Could crowdfunding do what Governments can't?

Climate change is a global problem—but climate capital doesn’t flow globally.

In this episode of FUTUREPROOF., Jeremy sits down with Lassor Feasley, co-founder and CEO of Renewables.org, to unpack why some of the highest-impact climate solutions on Earth remain dramatically underfunded.

Renewables.org applies a Kiva-style crowdfunding model to distributed solar projects across the Global South. Individuals can invest as little as $25 into no-interest loans that fund solar installations—and are repaid monthly over five years, allowing capital to be recycled again and again.

Lassor explains why:

• A dollar invested in Global South solar can deliver up to 5x the carbon impact of a comparable U.S. project

• Traditional climate fintech and ESG models break down in frontier markets

• Repayment isn’t just financial—it’s proof of impact

• Design, not just technology, determines whether climate solutions scale

This conversation goes beyond solar panels to explore systems, incentives, trust, and the future of climate finance—and why everyday individuals may be better positioned than institutions to fund the energy transition where it matters most.

If climate change is a race against time, this episode asks a harder question: are we deploying capital where it actually counts?

“So, today's episode is about climate, but not in the way that it's usually discussed, because the biggest climate story of the next decade may not be new technology, and may be actually where money goes and where it doesn't. So, my guest today is Lassor Feasley, co-founder and CEO of renewables.org, a non-profit of planning a Kiva-style lending model to one of the most underfunded, highest-impact climate opportunities in the world, distributed solar across the Global South. With as little as $25, individuals can fund solar projects in places where energy demand is surging, grids are still coal-heavy, and a single dollar can have up to five times the carbon impact of a comparable investment in the US.

So, in this conversation, we're going to be talking about that and a whole lot more, including why traditional climate finance keeps missing the mark. So, Lassor, welcome to Futureproof.

Thank you very much, Jeremy.

First off, want to ask you, you know, who are you and what do you do on a day-to-day basis? How do you describe yourself?”

“My name is Lassor, as you know, and I am CEO and co-founder of renewables.org. Renewables is the Global South crowdfunding non-profit for solar infrastructure across India and Africa, where anyone can log on and make a small investment or a large one in solar projects that we believe are the world's most carbon-effective investments possible. My background is in product design.

Before renewables.org, I was doing user interface design and other types of user experience design consulting. And so I bring a lot of that ethic to renewables.org, the work I do every day. And a lot of that is user experience design.

What drew me to this work is that I saw how much homeowners with residential rooftop solar loved to check in on their solar productivity. And so many people I talk to, suburbanites with roofs out in the suburbs, they will check in on their solar apps that they get when they install solar. Several times a week, several times a day, share them with friends and family.”

“They like to see how much carbon they avoided, how much money they saved. I think a lot of them just like to feel productive even when they're sitting on their couch. So I kind of asked myself, how do I take that really high, sticky level of engagement, something that's like the incredible ingredient for a great product design, and put on a call to action, make that engagement useful by inviting people to invest in even more solar.

And so that's a deep part of the ethic of what we're doing at renewables.org. Not only are you supporting Global South economic development and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, but you're doing it in this way that feels very tactile, that feels like your investment is accountable to you and a projection of your values and the good you want to do in the world.”

“By the way, so I'm glad that you kind of put it that way, which is that it's a values-based thing. But then I'm thinking there's another component about the value that you're generating and just essentially the ROI of that dollar invested in the Global South. You know, you argue that a dollar invested in the Global South, particularly in solar, can have up to 5x the carbon impact of one invested in the US.,

which I think is really interesting. I did not know that, but then it kind of got me thinking if that's true, why does so much climate capital still flow to lower impact projects in the wealthy countries? And what does that say about how broken our climate finance incentives really are?

Right. So a lot of our work hinges on this claim that we really believe in, which is that you create more than 500% more carbon impact investing in Global South through renewables.org than you would investing in the United States of Europe. And that's for three reasons.”

“Number one is that the grid is more carbon intensive in the Global South. There's more coal and diesel dependence there than in the United States, which has to some degree already transitioned to renewables, but also has more sustainable or at least less polluting, non-sustainable options like LNG and so forth. Number two is the cost of construction is lower.

The grid might be twice as carbon intensive in a market like Rwanda or Botswana, but then every dollar you invest builds two or three times more watts, more watt capacity on a solar facility. And the third reason is we have the cost of construction, the carbon intensity of the grid. And then finally, you just have 20% on average, more sunny hours each year across the Global South or in the markets where we select projects to build than you do in the United States.”

“So each of those watts that you create is receiving more sunlight each year. So the second part of your question, why is it that funds are not making their way to the Global South? I think it's important to realize that solar has only been considered a highly bankable infrastructure asset in the United States for five or six years.

Today, it's by far the largest source of new energy generation brought online each year. But even five or six years ago, it was considered a little bit speculative, a little bit off the beaten path for institutional investors to invest in a big way in sustainable infrastructure. It just simply has not saturated these more far flung markets across the Global South in the way it has in the United States.

And so a big part of what renewables.org does is to go to those frontier markets where the technology is only just starting to make inroads and help to accelerate that.”

“Yeah, to me, the acceleration is, I think, really important. But it just makes me think that we could be, maybe, I don't know, locking in decades of fossil dependency right now if we don't essentially get to these markets and help solar financing scale at a quick fashion. Like then you could be locking in an entirely different system that we've seen.

Doesn't work long term in a whole lot of other markets. Like, why not try to avoid that? Why not learn from past mistakes that we've had in other places around the globe?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And one way that I would put it is that it's much cheaper and easier, more efficient to do an initial build out that's sustainable, as opposed to what we call a sustainability transition, where you have to dismantle an existing infrastructure system that is unsustainable and replace it with a sustainable one. And that's difficult for logistical reasons, for engineering and finance reasons, and I think we all know for political reasons as well, because these industries are quite entrenched and incredibly corrupt and have a big influence on our politics.”

“So the Global South does not have a majority of, depending on how you define the Global South in general, the vast majority of energy consumption occurs in more developed markets, but this is changing. The Global South is rapidly developing as they require more electricity to fuel more advanced, more comfortable lifestyles like we enjoy in developed markets. They'll need energy.

It's really important that energy is sustainable because the world cannot continue to create the level of emissions that it already does, let alone take on billions and billions of new people at the same, who consume energy at the same rate.

I think another key thing that makes me think about like, so if you want to change a system, then obviously, you generally speaking, you're going to need money to do it. I think that there's been this belief that the Global South, you know, traditional lenders often say that Global South seller is too risky. Is that maybe because of like financial instability, like how much of that risk is real and how much of it is just unfamiliarity or bias or outdated financial models?”

“There are many barriers to all kinds of investment across the Global South. And one thing that a lot of investors in those regions lean on is a track record. My co-founder Primal Shah previously built a similar nonprofit called kiva.org that allows anyone to make 0% interest loans to individuals in markets across Africa and India, and you get paid back, just like with renewables.org, you get paid back without interest.

And that did a lot of work to help comfort institutional investors. Some of them were private investors, others were philanthropic sources of capital, big endowments and so forth, who went to those same markets and started to extend consumer credit to individuals there. kiva.org did the hard work of proving that consumers and individuals would pay back small loans that were uncollateralized at a satisfactory rate.”

“And they built the infrastructure and they established the track record that allowed institutional capital to come in and fill that gap in a big way. So over its existence, Kiva has extended several billion dollars in credit to these borrowers and the microfinance industry that they built has grown exponentially around them, hundreds of billions of dollars every year. And it required this seed, Kiva, to come in at first and prove that it was a bankable industry, a bankable finance vertical.

And so an important part of what we hope to achieve with renewables.org is to do the same for solar, to show that commercial solar is a viable and bankable asset class in the markets where we operate, and then hopefully attract larger pools of capital to come in and fill the gaps and help us accelerate sustainable energy adoption there.”

“So then one follow up question kind of got me thinking, you know, about like the old Kiva model, you know, Kiva proved that everyday people could unblock massive financial systems over time. Do you think that crowd based climate finance is a bridge to institutional capital or a permanent alternative that might out compete it? I mean, I kind of see it both ways, but I think that if there is big institutional capital and they see if somebody else helps them identify a market that they were a little too late for, you know, you're still effecting change either way.

So it's still a good thing, but like I kind of feel like maybe crowd based climate finance just lets institutions know, by the way, there's money to be made here. Then they'll maybe jump in and compete too. And it's a good problem to have.

But what's your take on how this all evolves from a financial perspective?”

“For sure, institutional finance will be required to establish change at the scale that we need. Retail investors and individual investors and lenders in our platform, we believe can prove to institutional investors that there is a bankable market here. Their pockets are just so much deeper than individual investors, and they're able to make investments at a scale and for a duration, make commitments that are decades long sometimes in a way that individual retail investors cannot.

But we see this a lot across retail investing in many verticals. Today, we saw crypto first being taken up by individual investors in a big way before institutions felt a need to get involved. In retail, it is a double edged sword.

You had retail investors famously in the 90s pushing up valuations and creating this exuberance that ultimately did not end well for the economy once institutions got involved. But on the other hand, you have amazing examples like kiva.org, where retail investors, individuals were able to project their values in a way that helped beneficial industries form. And that's what we're trying to do.”

“We're riding this wave of retail investment that has been an important theme and narrative in the broader economy for the past five or six years, and channeling it towards this important topic, this important issue, which is climate change, in the best way that we know how.

