this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Individual🌡 Climate Action ✊

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Discuss actions that we can directly take as individuals to reduce environmental harm.

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Investment Funds for 'Green' Municipal Bonds (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 months ago by throwaway44056@lemmy.ml to c/climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net
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Are there any investment funds (ETFs or mutual funds) which exclusively purchase municipal bonds in “green” cities?

Most mutual funds seem to profit from unethical companies. Genocide (Lockheed, Google), Climate Catastrophe (BP, ExxonMobil), Slavery (Verizon, Walmart). Murder (UnitedHealth, Dow Chemical).

It seems like municipal bonds might be one of the more ethical ways to invest money.

Specifically, I’m looking to invest in cities that are building-out infrastructure that will lead to an elimination on their dependence on fossil fuels. For example:

  1. Closing roads and building bicycle lanes.
  2. Building electrified trains and dedicated bus lanes.
  3. Passing laws to establish a maximum number of parking spots per person.
  4. Mixed Zoning (walkable cities)
  5. Banning fossil fuel power plants while building hydro/solar/wind/geothermal
  6. Passing laws to heavily tax carbon emissions
  7. And, of course, cities that invest in education usually get a great ROI.

Cities that come to mind include Paris and New York.

I could try to do all the research myself, and find a bunch of other cities that are on the right path -- but that seems like a full-time job, and it’s probably better to just have a fund manager do this research for us.

Are there already any funds that invest in municipal bonds exclusively in “green” cities?

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I wish you luck but I'm not hopeful. I've gone through a similar exercise of attempting ethical investing, and found the same shortcomings you are.

The problem is that each of us has a different litmus test as to what is ethical or not. As an example, I may want to invest in companies increasing nutrition to nations that are lacking it. Yet because of climate change, it may end up that GMO crops are the only thing that can feed a local population, and there are many that would believe GMO crops are unethical.

I could try to do all the research myself, and find a bunch of other cities that are on the right path – but that seems like a full-time job, and it’s probably better to just have a fund manager do this research for us.

Nearly all the "green" funds I've seen have at least one component I ethically disagree with. On top of that, because we are both shopping for such a bespoke product, the expense ratios or management fees will be sky high.

If you do find an answer, please post it. I'll be watching the thread.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Indeed it would be impossible to have a complex diversified fund that is free of controversy from more than one person’s viewpoint. The ideal answer must rule out managed funds¹. So we are left with each investor picking individual stocks and bonds. But as the OP says, huge effort. Full-time job level of effort.

I do not believe it needs to be a huge effort, though. It’s a tooling problem. Crowdsourcing the labor could be part of the answer.

This thread just inspired this FOSS proposal.

¹ But they can still be useful. Rutger Bregman has said if someone is at least 70% aligned with you, that’s sufficient to join forces or something.. I don’t recall exactly what he said but you get the idea. Some might say if a managed fund is 80% ethically aligned with them, that’s relatively good enough in the grand scheme of things.