Are the green ETFs really green?

Green ETFs have experienced a large increase in volumes and returns in the last years. However, financial agents ask themselves whether these assets are truly green. The large amount of currently available environmental metrics are widely considered as unreliable and their discrepancies generate confusion. The evaluation of the most capitalized green ETFs according to two of the most popular environmental metrics, namely the E Score and the carbon intensity, shows poor green performances of the sampled funds. Adopting a screening process based on the exclusion of the worst-in-class companies, we build synthetic low-carbon funds choosing among the 2021 holdings of these green funds. The synthetic assets show similar, and sometimes better, financial and environmental outcome than the listed ETFs. However, evidences exhibit significative differences in the companies environmental classification, green or brown, according to the two metrics.