Philly spreads $15 million of eco investment love

Today’s pop quiz: come up with three facts about the state of Philadelphia. Greenbang will help you out on the first two.

1. It was the original home of Will Smith’s character in the TV series The Fresh Prince before he “got in one little fight and my mom got scared so I moved with my aunty and uncle in Bel Air”, as the theme song rap revealed.
2. Its main export is cream cheese.

If you’re struggling with the third one, you can now add that its treasurer, Robin L. Wiessmann, has revealed a $15 million of green investment in “publicly traded funds that hold stocks of companies that provide solutions for environmental problems or operate in a responsible manner with respect to the environment.”
Clean tech, green tech, renewable energy, and emissions reductions all get the nod. Here’s some more on the state’s Keystone Green initiative to be getting on with:

The Keystone Green Investment Strategy includes several additional elements beyond today’s announcement:

— A private investment program, which will provide [currently “up to”] $40 million of financing for privately held firms or projects representing clean technology opportunities. Wiessmann and her staff expect to divide this into approximately $15 million for attractive investments with that will directly benefit the Pennsylvania economy and $25 million not subject to geographic considerations.

— A public equity investment screen, which will be a variety of considerations designed to help all of Treasury’s public equity managers to better evaluate whether their investment disciplines are taking fully into account the potential effects on their holdings of the factors noted above.