I’ll start by saying I don’t trust any bank to give me a list of green investments. Mine has a “pay monthly and we will invest for you” but the list of companies it has are all from BlackRock and have a bunch of US companies, oil and gas giants pretending to have green goals, and techno-fascist companies like Tesla on the list because “they’re going electric”.

My time is limited and I’m not willing to spend hours every day scrutinising companies and initiatives to ensure they are green, sustainable, and socially aware. Following green news, there is news about whatever new battery is in whichever stage, a new company testing a carbo-fibre something improve whatever new thing will turn a turbine, and so on, but some of those companies either aren’t public or so fresh it would be risky to invest.

How do I safely and lazily invest in green European businesses? I’m willing to pay for the service, but not a wild amount as I don’t have a wild amount to invest either. Also, the return should be more than just letting it sit in my savings account. Risk is fine, an average return of 2% isn’t.

  • Taalnazi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 days ago

    Find an independent place that focuses on research of whether investments are green or not, and which respect human rights.

    Some banks provide a transparency list of what they invest in. ASN Bank and Triodos for example would be relatively decent candidates.

    I wish there were an investment list though, of DUWOCS (decentralised, unionised and worker-owned co-ops), so that we could pool our strength into those.

    A possibility would be non-voting, non-tradeable and worker-preferred shares, where outside investors only get a bit of the profit back. Public loan funds are another option, that loan out money to those cooperatives and then pay back return on interest to you, in the form of e.g. paying something for you that you need (like a sort of coupon) to improve your life standards.

    Part of the returns then also could go to spreading worker-owned cooperatives, and gathering them into federations of those.

    That could motivate a move toward a gift economy.