This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern. You’re listening to Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern, KABC 790. My guest today is Helen Avery, Director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute. And welcome to the program. Helen.

Thank you for having me, Matt. Thank you.

Well, you know, you’re coming to us from across the pond today. And, you know, in honor of that, I’m wearing my Rolling Stones t shirt. You know, I didn’t actually plan that it just kind of I guess it was in the air where I, UK frame of mind here.

But the there’s a lot of great work, I think that your your institute is doing and one of one of the focuses that I saw looking at your website is that you’re moving capital to the needs of society, which is a fascinating concept, and creating a green industrial revolution, to create a zero carbon economy, a very big job. So tell us a little bit more about the Green Finance Institute, and what your role as the director of nature programs does.

They’re sure, yeah. So you know, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5 degree increase, only, then the investment required estimates say is somewhere between one point 6,000,000,000,003 point 8 trillion annually, until 2050s. So quite a large sum of money needs to be moved. And in the UK, just to sort of give you an example, just to retrofit the housing stock to be net zero by 2050, is going to cost 65 billion pounds, which is think about $95 billion.

So you know, government funding alone is just, it’s just not going to cut it. There’s just not enough to get us to stay within that two degree scenario. So we really need to mobilize private finance. So we were set up a couple of years ago, the Green Finance Institute, seeded by UK Government, and city, London, and we act as this independent entity. And our role is to mobilize the finance for net zero and H positive transition. So we go sector by sector, transport built environment and nature, and assess the barriers to that finance, then and develop solutions to get it going.

So in particular, the nature funding. Tell us a little bit more about that peace and what that can look like. Sure.

Yeah. So, you know, we’ve been sort of laser focused on climate change for a few years and decarbonisation is what we talk about. But you know, we’re facing two crises now, as I’m sure you’re aware, and one is climate change, and one is biodiversity loss. And terrifyingly, they exacerbate one another.

So, you know, with this in mind, as we’re moving towards this sixth mass extinction, we really need to sort of mobilize capital towards more really away from nature, negative outcomes, and towards nature positive outcomes. So there are several ways that we’re working on that right now. That I’m happy to go into more detail if you want, want to hear about it. Right?

Absolutely. I think it’s fascinating subject, because, you know, my background and undergraduate degree was in economics and the, the classic study of economics really didn’t take into account a whole lot of pollution as a part of measuring good, societal good it was it was whether or not it made money. And if it made money, that meant it was a good business, it was a good industry.

And that was the end of the analysis, up until very, very recently. Did we even consider the externalities of pollution? So what what is it that you at the grain finances to are doing to kind of put the consideration of pollution into the mix when measuring whether or not something is a good investment?

Yeah. And there are a few things that are doing it. So I don’t know if you’re familiar, there was the Dasgupta review. It was out just earlier this year, it was looked at the economics of biodiversity loss. And to your points sort of showed how our economies like rely on nature but we haven’t been pricing nature in at all or rather we have we’ve just given it a value of zero.

And so we that that review made us several recommendations about what needs to be done specifically of the finance sector as well in two, two of its two chapters have a 600 page review is a pretty big tome, and to get through, but it talks about some things they could do. And we sort of looked at that in sort of three ways.

One is measuring risk. There are companies that the finance sector is funding or financing or investing in, that have dependencies on nature that, you know, just might not be there in a few years. Or they also might be sort of have exposure to risks, because it could be a little bit of litigation risk happening.

Well, we can all be impact. We can all think of that. So it’s like, I mean, obviously, if you destroy a beautiful nature spot, then who’s gonna want to go there, and then all the jobs related to that tourist industry are going to be obliterated.

Right, right. Absolutely. If there’s, and there’s, there’s this really great example of a case about risk happening right now in in California, it’s probably know more about this than I do. It’s Nestle waters, that’s now blue Triton, I believe. And they own Poseidon. They own Poland spring water. So they’re basically taking water out of a water source, natural water source, and to bottle it and sell it. But it happens to be in an area that’s massively impacted by drought.

And people have had enough. So there’s a cease and desist letter gone out there, there’s potential for fines. And that particular business line or division, you know, really runs the risk of going going bust. And so it’s, it’s, you know, we haven’t sort of that externality that that water has not been priced in, when a bank made a loan to this company, they weren’t thinking, well, there’ll be no water in 1015 years time, or all the local people are going to be up in arms about it.

