Are My Retirement Savings Invested in Fossil Fuels?? Help!

How to Save a Planet

Gimlet

News, Society & Culture, Science

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Look inside your retirement savings and you may find some surprises: oil and gas companies, pipeline operators, utilities with coal-fired power plants. It can feel like no matter what you’re doing to combat climate change in your daily life, your money is working against you. So how do you invest without wrecking the planet? Is there such a thing as green investing? And why isn’t this easier to figure out? This week we ask: What does it mean to try to put your money where your values are? Calls to Action First, if you do have a retirement account — find out what you’re invested in! You can go to FossilFreeFunds.org and plug in the names of the funds in your portfolio. They’ll give you a breakdown of the fossil fuel exposure you have right now. Then: Demand better! If you want to go fossil fuel free and you have a retirement account at work that doesn’t offer good options, tell your HR department that you want climate-friendly or fossil fuel free funds added to your retirement plan. The shareholder advocacy group As You Sow put together a 401(k) Toolkit with advice for getting fossil fuel free options added to your retirement plan, and Green Century also created a handy guide. You can do the same if you have an individual retirement account. Tell your asset manager you want high-quality fossil fuel free investing options. The more they hear from their customers, the more seriously they take these things! If you take an action we recommend in one of our episodes, do us a favor and tell us about it! We’d love to hear how it went. Record a short voice memo on your phone and send it to us via our Listener Mail Form. We might use it in an upcoming episode. You can find all the actions we’ve recommended on our show here! This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Rachel Waldholz. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Anna Ladd, and Daniel Ackerman. Our supervising producer is Matt Shilts. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Janae Morris. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. Our fact checker for this episode was Claudia Geib. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to How to Save a Planet.
0:04.1	I'm Alex Bloomberg, and this is the podcast where we talk about what we need to do to address climate change, how we make those things happen.
0:39.0	Hey, everyone. We are bringing back a classic this week. It's an episode from August of 2021, which means it won't just be my beautiful voice that you're listening to. You will also hear the voice of my friend and former co-host, Dr. Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. This episode is all about retirement investing and how to make sure your money is invested into companies you believe in. To tell you
0:44.8	more, here's me from a year ago. Man, time flies. So, Ianna. Alex, yes. Hi. I recently had this
0:53.4	call with a listener.
0:54.7	My name's Andrea and I'm a software engineer for local government. So Andrea Egan, she works for the city of San Francisco. And she explained her conundrum. You know, in my day-to-day life, I make all these decisions kind of based on their impact in the climate. You know, if I'm at the grocery store, I'm like, oh, maybe I should buy less meat or I should take, you know, a bike instead of
1:14.9	driving somewhere. But she says, despite everything she does to reduce her climate impact in her
1:20.1	daily life, there's this one area where she just can't figure out what to do, her retirement
1:25.9	savings. She's got this retirement account. and like a lot of people with retirement accounts,
1:31.4	where money is invested in the stock market through index funds,
1:35.5	which are these big baskets of stocks of lots of different companies,
1:40.5	often including fossil fuel companies.
1:43.7	They have my retirement in these total stock market index funds,
1:48.6	and presumably that means that I am invested in these oil and gas companies,
1:54.7	and I don't really want to be supporting them.
1:57.5	Did it feel like your money was sort of working against you a little bit?
1:59.8	Yeah, definitely.
2:00.4	And, you know, it got to a point where I had been investing regularly, sort of every month.
2:06.6	I had been setting it aside.
2:07.6	And then I actually stopped for the past couple of years because I was like, I don't know that I really want to invest in these companies.
2:13.6	I don't know how I feel about this.
2:15.6	And, you know, that was a really bad choice for my financial future and my retirement
	...

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