If you are scared – or even simply concerned – by climate change, odds are that you might have weatherized your place, turned to efficient appliances and lightbulbs and perhaps even ditched your car.
While these actions and many others are quite obvious, they might not have the biggest impacts. Kelly Rigg, the Executive Director of the Global Call for Climate Action published a very interesting article on how you could do much much more.
To her, crowdfunding renewables, buying climate bonds (!), divesting from fossil fuels in your pension and mutual funds, voting with your wallet and joining a climate campaign are the next steps.
If I am aware of four of these steps :
- crowdfunding renewables and other cleantech at home and abroad is essential if we want to speed up the clean energy transition. I already wrote about crowfunding in my previous post on the Nanolight ;
— - divesting – while I actually never wrote here about it yet, I am aware that more and more people and institutions are removing their investments from fossil fuels companies to avoid being trapped in the carbon bubble ;
— - Voting with your wallet : here again, it is quite obvious : if you keep on buying stuff from people who are wrecking our environment, they’ll use YOUR money to wreck it even more.
— - and joining a climate campaign. I believe this should be on top of your list. From calling your representatives to get involved actively in
I have to admit that buying bonds was quite or even totally unknown to me. But as Kelly wrote in her post :
The Climate Bonds Initiative reminds us that most of the urban infrastructure we take for granted — from sewers and railways in the 19th century to the aerospace industry and highways of the 20th century — were financed with bonds that provided safe and secure returns for the public:
Bonds allow us to borrow against future economic benefits to allow for the investment needed now to deliver those benefits.
Although the Climate Bonds Initiative is aimed at large-scale institutional investors, you can ask your financial advisor about investing in climate-themed bonds.
You must have understood it : our most important actions to fight climate change is not a matter of personal choices : we have to change the system as a whole. Thanks to Kelly for reminding us this.