidance or removal of 1 tCO₂e—were initially introduced back in 1997 as a mechanism to adhere to the cap-and-trade schemes set by the Kyoto Protocol, under which developed countries had to fix a maximum "cap" of carbon emissions. To stay below it, these countries fractioned their cap into multiple carbon emission permits and distributed them to the country's economic agents (companies), which could then trade the credits with each other. For example: if Company A and Company B both had a cap of 100 tCO₂e, but Company A needed to emit 150 tCO₂e to produce and sell its products while Company B could do with just 50 tCO₂e, then Company B would sell 50 carbon credits to Company A, technically allowing both companies—and, by extension, the whole country—to stay below the cap.
That was the inception of the Compliance Carbon Markets, after which came the Voluntary Carbon Markets, where Cosora—and all other consumer carbon offset solutions—currently trade.
The main takeaway here is that conventional carbon offsets were designed to trade, rather than increase, climate benefits. Today, carbon credits are extremely differentiated products, even though they're often wrongly presented as commodities.
This brings us to the concept of additionality. Additionality is the degree to which a carbon offset project wouldn't have happened without the monetary contribution from the carbon offset itself. Projects centered around renewable energies are perhaps the most common non-additional offset projects, which are still being mass-marketed to consumers everywhere. Renewable energies have become so efficient over the past decade that they no longer satisfy the additionality principle: these projects will be funded regardless of whether or not you donate your money to them, simply because they're cheaper than their fossil fuel counterparts—and they will continue to decrease in price as investment floods in.
Certifications are another part of the industry that might mislead consumers under certain circumstances. Going back to the renewables example, you'll often come across renewable energy projects that have been verified by accredited third-party institutions such as Verra with its Verified Carbon Standard. While the role of certifying bodies is key to assess the quality of a project, it helps to keep in mind that a project might have gotten the certification years ago when it was still considered to be additional, even though that might no longer be the case.
Other critical factors contribute to the quality of an offset project, like its durability (i.e. the period during which the carbon removed and stored by the project will remain as such) or its risk of leakage (i.e. the probability that the emissions avoided by the project are shifted somewhere else).
We take eight variables of this kind into account to assess the quality of each carbon offset project, which helps us build a portfolio that maximizes the impact behind every dollar.
Our method is not about helping you check a carbon neutrality box so you can forget about your daily emissions and go about your day. It's only about optimizing carbon offsets to accelerate climate action.
On one hand, nature-based solutions, namely protecting and restoring forests, are the most cost-effective and proven methods to capture and store CO₂. However, even though these usually come hand-in-hand with many co-benefits for preserving nature, only those that meet strict criteria can be claimed to be of high quality and integrity. On the other hand, engineered climate solutions are highly technical projects that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (or from other sources such as waste biomass), and set up systems to either repurpose or store it. Engineered solutions are of high quality across the board: they're objectively additional, more durable than nature-based solutions, and have no risk of leakage. Carbon removal technologies are, nonetheless, extremely expensive. They are still embryonic and need a lot of investment to reach cost-efficiency, just as renewables before them.
The need to invest to reach cost-efficiency and make engineered solutions viable—can be neatly summarized as "the need for innovation".
But here's the catch: focusing on the quality of engineered solutions as measured by variables such as additionality, durability, and risk of leakage without regard for the second-order consequences of only funding these types of projects is dangerous. This approach may lead us to create a portfolio that is impractical and ineffective when it comes to reversing climate change.
As the saying goes, "For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong." Trying to solve the climate threat exclusively through hard tech is a clear example of that.
In "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster", Bill Gates focuses extensively on the need for such technologies—and he's on point in that regard. However, as Robert Pérez explains in one of his articles, he fails to address one of the most important levers to fight climate change: forests. He severely underestimates how avoidable practices such as deforestation have a tremendous impact on global warming, both because of the emissions generated by the activity itself and the carbon that otherwise-standing forests would remove.
According to the book, "forests" contribute 1.6 GtCO₂e (that's 1.6 billion metric tons!) net emissions per year, which is quite the misleading statement. This figure comes from taking forest carbon removals (the CO₂ trees absorb) and subtracting deforestation-related emissions from them.
Not only is it picturing forests as inherently carbon-emitting entities even though they make up our planet's largest carbon sink, but it also seems to differ substantially from the latest research on the topic, which estimates forest carbon removals to be responsible for capturing 15.6 GtCO2e every year (equivalent to 31% of global greenhouse gas emissions), while gross emissions add up to 8 GtCO₂e per year (16% of global greenhouse gas emissions).
That brings the actual figure of forest net emissions down to -7.6 GtCO₂e per year!
Any climate change policy or carbon offset portfolio that doesn't include halting deforestation and accelerating forest restoration is quite literally missing half of the story—specifically, it's ignoring 16% of the problem (i.e. halting deforestation) and 31% of the solution (increasing forest carbon removals). And thus "the need for protection and restoration".
So, summing up. What is Cosora?
It's the switch that will help us find a way to land the plane of unrestrained economic growth. It's the method we can follow to fix climate change rather than signaling our commitment to the planet. And it's the portfolio of projects that will foster the innovation to unlock the future and the restoration to save our present.
Either that or, you know... just another carbon offset subscription. Your call!