So now that banks got a huge risk on its books, if it’s got a loan to that company. So we’re trying to get businesses to think more about these externalities, as you say, and banks to start understanding, hang on a minute, I could have some risk here. Because the minute you get them to really think in terms of risk, they’ll stop financing. And we’ll have a whole big behavioral change of companies.

But one of the things that I was looking at, there was a study, I think, done by the oil companies a while back back in the 80s, in which they had looked at the fact that they’re using carbon energy would eventually bring the parts per million up in the 400 range, and that would cause global warming, and so they knew it, and that they didn’t do anything to change their behavior.

And it seems though, that was just one example of them not telling their shareholders what the potential risks were for the company, let alone the risk for the entire planet. Yep, what are you encouraging companies to do to, to disclose these kinds of risks that they have to their shareholders to their lenders?

Well, there’s already the TCFD. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but it’s the task force for climate related financial disclosures that was set up by Mike Bloomberg. And Mark Carney, former Bank of England governor. And that is sort of where companies and financial institutions that are reporting on their risks associated with climate. So that’s already up and running.

And then what we’ve been working on in conjunction with governments, financial institutions, around the world companies, and multilateral was is to launch an equivalent for nature. So in June, the task force for nature related financial disclosures, these acronyms kill me t and FD is going to launch and that that is planning to sort of develop a framework to help companies assess that nature related risk, and for financial institutions also to do the same.

So hopefully, that will create behavioral change larger, it’s gonna take a couple of years to sort of work through but that’s where we are right now. We’re working with huge amount of people on this.

So what’s your background? What brings you to the green finances to…

I’m actually a journalist by background. I was the sustainable finance journalist or Ella finance journalist for over 20 years. And just really wanted to kind of leave the sidelines of writing about it and kind of get in it. So I didn’t join the Green Finance Institute until the middle of middle of last year actually.

Okay, and And so what, what do you do is the director of nature program? So what is the focus of your job in particular there?

Sure, so I work on how we mobilize capital towards nature positive investments towards nature based solutions, maybe natural climate solutions. And there are a few things. As I mentioned, I work on the TNFD and the development of that TNFD. And the Dasgupta review, I mentioned earlier, sort of doing some work with financial institutions, some of them American Bank of America, JP Morgan, to look at how we might move those recommendations from that review forward.

And then finally, we’ll do some work with the UK Government and the Environment Agency around sort of putting catalytic capital to work to create new nature markets, and new investments in nature. So a few things going on right now.

Well, I love the term catalytic capital because that that’s really what we need is a catalyst for change here to spawn the next great green company that will help solve this problem. So you’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. My guest Helen Avery, and we’ll be back in just a minute, talking about catalytic capital and, and how we’re going to change the world to a zero carbon economy, which is quite an exciting topic. So join us back in a minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America KABC 790. This is Matt Matern. And our guest today is Helen Avery, Director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute. And, Helen, welcome back. And you were talking to us about catalytic capital?

And I’m interested in that and how are we going to transition to the zero carbon economy? What is your organization doing to kind of marry up the capital necessary to put into the entrepreneurs hands to create this new green Industrial Revolution?

Yeah, no. It’s a great sort of question. I love this sort of topic of catalytic capital. So one of the sort of challenges with green investments is that a lot of it is just entirely new technology. And that is a risk for any investor. You know, when if you think back to the early days of solar and wind, it was deemed like a really risky investment did you want to get into it.

And so what happened back then of people sort of have forgotten forgotten about now is that there was a lot of catalytic capital in that there was concessionary capital coming in, from philanthropy, from governments to help sort of de risked some of those projects, and some of those technologies act as sort of CO investor, maybe their first loss or last loss as guarantor on some of these investments.

And that’s really kind of what we need. Now, again, in sort of newer technologies around in knows that sometimes around electric vehicles and some of the infrastructure, for example, but also particularly around nature, you know, some of these sort of nature based solutions, they’re investors, they’re brand new, they don’t know what the risk profile is. So you need sort of governments to stand up and say, hey, you know, what, will co invest with you, if it doesn’t work, we’ll take like the first loss, you know, they normally aren’t going to work.

So it’s not like governments are taking on a huge risk, you would assess them first. But it just sort of gives a level of confidence to investors. And that’s the kind of catalytic capital we really need at scale, right now, we need governments to step up and say, let’s do something smart, not just handout money, but think about a way to crowd in private sector funding. And one way of doing that, as I say, is by de risking or acting as a guarantor.

