These investment houses can be a little lean on the green or invest in things you might not like. When it comes to the increasingly popular avoidance ESG investment model, the average investor doesn't have a lot of say in which companies get added to a portfolio, and the investment giants are a lot better at promoting their conscious capitalism than they are at keeping investors informed about where their dollars are actually being deployed. Signs of change at ExxonMobil a year after hedge fund proxy fight. Instead, they invest in big climate offenders and then use their investment and activism to push for change. They flip the model on its head and argue that simply choosing to not invest in corporations with poor environmental records gives the investor no power and has little effect on the companies. The less common form of ESG investing is exemplified by a firm called Engine 1. This is the avoidance ESG model where you try not to invest in companies whose values you deplore. In the popular model, investors (usually working with brokers) focus their public investment dollars on corporations that are acting in a world positive manner - or at least keeping their negative actions to a relative minimum. There are two types of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing.