If you are a climate tech startup in 2026, you are essentially in the business of selling two things: a physical object that helps the planet, and a financial abstraction that pays for the physical object. The problem is that the physical object is expensive, and the financial abstraction is a house of cards. The KOKO shutdown Take KOKO Networks in Kenya. For a decade, KOKO was the poster child of Africa’s green transition. They had 1.5 million households using high-tech bioethanol stoves instead of smoky charcoal. It was a beautiful, blue-flame success story. Until it wasn’t. In January 2026, KOKO abruptly shut down and laid off its 700 employees because the math no longer worked. The way the math worked was that KOKO sold stoves at a massive discount, roughly KES 2,000 ($16) for a s...