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.
One option could be to find a bank that you actually trust.
If you don’t want someone else to invest for you and want an easy way to invest I guess the best way is to find one or several indexes that fit your requirements and invest in those.
For example there is the "MSCI Europe Select Green 50 Index
I’m evaluating a few options now. Mostly by reading their statements, how they work, costs, what the reporting on them looks like (positive, negative - especially negative is important), how long they have existed, and which projects they have funded.
- https://goparity.com/ - Portuguese crowdlending platform
- https://enerfip.eu/ - French crowdfunding platform for green energy projects (mostly in France)
- https://trine.com/ - Swedish crowdfunding platform for green energy projects (seem to be worldwide but require an account to see projects - don’t have an account yet)
- https://www.bettervest.com/ - German crowdfunding platform
Supposedly there are also Green Bonds and Green Funds, but I haven’t finished reading investopedia. If somebody knows how to buy those, I’m all ears. (and I’ll finish reading investopedia).
If you have enough cash to spare and enough time so you don’t mind it being committed: Carbon equity, also does private equity.
Be mindful though that the risk is high, you need lots of cash (>20k), and your money will only come back after ~10yrs
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.
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There are private, closed investment funds for things like windmills in the north sea, but these are of course super non-diversified and non-liquid. You could also try to find an etf that matches your preferences as much as possible and use a cheap/free neobroker to buy it, for example: Amundi MSCI Europe SRI Climate Paris Aligned UCITS ETF DR ©, you can see the full list of holdings at Amundis website
I would go the etf route, because it is diversified and you can get your funds out at any time, you also don’t have minumum or maximum amounts of investment. In some countries you can even do it tax free as a pension.
You don’t. You can’t just dump money into green companies and expect it to grow. Green companies don’t magically increase in value just because they are green. You still have to do the difficult work of evaluating the company. Without it you’re just throwing money at random. The lazy way is to invest in diversified funds which for sure will include companies that are not green. With only green companies you can’t have both lazy and safe.