And so tell us kind of what success your organization is having in the UK and, and across national boundary?

Yeah, so I can sort of share with you about some of the work we’re doing on nature. And we mainly that’s, that’s sort of my my area. It’s my colleagues who’ve covered sort of transport and built environment, and that’s some of the other sectors. But so for example, in nature, I mentioned that we’re working with the Environment Agency, and essentially, they’ve just launched a 10 million cells, tiny doesn’t it? 10 million pound fund, but it’s it’s catalytic capital.

And the idea of that money is to basically you can apply for a grant to help you build a business case for nature, which, again, is sort of a What does that mean? So we’re helping the EAA sort of work. which projects to sort of apply for it. And we’re sort of assessing some of the projects are coming in.

But essentially, it means that, you know, maybe if you’re a farmer, you could be putting interventions in your field that prevent floods, happening down in a village down the road. Now, ordinarily, government is going to pay for that. But we just don’t have that kind of money, what you really need is the private sector pay for it. So what you could do is if a whole whole bunch of farms, they say, we’ll put these interventions in, it’s going to stop floods happening down in that town down there.

And then you would go and approach the town and see if they will pay you to put those interventions in instead of the government paying huge, but there’s interventions in so that way, you sort of got private sector financing coming in, the only problem is this hasn’t been done before. And so you really need that sort of catalytic Capital to help. In this case, Grant Capital to help those farmers kind of figure out and with the buyers, the town’s going to pay for the sort of lower cost of flooding, and sort of come together and figure that out.

And that is, it sounds like very dry, perhaps or not important. But it is crucial, because what we forget about climate change is that all the action happens locally in community, we need to figure out a way to get finance coming in globally into sort of local solutions. So that’s some of the work we’re doing with EA right there is sort of figuring out how you actually create entirely new markets, from scratch into like buyers who have never bought the things they bought before sellers who have never sold the things they’ve sold before.

So that’s just sort of one example of a nature and nature sort of problem and solution that we’re working on. There’s many, many projects like that looking where they’re looking at carbon, or and water quality improvements and stuff like that. That’s just one example.

But certainly, there are so many different areas that we need to get capital to whether it’s building clean vehicles, cleaner buildings, power transmission generation, nuclear power, energy efficiency. Tell us is do does your organization have any position as far as nuclear power and whether or not that’s a good solution going forward? Or how it should get financed?

You know, we don’t look at energy, and there’s only for good reason and that there’s is so much money flowing into energy right now. So I’m afraid I can’t, I could only tell you my personal opinions about nuclear. But we don’t have, we’re just not working in that sector. And as I say, for the only the reasons that there is so much money flowing in a lot of it’s already tested. So it doesn’t need that catalytic capital right now. Not to efficient energy.

Right, that does make sense that there there does seem to be a lot of capital going into, say, for instance, the car market already when electrifying cars and I don’t know, if you have that as much over there, the hydrogen cars which have been rolled out here in California, I don’t know if that’s a thing back in, in Europe.

I have not heard about hydro cars, I have to confess, I have only just moved back to the UK from New York. And I lived there 15 years and didn’t have an electric car there either. So I’m not so super familiar with it. But we are obviously working on electric vehicles, we have sort of some policies that have come in, that are sort of getting rid of sort of heavier, polluting cars in the next few years.

The challenge is, I think I mentioned earlier, is the infrastructure, you know, and and how do you make that fair? How do you make sure that the charging infrastructure just isn’t in wealthy neighborhoods, and and it’s not down in, in neighborhoods where, you know, people have to get up at four in the morning and find somewhere to charge their car.

So there’s, you know, there’s a lot of questions around electric vehicles that we need to sort of answer really, what I went through every I’d love to hear what your experience is in the on the West Coast, because obviously you’re far streets ahead. Well, I don’t

know how much further ahead we are than then where you’re at, but we’re working on it. And I’d say that rolling out the infrastructure for the hydrogen vehicles is it’s been challenging. We have it here in California. And it’s it’s a good enough where I can drive across the state pretty easily without with finding charging station or fueling stations.

But it took it took a fair number of years to kind of get that rolled out so and fortunately private that we did have the catalytic capital. We had some government funding, but then in private industry came in and they kind of had a partnership between government And, and the car companies and the energy providers, the hydrogen providers, and they created a market and now they have a functioning market where the providers of the gas are getting paid. I mean, so it’s working, I believe for them.

