Green Investing: It's Hot Like Global Warming

by Andrea Millar — May 1, 2008

Maybe it was the past 12 months of rising gas prices, or the success of a certain former Vice President's documentary on climate change, or maybe that G8 concert did help things along after all (despite its fairly large carbon footprint). Whatever it was, it is now apparent that green industry is widely seen as a viable player in the national and international economies. The Web site Green Money Journal currently has a write up about the success of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) and the news is good. According to the SRI report, many investors are increasingly interested in green technologies, particularly solar. They attribute the increased interest in green investing to the enhanced profile of the eco-movement afforded by community initiatives, consciousness-oriented marketing, and easily accessible microfinance resources.

To put a finer point on it, if there's one positive outcome to the current gas price spikes, it's that it tends to put the common invest-now-save-tomorrow green purchase model into very sharp, and positive, perspective. Investors follow the nose of consumers--and increasingly, with more widely accessible financial practices like Day Trading becoming popular, consumers are the investors. This tight loop is great news for green entrepreneurs and investors alike.

The article also attributes the boom in eco-interest to China's increasingly stringent environmental standards, and as anyone who has flipped through a newspaper in the past year knows, something that is turning the heads of a country of more than 1 billion people is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Green Money Journal also cautions against too much consumer trust in 'greenwashing' (we talked about it last week; greenwashing occurs when companies utilize green verbiage and imagery to hide less-than green practices). Green economics Web site Ecopreneurist follows this up with a great article about possible consumer backlash due to the proliferation of increased acceptance of greenwash marketing. Let's hope this aspect of increased investor/consumer confidence in green industry is a little less fickle than that!