Investment Funds for 'Green' Municipal Bonds - SLRPNK
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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. 1. Building electrified trains and dedicated bus lanes. 1. Passing laws to establish a maximum number of parking spots per person. 1. Mixed Zoning (walkable cities) 1. Banning fossil fuel power plants while building hydro/solar/wind/geothermal 1. Passing laws to heavily tax carbon emissions 1. 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?

Linked thread is the seed of the idea.

We need a tool that makes short work of ethical investors trying to find decent investments that align with their values.

Crowdsourcing the labor is be part of the answer. If I find myself aligned with person X, say Rutger Bregman or Noam Chomsky for example, in principle they could share their portfolio (or at least the portion of their portfolio they are proud of) and I could efficiently browse through and mirror the investments I agree with. Then do the same for the Dalai Lama, Richard Stallman, or whoever. Perhaps I could list people and orgs whose portfolios might be aligned with me and study the intersection of their common investments.

If @throwaway44056@lemmy.ml just focuses on muni bonds for cities with competent cycling infra, I would love to make use of his findings. If he is followed by others, it would inspire him to work harder on finding ethical investments because it would amplify his advocacy.

Consider as well how Netflix uses customer’s movie scores to make recommendations. A mechanism like that could also be adapted to investments. If you like to invest in Copenhagen bonds, perhaps you would also like bonds in various Dutch cities…

There could even be shared blacklists, where a researcher works out which corps are greenwashing abusively and shares the findings.

There could even be a fedi component whereby a thread might host a discussion for each investment.

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