And it’s working for the car company. So I mean, it took a little bit of a nudge to get it going from the government. But once it once it, got that nudge, the market then kicked in. And we have really a market driven solution to the problem, which I think is what you’re talking about as well.

Yeah, I mean, that’s the goal, isn’t it? If you don’t, you don’t want government capital come in, get something going and stay there. That would be distorting markets you want to in and then out, thanks very much, then the market takes over, as you say the demand is there. And competition kicks in and technology kicks in? And off we go.

I guess that’s the question is, where does the Green Finance Institute stand in terms of finding out we’re those creating a platform that makes sense where the right formula for government? Capital, private capital, philanthropy, we’re, how do we create these new models?

I mean, it’s a really good question. How do you find that fine line between how much sort of catalytic capital the philanthropic the government money is, is enough? And not too much? And I don’t think we we do actually know, at the moment, certainly not in some of these really new markets. I mean, the way we do it is that we do it by coalition’s so we get together as many people as we can from across sectors, including civil society, and government and private sector and finance, and academia and science, and get them through series of workshops of saying, you know, what are the barriers, what needs to be done, and kind of figuring it all out together?

Because I think if we want to solve some of what we want to solve the problems that we have, it has to be kind of in that collaborative manner right now. Rather than just saying your government knows best or private sector knows best, I mean, they’re just it’s just not going to happen. So that’s the way we do it. It’s sort of why these really in depth deep dive coalition’s?

Well, that sounds like important work and something that we all need to kind of be engaged in. It’s it’s not just one group. And I’ve been certainly a proponent of that. And that’s that we all need to be a part of the solution. So you’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. Our guests that Helen Avery, the director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute, doing some great work there, and we’ll be back in just a minute talking about creating a zero carbon economy and a green Industrial Revolution.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America KABC 790, your host, Matt Matern and our guests, Colin Avery, Director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute, Helen, I want to kind of pivot and start talking about pension funds and how we can direct some of that money, which is real, literally trillions of dollars to be invested into creating this new green Industrial Revolution.

Yeah, I mean, really, that’s, that’s what we need to get moving, isn’t it? That’s where that’s where the sort of lion’s share of the money is, that will really, really make a difference. And it’s challenging, because, you know, the pension funds will say, we’re already we’d love to go, you know, we care, but is the product there?

They’ll go to asset managers and say, you know, what can we invest in, we’ve got this money, where’s the fund, I can go in the the nature positive fund, the Clean Energy Fund, which we do have clean energy funds.

But a lot of that product has not been developed yet. And some of that is just because of, you know, the data, the, the data and the scoring. isn’t there yet. So for example, how can you sort of tell that a company you’re investing in, is doing good for the world, there’s a whole bunch of metrics, we just don’t really know.

And it’s all about CI, the EU us developing this taxonomy at the moment that’s gonna sort of tell you what is a green investment. And so that you can be sure that when you invest in a fund, that it is actually going to have a positive impact? Because there’s a lot of funds out there right now that will say, you know, this is a lovely green fund. And you’re investing in shell or BP.

And yes, they may have like a strategy, a corporate strategy to transition, but I think you’d be pretty upset if you realize that you were investing in Green Fund and you ended are investing in fossil fuels. So but that is actually what’s happening right now. And so there’s just like this, this sort of mismatch between what we actually need and what we have in terms of funds and products at the moment.

And a lot of it is there’s just, there’s just not enough good stuff happening. Is there the I hate to say it to really sort of justify filling green funds with at scale needed pension funds the least.

Right? So yes, it’s that gap between the nascent technology and small companies that are bringing that those ideas, kind of to market and publicly traded companies. So those very small companies that are on these breakthrough technologies, how do we get funding to them? Who are probably the ones that are most capable of starting this green revolution?

Yeah, yeah, there is a pension fund company in the UK, that actually does invest in early stage companies. So it’s called legal in general. And actually, they operate in the States as well. But they have like an enormous enormous pension funds, they, they manage the pensions of, you know, hundreds of millions of British people, at least, probably more than that.

But, and, but they use their own balance sheet, to invest in early stage, clean tech, energy efficient buildings, social housing, not just it’s not just clean energy, but it’s also sort of on the social side. And once you, you know, once that gets up to a stage that investment where then they can, you know, get to a level where the risk has gone.

