Renewable energy should be a potent weapon fighting climate change. But experts we trust to help fight global warming are instead disarming us. They’ve built a carbon accounting framework that breaks the deep connection between renewable energy and carbon reduction. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, America will be rethinking a lot of things. How to create more honest, real-world and effective weapons in the fight against global warming should be one of them. American businesses have become the front line of the fight against climate change. We’re attempting to create an innovative and practical tool for them.

Our mission is to fight climate change on a large scale by creating a new, second-generation solar carbon offset:  we call it a “carbon mortgage”. Once a company has done everything practical to reduce its own footprint, it must then turn to offsets to deal with its residual emissions—―investing in greenhouse gas reductions in areas outside of its own operations. There is no better place to create these offsets than electric power generation.  Clearloop and its carbon mortgage offers a powerful and practical way to do this, creating jobs, tax base and important national infrastructure in the process.  Now there can be a lot more and bigger attacks on climate change with a carbon mortgage.

Today—on Earth Days 50th birthday—I’d like to add one more word to the Climate Action challenge:  be effective. The best approach to mitigating carbon is not to try to drag it back out of the atmosphere and store it temporarily in trees, it’s to stop taking it out of the ground in the first place. We started Clearloop to help move this along– building solar farms to replace electric power generated from fossil fuels with clean, renewable solar power. Many of America’s corporations, despite their profit motive and responsibility to shareholders, have placed themselves on the front lines fighting climate change. Clearloop’s mission in the years ahead is simple: help them.

A new way of thinking is making its way into corporate sustainability strategy. Why just purchase renewable energy anywhere when you can choose strategically to displace greater CO2 emissions? Read how one company—clearloop—is setting the standard.

In Tennessee, for instance, startup Clearloop is rewriting the playbook to offer renewables-based emissions offsets at the product level, rather than the industry norm of providing renewable PPAs on a straightforward MWh basis against the organization’s overall electricity consumption. As more investors recognize that better siting of new wind and solar projects means deepened reductions in grid emissions, more clean energy development opportunities — and employment — will emerge, too.

Clearloop will offer short-term agreements that enable companies to compensate for their carbon emissions impact by paying to fund new solar panels in communities with the dirtiest electric grids. The agreements would offset companies’ carbon footprints, either product-by-product or service-by-service. This is former Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen’s second renewable energy-centric venture since his time in public office.

A new business venture by former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and two partners takes on global warming by helping companies fund solar panels in communities with dirty-power electric grids. Bredesen believes this idea will make it easier to reduce the health and environmental impact of carbon emissions by sidestepping the years-long renewable energy contracts that some larger companies agree to as they seek recognition for trying to curb climate change. He said many companies “would like to do something but need to lean on somebody else’s expertise to simplify it.” If a company wants to reclaim the carbon emissions released to produce a coffee cup, for example, there will be an offsetting solar panel built somewhere tied directly to that cup.