Yeah, you know, something that we've talked about actually a lot on this show is the idea of a public company versus a private company, and whether or not it was actually, like, let's say, can you achieve as much if you're a, you know, a public company that is reporting that your earnings every 90 days. And, you know, we don't often ask the question about nonprofits in the same way, but, you know, renewables.org is structured as a nonprofit. So in a future where profit incentives often distort long-term outcomes, realistically, do you think nonprofit capital structures are better suited for solving planetary scale problems or do they introduce new limitations?”

“I think that there's a place for both. In our case, we're going into these untested markets, proving a finance vertical that you just can't raise money at scale for in the private markets. And so the nonprofit structure is very strategic and works very well for us.

I think particularly because we are asking our lenders, we're asking our investors to accept a 0% rate of interest, and maybe to accept the risk that comes with going into these new markets. And in exchange, we will go and find the highest carbon impact solar infrastructure we can fund. Even if we have to fund it at a concessionary rate, and our individual investors get paid back without interest, it would not be fair to them if there was a private beneficiary of that.

And so the non-profit structure works very well for renewables.org. It makes a lot of sense. However, if you do want to mobilize trillions of dollars to go into these markets after us, there will have to be a profit incentive in order to get institutional capital involved.”

“So there's a time and place for everything. And I think that in the United States, it's seen as a very strict binary between profit and non-profit. But when you take a wider view, you will start to realize that a large portion of our economy is non-profit.

We have, of course, a huge public sector, government workers at the federal and state and municipal level. Then we have our entire health care industry is primarily composed of non-profit regional hospitals, which are another good 10% or 15% of our economy. So it all depends on context.

And in our particular context, non-profit is a good way to glaze this trail.

Yeah, because like as you're saying this, it strikes me thinking about kind of like if I'm going to talk about the Global North, as if it's like one monolith for a second. I think that for a lot of people up here, climate action still feels a little bit abstract. And when you're thinking about like a non-profit, it's maybe just the structure to succeed.”

“But funding solar and the Global South isn't necessarily like quote unquote cherubi, it's self-preservation in a globally connected climate system. Like last I checked, the whole earth is connected and if you basically introduce a problem from a climate standpoint, one place in the world, like we have no way of just cordoning that off so that it doesn't impact the rest of us. So it just seems to be like, it sounds so cheesy to say, oh, we all have to care about each other, but we kind of do because it's like somebody smoking outside when you're walking by, like it's going to get you.

There's no way to really separate those two and maybe we do have to be thinking about it a little more about from a self-interest standpoint in the North, we have to be taking care of this out that's going to benefit us as well.

Yeah, that's right. And the impacts of climate change are only just starting to be felt. I think that probably the vast majority of people who are more than 25 or 30 years old can remember a time when the climate was different.”

“I'm from here in New York City and when I was growing up, there were sometimes five or ten snow days each year when we got to stay home in Missadave School.

Same. And then it bums me out so much to that like my kids just, they're not going to have as many of those, so.

Yeah, that's right. And the majority of people experience climate change in this way. And from time to time, we have some anomalous climate effects or at least climate catastrophes that can in part or in whole be attributed to manmade climate change.

And those tend to be kind of one-offs, but we have a few each year, either hurricanes and typhoons or fires, droughts and so on. But those are relatively manageable compared to what is coming next, which is, for example, coastal flooding in major cities in the United States on an annual or even monthly basis. This is something we can look forward to in our lifetime.”

“Could be that the ski season becomes shorter and we see less snow and wind and other climate effects that change the way agriculture is done and recreation and tourism. And it will take a big toll on economies. It won't just be nostalgia or it won't just be changes that we can adapt to.

The imperative for climate action will become very urgent and inevitable over the next 10 or 20 years.

Yeah, I know we're screwed, but in all seriousness, you would not be doing this type of work if you didn't think we could be making some degree of outsize difference. So that's crystal clear. I want to ask you just to kind of wrap up.

When you look ahead 20 years, what's the single decision that governments, investors or citizens could make today that would most meaningfully future proof the global energy system? And then what's stopping us from making it? Because it does seem like one of these things where there are all these people who are like, we should be doing more.”

“And then, you know, some of these says, you first.

Well, climate action and responsible pollution requirements have to become involuntary. That has to be the new norm internationally. And I think that the public at large understands the imperative of climate change.

It's a little bit of a meme to think that public opinion is the main impediment. I think that it is political corruption and the influence of incumbent industries that are preventing stronger climate action from being taken. That said, the second most important thing that could happen to avoid the worst impacts of climate change is that millions of people could invest even a small amount of money in renewables.org by going to www.renewables.org, learning about our product and getting started.

Amen. And of course, we'll have a link in the show notes, but I think it's obviously not a bad way to start a new year is to invest a little bit in our future. Even if you don't think it's your future, somebody living elsewhere, it actually is as we went over midway through the episode.”

“And Lassor, this is a really cool and very big undertaking, but at least I don't have to go to sleep every night wondering if you're making the world a slightly better place or not. A really cool mission. And thank you so much for making the time.

Thank you, Jeremy. I liked it.”