Where you can actually take pension fund holders money and invest, that’s what they do, they sort of come up from the bottom with this higher risk, and higher return capital they can from the balance sheet, and then come in at the other end, once it’s got up to a certain place with the pension fund money, which is great, because it means you’re a pension bond holder, you are making money out of investing in the clean revolution, and not just in some sort of passive fund that’s making just a small amount of money, there’s a really innovative way that they work both on both sides to your point.

So getting in like private equity at the beginning, but then also coming in with that large sort of billion dollar fund at the end. So I’ve not seen it happen anywhere else. Actually. They’re the only company I’ve seen do that as a pension fund manager.

But clearly, the money is necessary to make this work and moving capital to the needs of society is is the task at hand? And you know, unfortunately, our current system is it isn’t doing it very effectively. I mean, there have been some successes, and we’ve seen some companies that are greater take off, but I don’t believe there’s enough opportunities right there.

Right now, as you were saying, and and what are we going to do to kind of further encourage that the growth of those small companies that are bringing, bringing these ideas of carbon net carbon zero to the forefront?

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it’s just the way the system is set up. So we have new financial institutions have regulations, for good reason, because our money is tied up in them, which means they can’t invest in certain things. So there’s sort of risk weighted assets that they have to sort of maintain. So it just means that, you know, is there a way and and people are discussing this moment? Is there a way of changing the risk weightings for banks? If it’s green investment? Could governments again, provide some sort of guarantee? So that you know, you and I don’t, don’t lose all our money?

If bank invest in some early stage, those small green company that doesn’t make it? I mean, it’s a real tricky one, isn’t it? You know, what we need is just more of that early stage capital coming through that can actually have the appetite for risk. And everyone says, Well, why aren’t banks doing and why aren’t investors doing it?

Well, they can’t they have a fiduciary duty to, you know, you and me who have our money with them, they can’t just take our money and just put it in high risk investments, we’d go mad. So it’s, it’s like a real sort of how do you sort of how do you develop that higher risk appetite, in finance with a higher risk appetite? It’s it’s a hard, it’s hard, you know, which is why so many companies never make it.

I guess, one of the things that is a question for you, and I think a question for all of us is how do we each take responsibility with our finite finances? Where are we putting our money on deposit? Is it? Where where’s our retirement fund being invested? Where’s our savings being bested?

How can we use this money, invest it wisely make smart decisions, because obviously, we don’t want to lose our money. But also put in a in a fund that is more conscious and more concerned about environmental problems. Yeah,

I mean, absolutely like to be honest, you know, we can recycle and fly less frequently and ride a bike and eat less me and give up the weed killer and stop worrying about our perfect lawn. And we should do all those things. Absolutely. The one biggest thing you can ever do for climate is put your money in somewhere that is sustainable. Like is to think about, as you say, where is my money on deposit? Is my bank investing in local businesses, green businesses?

Is it a B Corp bank, credit union, a community bank? Or is it lending out to those large corporates, you know, which may or may not be doing good things for the world? And whereas my pension fund invested my retirement savings, whereas my savings invested, and we just don’t ask ourselves these questions. We don’t ask her what’s our money doing overnight? When it’s the undeposited? When I get paid at the beginning of the month, or every two weeks in the US like?

What’s that money doing? It’s just sat there in a bank. I’m not using it for another week or so where is it going? Like, we need to answer these questions. And it Fortunately, there are sort of services available now where you can start checking that mighty deposits is one, you can go on there, you can check through your bank, you can just see, where is it investing? Where it was my money on deposit going to? Is it going to communities of color? Is it going to female entrepreneurs?

Is it going to green businesses like the things you know, you care about? And you want to see? Is it going to businesses near me? Or is it going to businesses, huge corporates in a different state? You know, we want to know that. And I think so. Yeah, totally. It’s like that, that question needs to be asked ourselves all the time, like, where is my money? What are you doing?

Right. And I think that I read some fascinating books and articles about local investing what you just discussed, and I think it’s really fascinating what can be done if a community pulls together and puts their money in invest it locally, and kind of makes more local decisions, because I think most of us end up putting our money in entities that are national, and have a very wide reach and have very little concern for where we live.

And I think making some decisions to put some money locally helps, helps our local community heads gives us more autonomy, because then the bankers or finance places that we put our money actually might listen to, to the local community. Yeah.

