Individual🌡 Climate Action ✊

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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:

Closing roads and building bicycle lanes.
Building electrified trains and dedicated bus lanes.
Passing laws to establish a maximum number of parking spots per person.
Mixed Zoning (walkable cities)
Banning fossil fuel power plants while building hydro/solar/wind/geothermal
Passing laws to heavily tax carbon emissions
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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[–] 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.