Episode 5 - Green Banking

Welcome to 1000 Ways Green! The show where we are going to give busy people like you easy ways to help save the planet for our future generations.

This week’s episode is a break from our series talking about how to remove plastic from our lives. Today we are going to dive into a topic that was until recently behind blinders for me: Banks and their funding of the oil and gas companies. Is yours one of them? Let’s find out! Onto this week’s three things:

Mint Green level: This one is quite easy this week, but… based on the result you get, you might want to push yourself to go up to the Shamrock Green level. Your Mint Green challenge is to go to bank.green and type in your bank’s name, and it will tell you how well (or poorly) your bank is doing. To ruin the fun for a few of you, if you bank at one of the 5 largest banks, it isn’t great news. JP Morgan Chase is the worst, Bank of America is the 4th worst, Wells Fargo is the 3rd worst, Citi is the 2nd worst, and US. Bancorp is the 13th worst. At first I thought I was in good shape since none of our 3 banking institutions were on that list but it turns out that half of Chime users are actually using U.S. Bancorp as their bank so I’m now moving myself up to the shamrock green level…

Shamrock Green level: Ok, so if your banking institution didn’t pass the mint green test at bank.green, it is time to do something about it. There are other banks that don’t have any record of giving money to oil and gas, but the goal here is to do good, not just do no harm so…your shamrock green challenge this week is to switch your bank account over to one that will actually help heal the planet when you use it. Some of the options available to you might be Climate First Bank or Aspiration which is where I’m going as it has a pretty high interest rate, though it looks a little complicated to get that rate, so your call if you want to read the fine print. There are others you can search for that I have listed on the 1000 Ways Green website that is linked in the show notes.

Forest green level: Do more: If you’ve already gotten your money into a clean bank, or it was there to begin with your task for this week is to take a look at the what's next link in the show notes from the bank for good website and see if any of their next steps resonate with you to take more action on a connected need for our planet and people.

Thanks for listening, that is it for this week. Next week we’ll be going back to our series on plastic removal to help you clean up your plastic use. If you like what you heard I’d love to see you post a review on your podcast player of choice as that helps the show's rankings. That's it for this week, as always be green and be seen.