And then on the plus side, you know, as you invest in your local community, your property price will go up and your schools will improve. And so with the services around you, it’s like a win win. So why wouldn’t we just be investing if we can in our communities? So I’m all for that bring back old fashioned community banks, and we lost a lot of them. But I’m all for it. Credit unions.

Yeah, it’s something that it seems a bit old fashioned and quaint in our in our modern society, but it really has a lot of social utility. And kind of like a democracy because our, our democracies depend upon kind of a healthy local component. And we have, we’ve gone to these mega banks who are just disconnected from their communities for the most part.

So you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. Again, my guests Helen Avery, Director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute, we’ve been talking about finance and why it’s so important to creating a zero carbon economy and a green industrial revolution. So we’ll be back in just a minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America. I’m Matt Matern, and our guest today Helen Avery, Director of nature programs at the Green Finance Institute, talking about banking and and why it’s so important to, to the environmental issues that we’re facing. And, you know, we’re just talking about some of the small banking ideas. Tell us a little bit about the larger banks that you’re working with and and how you’re able to work with them and develop new programs. Was that can help the environment?

Yeah, sure. It’s I mean, it’s really interesting to sort of seen the evolution of the thinking of the larger banks over over the years. You know, when I was a financial journalist and sort of working with their banks after the, the financial crash, you know, it was just, if you compare sort of their outlook today, compared to how it was pre crash, it’s, it’s like night and day.

And that’s, I always think that’s because there have been people within those banks really pushing from change. But from within, there’s just been some real sort of pioneers in every one of the large banks that I’ve seen, who’ve just sort of never given up. And then they’ve sort of grown teams around them who really just want to move finance for good. And they’ve managed, sort of convinced that ultimately, their senior senior leaders, and eventually, the CEOs, or some times it comes from top down. So there’s a lot of good things happening at the large banks, you know.

And, as you mentioned, we work with some of them around what their best practices are, and what they recommend to us. So it’s sort of changing their policies. So they’re not investing in Arctic drilling, for example. Or committing to give more capital towards a more allocate more capital towards investing in green investments, or social investments, there’s a lot of that happening. And we are seeing a lot more, you know, tone from the top, the CEOs are coming out and talking more specifically about the importance of nature and climate change in sort of moving their businesses to align with that. So you know, whether it’s JP Morgan or Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Stanley, Citi.

There is a lot of change happening. And one thing I would just say is that, you know, never forget that if you are unable to talking only about or move, move bank to a to a bank that really cares. But the power of you as a deposit, sort of a current account owner at Bank is incredible. I don’t know if you remember, but back when it was the Dakota Access Pipeline, and city, I think we’re gonna finance it, or they were involved in some financing. And lots of people who banked at cities, like protested again and again and again, and caused such a fuss, that city stopped financing that pipeline.

And I remember interviewing them at the time and them saying, you know, this is, this is why we did it, because of the pressure that we hadn’t noticed that. So it’s sort of you can be in it and then fight from within, you know, by putting pressure on your own bank to make make a change, or you just get out and let them figure it out and selves and bank with one eye.

So I think of someone a bit greener. So, you know, I think banks are sort of wary now to the pressure of their own customers, and their employees, you know, people want to work for companies that make them feel good. They don’t want to work for companies that are, you know, ruining the planet. So I’m not sure that answer your question, Matt. But there’s a lot going on.

No, that’s, that’s great. And I think that, so for some of our listeners who aren’t as attuned to banking, and I’m not a banking expert, my understanding is that a bank can tend to lend out maybe 10 times or 12 times as much as they have on deposit or more.

So if you’ve got on deposit $100,000, they might be able to lend a million or 1,000,002 or more. So there’s a lot of leverage there, they’re able to make a lot of money off of a fairly modest amount of money that you might have deposited, or we might have deposited.

Yeah, and your small amount of money might be being lent at a large amount to someone you don’t want it to be lent to be wary of yet.

Right, or they’re making in terms of interest rate, lending it out at maybe credit card rates, and you’re getting, you know, one or 2%. So the the, the amount of profit that they can make off of your deposits are pretty substantial. So they like you said they will listen if we if we say hey, this isn’t proper. But again, it goes back to being conscious enough to knowing what your bank is doing.

And I think myself included probably don’t look as carefully at the banking institutions that I bank with, and and hold them to account and say, Hey, I don’t I don’t want to be with a bank that’s investing in coal or heavy polluting industries.

Yeah, yeah. And there are lists out there. Bank track, for example, you can have a look at that. And I’ll tell you who the biggest banks are financing fossil fuels. And there is the ambiguous retail bank names in there. So that’s called bank track and bank track. Yeah. Okay. That’s a that’s a great tool for the listeners to take a look at that along with the mighty deposits. There was a banking concept, aspiration. And we were talking about that earlier. And maybe you can tell the listeners a little bit about that, and why that seems like a pretty good concept.

Yeah, it’s a it’s a great bank. And I wish I’d banked with them when I was living in the States to be honest, and but essentially, they are a bank that is looking to, you know, one not make so much profit off of you, for a start, where you can determine your own fees. But also, my understanding is that if you bank with aspiration, if you sort of advises you, if you want to bend, you know, if you want to pop into Rite Aid or CVS, it will tell you which one of those has the better human rights record or phases pays its employees better or maybe is has a sort of greener ambition than the other.

So you can sort of help determine where you’re going to spend your money, which is always helpful. And then also, I know that I’m not sure where they are now in their journey, but they were looking at sort of putting your deposits to use in a way that goes into community into sort of social solving social issues, or lending to people, or lending to, for example, CDFIs, and community development, financial institutions, which are developed to support low to moderate income families, for example. So you always know that your money is doing doing well there.

So it was, they was kind of the first I sort of felt like to sort of break that mold. I don’t know if there are more now, that have followed in the shoes of aspiration as a bank in the UK, as a European bank with trade offs, actually, but the UK branch is it’s really neat. It has like amazing ethos. But it will you can invest like a community lending in things like your local YMCA, that wants to expand, or it’s a fisherman who’s developed like sonar, pinic, pingers, that repel dolphins from his nets, you can invest in his business, they’ll go out and source these community investments for you.

So you actually know Oh, my God, I can invest. It’s behind the due diligence been done by my bank, like invest, you know, 100 pounds of my money or $100, wherever you like, in this business at a small return. And I know I’m doing something in my community. So lots of things like that starting to happen at banks, and sadly, not at the large banks. Still, but um, but yeah, I actually, I don’t know how big aspiration is now, perhaps, that’s, you know, they’re out your way.

But I think that, you know, again, we’re talking about ways that all of us can be more conscious about where we’re investing our money, and where we’re putting our money, because and holding our financial institutions to a higher standard. And there are financial institutions out there that are doing good work.

So we should be putting our money with those financial institutions that are most consciously trying to get our economy to zero carbon to a zero carbon economy, to fund a green Industrial Revolution, which quite frankly, means new new jobs and and an economy that isn’t a poor economy. It’s It’s an economy that just isn’t as dirty of an economy. Can you you speak to that a bit?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, the data is out, you’re not going to lose money by investing in sustainable investments, if anything, you actually probably are going to make a little bit more money than you would if you if you don’t, so, it’s it’s kind of a win all the way round. Sometimes it used to be thought, you know, it was a bit of a trade off, I’ll invest in green, so we’ll have a cleaner economy, but I’ll lose money on it or or certainly won’t make as much money.

And that’s just not the case now. And often, you know, sustainable, sustainable businesses pay their debts back faster and more reliable than businesses that haven’t thought about sustainability for obvious reasons. There’s sort of more conscious about their business and what’s coming down the pike. So there’s, there’s definitely a case for, say it sustainable investing.

There’s a phrase in the UK pensions with intentions, sort of trying to get everyone to sort of get their pensions into green investments, call up your pension provider, call up your company HR and say, Where’s my pension invested? Where’s my retirement account going? I want to know and get it moving.

Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you how we’ve been talking about getting moving capital to the needs of society and Here’s why we need to restructure kind of the way we look at this because quite frankly, we haven’t been pricing in the cost that our economy in our planet incurs.

And we all incur by making investments into say dirty energy, such as coal, and fossil fuels that are polluting our countries and our world. And we need to start thinking about investing into cleaner and greener methods of transportation and energy transmission and generation and, and I applaud the great work that you’re doing there over the brain finances to, to, to bring us into this new era. It’s, it’s great work and, and thanks for doing that. Thanks.

Thanks. Thanks to you, Matt. Thanks for getting the message out there and every day. Thank you.

Well, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern and my guest has been Helen Avery director, nature programs at the Green Finance Institute. You can find the Green Finance Institute on the internet and look forward to having you back on the show at some time in the future.